Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

This chapter examines aspects of language use and gender ideologies in Vanuatu (located in the southwest Pacific). It also discusses local ideologies about authority and knowledge, two other important social attributes, and shows how all three are linked. It adds a historical dimension to their analysis which stresses the longitudinal dimension to the ways gender is interpreted and enacted today. Three themes will be developed and subsequently drawn together. First, I will discuss evidence which suggests that in Vanuatu, gender emerges through relationships with people, perhaps in an even more fundamental sense than it emerges in the Western societies that are used more frequently as the basis for theorizing gender and language. I will adopt Marilyn Strathern's (1988) analysis of gender in Melanesia. She argues that in Melanesia as a whole, gender is understood as a trope of relationships with others, rather than as an opposition of different kinds (as it generally is in Western thought). Second, I will take the position that relationships not only are negotiated in the here and now, but also carry historical baggage. Variationist sociolinguistics has shown us that synchronic variation often offers valuable insights into changes that have taken place in the past. This chapter builds on that tradition and links the historical record of how women and men have been talked about, ... log in or subscribe to read full text