ANTHROPOLOGISTS have long been attracted to South Pacific islands for more than the warm breezes and sparkling lagoons. They go to such places seeking in the simpler societies the rudiments of human community, sometimes glimpsing a rough-hewn harmony beyond the experience of more complex societies.
So it was for Dr. Maria Lepowsky, who in 1978 became the first and only anthropologist to live with the people of Sudest Island -- or to use the local name, Vanatinai, meaning motherland. This is a sparsely populated island in the Louisiade Archipelago of Papua New Guinea, which extends southeast of New Guinea and separates the Solomon and the Coral seas. The people there are an anthropologist's dream because they have had only minimal contact with Western colonialism and missionaries.
The longer Dr. Lepowsky observed the people, sharing their daily lives for two years and learning their rituals and ideologies, the more she realized that life on Vanatinai was different from other societies in one fundamental respect. Men and women were living and working as virtual equals. This was, she concluded, a striking example of what anthropologists call a gender-egalitarian culture, and perhaps the first one to be studied in detail by any anthropologist.
"It is not a place where men and women live in perfect harmony and where the privileges and burdens of both sexes are exactly equal," Dr. Lepowsky said, "but it comes close."
Close enough, she said, to challenge the position of some theorists in anthropology that male dominance is universal or somehow inherent in human cultures and that only its forms and intensity vary. The new findings suggest instead that the island's culture could serve as a model of what a sex-egalitarian society would be like and a countermodel to relations between the sexes and ideologies in nearly all other cultures.Continue reading the main story
Dr. Lepowsky began the research while a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley and has elaborated on the findings in a book, "Fruit of the Motherland: Gender in an Egalitarian Society," published last month by the Columbia University Press. She is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Other anthropologists said the Vanatinai study was certain to draw new attention to the role of a person's sex in the complex interrelations of individuals and society. It could influence scholars to search for other cultures, mainly small-scale groups in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, that may also be verging on sex egalitarianism.
Dr. Sherry Ortner, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, said such findings might have provoked stormy ideological debate two decades ago, when the supposed universality of male dominance and female oppression was politically charged dogma to many anthropologists. "It's not so radical now to say that some societies may approach egalitarianism," she said. "Most debate now would be over different definitions of equality." Problems of Definition
Dr. Christopher Boehm, director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who has studied egalitarian behavior, said the quest for a truly equal society had often run into problems of definition. "It's very difficult to know if women and men in another society have equal power and wealth," he said, "since our definitions of power and wealth are themselves culturally biased."
In praising the work of Dr. Lepowsky, Dr. Roy Wagner, an anthropologist at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville who is a specialist in cultures of the New Guinea area, said she had wisely confined the book mostly to description of the flow of life in the Vanatinai villages, including evidence for sexual equality in decision-making, ritual practices and property holdings, and refrained from drawing large theoretical conclusions.
Dr. Lepowsky acknowledged that the island's small population of 2,300 and remoteness favored the development and preservation of such a society. On Vanatinai, everyone participates in community decisions, meeting face to face, instead of delegating power to a few leaders, who might tend to be men. Vanatinai has no chief.
Another factor, she said, is that the culture is matrilineal, with kinship traced through the mother's clan and women inheriting and owning land and other property. Other matrilineal societies do not approach equality of the sexes. But on Vanatinai, the central position of women in island life is said to be taubwaragha, which means both "ancient" and "the way of the ancestors."
Dr. Lepowsky found evidence of the equality on every hand. Unlike other Pacific cultures, Vanatinai has no special men's meeting houses or male cult activities. The language is gender-neutral, with no pronouns like he or she. Boys as well as girls care for younger siblings, and men are expected to share in child care as fathers. In many other New Guinea societies, which consider women inferior to men, menstruation is thought of as a form of pollution and menstruating women must go into seclusion, but not on Vanatinai. Women there also have as much sexual freedom as men.
Young people on the island are considered to be adults once they have entered into a stable marriage. They frequently marry several times before they settle into a lasting relationship. The new husband is expected to spend several months to a year in "bride service," living with and working for the wife's parents and presumably earning their approval. Later on, the couple normally alternates living with the wife's kin and the husband's. 'Wise Woman' in Mythology
Although their god of creation is a male named Rodyo, the mythology includes powerful female spirits and the theme of the "wise woman." Both men and women have access to supernatural power through communication with ancestors and other spirits. Women as well as men can possess special knowledge of magical spells and ritual techniques, sources of power in the community. Either a man or woman can preside over the crucial public ritual at the time of planting yams, one of the island's main crops.
A significant contradiction in sex-related ideologies of Vanatinai, Dr. Lepowsky found, "is between the often stated ideal of woman as life-giver and the belief that women kill through witchcraft and, more rarely and in male dress, as sorcerers."
In earlier times, warfare was the one important activity reserved exclusively for men. Like other islanders, Vanatinai warriors would occasionally set out in sailing canoes to raid an island nearby, plundering gardens, stealing pigs and sometimes seizing women for marriage. But women participated in all decisions on when to fight and when to make peace.
This one example of asymmetry in male and female roles, Dr. Lepowsky said, ended several generations ago when British and Australian colonial authorities put a stop to such raiding. The memory, though, still affects some thinking about roles of men and women.
"One of the only times I saw a little girl treated differently on the basis of her sex," Dr. Lepowsky wrote, "was when a 6-year-old girl joined her brother and several older boys in throwing mock spears. Her mother finally noticed and came out of the house. She stood close to her daughter and said, irritably, 'Are you a man that you throw spears?' The girl burst into tears and ran into the house."
But women on Vanatinai have equal access to the culture's most significant form of authority and influence. Through hard work, ritual generosity and acquisition of supernatural knowledge, anyone may achieve the gender-blind title of gia, or giver. It is a version of the "big man" on other islands, who gains prestige by accumulating goods and then giving them away at ritual feasts.
On Vanatinai, Dr. Lepowsky reported, women figure prominently in the acquisition of ceremonial valuables like shell necklaces and greenstone ax blades. They may lead their own expeditions to other island to trade for these goods. It is a "dramatic indicator of the sexually egalitarian nature of the culture," she said. Some Disparities Are Noted
In some ways, though, it is not perfectly egalitarian. Dr. Lepowsky observed that younger women were likely to spend more time caring for children and gardening and less on building reputations as a giver.
"The average woman spends more of her time sweeping up the pig excrement that dots the hamlet," she wrote. "The average man spends more time hunting wild boar in the rain forest with his spear. His hunting is more highly valued and accorded more prestige by both sexes than her daily maintenance of hamlet cleanliness and household order."
Nonetheless, Dr. Lepowsky concluded, "The example of Vanatinai shows that the subjugation of women by men is not a human universal, and it is not inevitable."Continue reading the main story