Resumen de Social Reproduction and Social Change: Emotions, Resentment and Intimate Relationships in Urban Goroka, Eastern Highlands, papua New Guinea.
In contemporary Papua New Guinea, the question of whether and how indigenous practices, beliefs and values have changed from pre-colonial to post-colonial times has become a source of interest for anthropologists. Following Sahlins (1992), anthropological work on the emotions, specifically humiliation and resentment, has found a new lease of life through ethnographies on Papua New Guinea concerned with questions of socio-cultural change (c.f. Robbins and Wardlow 2005). I draw on such work and my own fieldwork in Goroka in order focus on women and children's intimate and kin relationships to argue that resentment is a crucial motivation and framework for their actions; that seemingly "insignificant" or "trivial" moments in one's personal life can unintentionally contribute to wider social change.
One potentially unintended consequence of resentment in intimate relationships is social change in the form of disrupted socio-cultural reproduction. In many anthropological depictions of Papua New Guinea, kinship is the medium through which broader socio-cultural reproduction occurs. Birth, marriage and death are the reasons for, and mode through which, socio-economic exchange is conducted, political relationships are lived, and meaningful social values generated. To change kinship is thus to change whether and how socio-cultural reproduction can take place. Arguably, this is happening in Goroka where "customary" marriage practices and sexual reproduction are increasingly decoupled from one another by the prevalence of pre and extra-marital sex and prostitution. Writing of the Huli of the Southern Highlands, Wardlow has observed that promiscuous sexuality (in the form of prostitution) "threatens human history as the Huli conceptualize it, which is primarily in genealogical terms: it suggests the possibility of a world in which women are no longer exchanged, valuables are no longer distributed, affines are no longer created, and [due to the logic of patrilineal descent] the identities of children become indefinite" (2006: 151, parenthesis added).
Resentment must be acknowledged as a key (although not sole) motivation for these types of sex. In Goroka, anger and resentment harboured towards one's parents, partner, or partner's parents rather than sexual desire, were frequently cited as the trigger for one's adultery or promiscuity. Again, Wardlow (2004, 2006) observes that it is anger, disappointment and resentment towards one's fathers and brothers that drives women to prostitution: unwilling for their male kin to profit from bridewealth that would be paid on their marriage, women decide to "ruin themselves" through removing themselves from social reproduction. In both cases, women's decisions and the resentment that motivates them, turn on a culturally specific mode of personhood and emotionality.
Yet, despite cultural models of and for the emotions, it also became clear to me during fieldwork that certain forms of resentment and anger cannot be articulated or read in existing socio-cultural frameworks for the emotions as "socially legitimate". Initial resentment, coupled with resentment and frustration at being excluded from existing avenues of expression, has led women and children to seek out nonindigenous state institutions (district courts and the police). They do so in order to exact revenge or inflict hurt on those men that they could otherwise struggle to challenge, those men that had caused their initial feelings of resentment.
In making my arguments, I draw on ethnographic examples from my fieldwork to revisit traditional themes of anthropological interest: social reproduction, kinship and marriage. However, in approaching the social relationships these involve in terms of intimacy and the emotions, I depart from traditional approaches that view such relationships in terms of structure, practice, norm or their socio-cultural productivity.
