Boundaries of difference : geographical and social mobility by Lifuan women

Abstract

In this thesis I investigate Lifuans' construction of identity in the context of their interactions with outsiders in the region and with Europeans. I illustrate the articulation of values and motivations embodied in the indigenous construction of identity by highlighting Lifuans' notions of authority, hierarchy and adoption. I introduce the notion of boundaries of difference as an analytical category to explore how the construct of identity has shifted in different historical contexts and how it is deployed by women and men of Drueulu (Lifu) today. I also explore custom, religion and place as elements which have become salient in defining the identities of men and women through time. I am concerned to examine how representations of indigenous gender relations are woven together with exogenous influences. Women's and men's articulation of tradition and modernity varies. Women predicate their engagement in the wider social arena in terms of motherhood, and, by doing so, have been able to engage in new forms of collectivities and acquire wider autonomy in terms of greater social and geographical mobility. Men, in contrast, make use of custom as a language of resistance in their articulation of tradition and modernity. I consider the various ways men and women have expressed their concerns as different ways of using boundaries of difference. This analytical category should be understood as a way of mapping one's construction of identity, of seeing which elements are put in the foreground, allowing for a redrawing of how men and women represent themselves in different contexts and to outsiders, myself included. I perceive boundaries in a flexible way, meaning that they are informed by intersecting elements and that people consciously redraw them. Thus boundaries of difference should not be seen as a way of juxtaposing Lifuans to outsiders in order to essentialize them, but as a way to reformulate the way they represent themselves in the face of social and political changes. In the latter part of the thesis I analyse women's lives in both village and urban settings. Women construct and live in the two milieux as permeable spaces. The values and the formal and informal support networks of the village accompany people when they move into town, enabling women to render an alien space into a familiar place.