Pacific Studies.

Robinson, Kathryn

This special issue of Pacific Studies collects together essays concerned with domestic violence, principally violence against women and children, in a number of Pacific societies. There has been a lot of activity by Pacific Island NGOs in the last ten years in combating domestic violence, much of it associated with the social dislocations of development, especially drunkenness. The papers in this collection address this as well as a broader set of issues, including one which the editors comment may disturb some readers, that 'in many Pacific societies a certain level of family violence may be normal and acceptable' (p. 3).

Some of the papers, for example, Korbin's article on child rearing in a Hawaiian American community, deal with the issue of parenting strategies which use what would be regarded as harsh (even illegal) treatment in our own society. She comments on the apparent contradiction between loving gentleness and harsh punishment which she documents in the families.

Overall, the volume is more concerned with violence between husband and wife, usually male violence against women. Shireen Latieff sees male violence as a means of controlling female sexuality amongst Indo-Fijians. Beating is a strategy to preserve the virtue of unmarried girls (and hence family honour) and to preserve the modesty and subordinate status of married women. As in Western countries, the absence of alternatives forces women to endure their fate. (A women's refuge in Fiji has proved enormously successful.)

A number of the articles address the tensions associated with modernisation, and the ways in which this exacerbates violence. For example, in Palau, Nero argues, alcohol is implicated in wife beating - drinking is seen as 'time-out' and people are not held responsible for actions while drunk.

According to Carucci, the Marshallese see parallels between male physical violence and women's 'violence' through magic. Indeed, Kaliai women in West New Britain put menstrual blood in their husbands' food as retaliation for violence. Counts argues that suicide is a response - the ultimate response - for an abused wife, as it 'shift(s) the burden of humiliation from themselves to their tormentors' (p. 166).

Zimmer's paper raises the issue of intergenerational violence against the elderly. This article raises the question of social policy to deal with the practice.

No such collection would be complete without the bizarre - in this case the practice in Kiribati of men biting off a wife's nose if she is repeatedly immodest or unfaithful. Lewis describes this as a culturally approved kind of sexual mutilation. However, he adds that it is a last ditch sanction and rarely occurs.

Why does this violence occur? Some of the papers use a functionalist framework to suggest a role for violence in producing social conformity and cohesion. Other authors suggest a 'violent ethos' where the person is socially constituted with violence and aggression as aspects of personhood. For example, in Bun both husbands and wives practise violent behaviour. In other cases, it is suggested that social and cultural factors related to cultures of femininity and masculinity are seen as the important underlying dynamic, in particular ideas of female submission, and warrior cultures.

Many of the papers claim a higher level of acceptable violence than would be the norm in our own society, but it is not universally true. For example, Nash writes that among the Nagovisi (in Bougainville) physical violence between spouses or against children is rare and not condoned. She raises the possibility of a difference between matrilineal societies (like the Nagovisi) and patrilineal societies in this regard. She comments that in matrilineal societies the wives are not 'on trial'. Mitchell also describes the Wape in PNG as pacific, with an absence of wife beating.

The issues raised in this volume pose a challenge to assumptions of cultural relativism which have been so important to anthropology, and raises the question of how anthropologists deal with phenomena in other cultures which challenge the parameters of legitimated behaviour in our own culture.

KATHRYN ROBINSON University of Newcastle