The paper charts the ambiguous, mobile interplay of individual and community in the self-representations and actions of ni-Vanuatu in general and women in particular. It does so via a series of verbal snapshots of mundane settings, changing focus successively from the past to present rural, urban, and national contexts.
Running through the paper’s argument is a key issue in the politics of representation, both academic and popular: the need to problematise the romantic secularism that slights Indigenous women’s engagements in apparently banal Christian settings – prayer meetings, Bible schools, sewing circles, fellowship groups – because they seem to advance hegemonic missionary, male and national agendas of conversion, domestication, and modernisation, rather than empower women.
Read the Paper here.