ABSTRACT
Anthropologists writing on the Highlands societies of Papua New Guinea have stressed the variable importance of ideas of menstrual pollution as markers of gender relations. This chapter suggests an alternative approach to these ideas, emphasizing instead aspects of power, placement, complementarity, collaboration, and the moral agency of both genders. Early anthropologists working in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea tended to emphasize the themes of separation of the lives of women and men and antagonism between them. In New Guinea societies, concepts of power are paramount when discussing bodily substances. Notions surrounding bodily substances in New Guinea are closely intertwined with ideas about sexual activity, maturation, and gender relations. Health and sickness, fertility and decay, female and male characteristics may all be expressed in terms of particular bodily fluids, such as blood and grease/water. Powerful substances are dangerous if they are not handled correctly, and correct handling requires the management of their flows in bodies, in time, and in space.
