Gender Interventions

Gender Interventions
The project has been involved in gender awareness training both at the district and
subdistrict level and this has brought about several positive aspects including a much
needed openness to discuss women and men’s roles in society. The project has also
sincerely endeavored to improve the well-being of women in Jayawijaya. However,
some of the conclusions reached about “gender imbalances” and the need for
interventions to “correct gender imbalances” or “gender inequalities” need to be reevaluated
and re-formulated from a better understanding of Melanesian ideas about
gender.
It is very widely assumed that women in Melanesia are socially inferior to men, and
reading the situation in places like Jayawijaya from contemporary foreign (particularly
Western) va lues and expectations, this appears hard to deny. However, there is also
contradictory data. Melanesian cultures are fiercely egalitarian: no one is considered
inherently ‘better’ or ‘superior’ to another person (the lack of structured hierarchy in Lani
society and their ‘everyone is equal’ attitude are cultural realities of which the project
staff have become very aware). Furthermore, in regards to children, there is generally no
preference for one sex or the other. Daughters are loved and valued equally to sons
(another cultural point of which the staff was aware). So how is it possible to make sense
of gender relations in Jayawijaya without imposing an ethnocentric framework that
automatically assumes gender differences are evidence of inequality?
In the past two decades there has been an unprecedented amount of work by
anthropologists on the cultural construction of gender in Melanesia. The following points
draw on this social research. (See Annex 3 for a listing of the more important w