I have two stories to tell, each of which narrates a larger story about feminism and anthropology. My first story relates to my period as a newly-arrived pre-fieldwork PhD student at the Australian National University (ANU) in the early 1980s. I had come to ANU to research and write a PhD about Borneo’s Indigenous Dayak peoples. After I had been in Canberra for less than a week, I made a morning tea visit to the departmental tea-room. When my Head of Department saw me enter the room he announced loudly to everyone present that he was not comfortable with the idea of me doing fieldwork in Borneo. “I’m not happy with the idea of a lone woman floating around the jungles of Borneo,” he said.
There are many elements of this statement that we might unpack. I will make two points. The first point is that the classic Eurocentric image of Borneo was being invoked in this anthropology tearoom: the Borneo that recalls the story in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with its deep dark jungles teeming with all kinds of unimaginable perils. Not least of these was the Indigenous peoples with whom I planned to do my fieldwork, the Dayaks. For a long time, the Dayaks occupied a special place within the European imaginary for their voracious headhunting. At one level, headhunting was being referenced here in the suggestion that Borneo was a dangerous place for a lone woman.
No matter that by the early 1980s Dayaks had not headhunted for a long time and no matter that, in any case, they had almost never bothered with European heads. No matter too that headhunting, when practiced, had been entirely gender neutral in its choice of victims. So a “lone woman” was theoretically in no more danger from it than a lone man.
This brings me to my second point. That is that while my Head of Department’s statement undoubtedly invoked the European stereotype of the violent Dayak headhunter, it was not actually about headhunting per se. Rather it was about a different form of violence, one targeted mostly at women. It was about sexual violence, and the possibility of rape for that lone woman floating around in the jungle. This was how everyone present read it. How easy it was to slide from the image of jungle-dwelling headhunters, to an image of men who routinely rape. It struck me at the time that there was a deeply racist iconography at work here.
My second story relates to my period of my PhD fieldwork, two years later. This is a story that I have written about at some length elsewhere (Helliwell 2000). I was around three-four months into my fieldwork in inland Borneo, living alone in an apartment in a Dayak longhouse, when the events in this second story took place. I woke up one morning to a din on the longhouse veranda outside my apartment. A group of elderly women were recounting, with great and raucous enjoyment, an event that had occurred the previous night. A man from the community had climbed through the window of a nearby house where a widow lived, and had attempted to climb inside her mosquito net while she slept. He was whispering “be quiet, be quiet.” The widow woke, sat up, and pushed him violently, so that he stumbled backwards and got tangled up in her mosquito net. He finally escaped in some disarray out the window, with the woman shouting abuse at him as he did so.
I was appalled by this story. I was also appalled by the light-heartedness of the old women’s response to it. I knew what this was called: attempted rape. And I knew what needed to be done about it: the man needed to be punished heavily. But when I attempted to put this view to the group of old women they simply laughed harder.
Later the same day the widow herself came up onto the longhouse veranda to vent in public her anger over what had happened. Feeling vindicated, I took the opportunity to question her. Had she been frightened? I asked. Of course she had. And she had been angry too. Why then, I asked, had she not taken the opportunity to kick the man, or hit him with one of the wooden implements to hand? She looked shocked. “Why would I want to do such a thing?” she asked. “He was trying to have sex with you,” I said, “although you didn’t want to. He was trying to hurt you.” “Tin [Christine], it’s only a penis,” she responded. “How can a penis hurt anyone?”
That simple question, “how can a penis hurt anyone?” was transformative for me in my journey as both an anthropologist and a feminist scholar. It opened a window onto the bag of cultural assumptions about gender and sex that I had carried with me to the field along with my mosquito net and notebooks. These assumptions included that gender was ultimately rooted in bodies and, specifically, in genitalia; that men and women are profoundly different, and indeed in many ways opposed, kinds of being; and so on. And the question also produced the astounding realization that rape was not a cultural universal, as most feminists at the time believed it to be.
In fact, there was no such thing as rape in the society in which I was working. It was, quite simply, unthinkable. This event also made me realize, in a way that I had not quite realized before, that my own society was a deeply violent one, and I carried always within me the fear of sexual violence from men—gained, as Judith Butler (1990) puts in so beautifully, as part of the process of being “girled” in that society. In my Dayak longhouse I lived in an apartment whose door could not be secured at night, and I look back now and realize that deep down this left me feeling vulnerable. But I had no need to feel vulnerable: not only because this was a community in which rape was simply unthinkable, but also because I was surrounded by, and embedded in, an ever-vigilant community of neighbors. I realize too, looking back, that the locals had almost certainly been charged by the local Indonesian police chief with making sure that I came to no harm. Indigenous people were frightened of the Indonesian police representatives and would certainly have followed their orders. My Head of Department need have had no fear of me being raped.
These two events brought home forcefully to me the fact that even anthropologists, with all our apparent sensitivity to racial denigration, nevertheless engage in it quite unthinkingly. Like my Head of Department, I had assumed that because rape—a practice which we view as shockingly barbaric—was found in my own society, then it must be found everywhere: because we are the most civilized society there is, right? This forced me to confront the links between sexual othering and racial othering that many feminists tended to overlook at the time.
Read another piece in this series.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Helliwell, Christine. 2000. “‘It’s Only a Penis’: Rape, Feminism, and Difference.” Signs 25 (3): 789–816. https://doi.org/10.2307/3175417.
In addition to the work of the guest editors, this piece was edited by Rosanna Dent.
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