ABSTRACT
I have repeatedly pointed to female agency as a creator of alternative roads, whether they are matrilateral links making it easier to code potential marriage partners as suitable, paths to new places, or alternative social movements such as the church. I have outlined a gendered social structure that alternates between a male personalised form and a female communal form. I have argued that understanding the dynamics of different aspects of social life on Ambrym – everyday interaction on the one hand, the hierarchical male society on the other, or the local council or the church on the one hand, and NaGriamel on the other – is premised on seeing how these different aspects of social life are gendered. I will claim that gender is a difference on which other differences are ordered. However, on Ambrym the social structure not only builds on gender as a fundamental difference, but it transforms itself on a gendered principle. As I have pointed out in the previous chapters, there is a constant alternation between a male personified form of the social structure and a female communal form of the social structure. This alternation is clearly visible in the context of the ceremonial economy, described in detail in previous chapters, where the switch from a focus on the female and communal to the male and the personified takes place as the man who stages a ceremony enters the ceremonial ground and the other participants disappear into the background.
