Hu nao save tok? women, men and land : negotiating property and authority in Solomon Islands
Date
2012
Authors
Monson, Rebecca
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In the last decade there has been a resurgence of interest in customary land tenure and the management of land disputes among national governments, donor agencies and scholars of the South Pacific, particularly in Melanesia. Recent studies of land tenure in Melanesia and elsewhere in the world suggest that customary systems of tenure are dynamic and negotiable, and that contests over land are linked with processes of social differentiation. This thesis focuses on gender relations as a critical lens through which the negotiation of land tenure systems may be understood in one Melanesian country, Solomon Islands. I examine the ways in which claims to land are negotiated and performed in two sites, one rural and one peri-urban; and pay particular attention to innovations in land tenure and sociality arising in response to colonisation, missionisation, and the commodification of land and other natural products. The case studies demonstrate that land tenure in Solomon Islands is dynamic and contested, with multiple pathways for negotiation through kastom, Christianity and the state. However men and women are differently positioned to influence the outcomes of negotiations as they occur across different arenas. In particular, once contests over land enter the arenas established by the state, it is primarily male leaders who perform, endorse and reject claims to land as property. I suggest that the dominance of senior men in these arenas must be understood not only in terms of received ancestral ideas about ""who may talk"" about land matters, but as linked to processes of colonial intrusion, missionisation, and capitalist models of development. Furthermore, I suggest that soliciting the state's recognition of claims to land as property has become a vital avenue to economic and political power in contemporary Solomon Islands. The recursive constitution of property and authority tends to consolidate control over land in the hands of a small number of men, while reproducing state norms and institutions as a masculine domain. Thus contests over land not only reflect social differentiation but constitute it, with implications that stretch far beyond the local contexts in which contests initially arise. This thesis demonstrates that processes of inclusion and exclusion at the national level are entwined with the construction and reinscription of categories of difference through contests over the ""ownership"" of land at the local level. This situates questions about land tenure in the context of broader debates about social, political and economic transformation in Solomon Islands. Furthermore, by drawing together the detailed study of land tenure in two sites in Solomon Islands with the broader literature on Melanesia and sub-Saharan Africa, I provide insight into a range of conceptual and normative questions that are of considerable comparative interest to scholars concerned with questions of negotiation and social differentiation in land relations. In particular, I suggest that disputes over property and territory both emerge from and are productive of gendered, racialised and spatialised identities in ways that are not merely confined to ""the local"", but are inextricably entwined with the formation of authority in a nation state.
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