ABSTRACT
I have so far emphasized that women’s role in production isrecognized and valued locally and that there is a mutual engagement in the production process. Gender difference is really manifested in social transactions and discourse. So women’s struggles around land represent their struggle to gain social identity as complete beings and not just ora hor or home-makers. In her work on the New Guinea Highlands, Marilyn Strathern (1988) makes an analytical distinction between what she calls the ‘domestic domain’ (which includes the sphere of production) and the ‘political domain’ (sphere of wider social relationships). While material production is seen as a joint enterprise in the ‘domestic domain’, the production of a collective identity is seen to be the task of the ‘political domain’, where only men as ‘transactors’, can convert material produce into symbolic and political capital through ritual and gift exchange. Male domination is established not by exploiting women’s labour or establishing exclusive ownership over land, but rather by distinguishing between the domestic (production) and political roles, and attributing greater value to the latter. Women often support rather than contest the process of accumulation of symbolic wealth amongst their own men and kin-groups, for the status and the material rewards that it can bring them.1 While the intention
may not be to subordinate women, this process of gaining symbolic wealth and status amongst men does lead to the denial of women’s claims to property.
