Gender as a Dimension in Changing Hegemonies

We are here for a conversation about gender as an analytical lens on the relationship between theory and fieldwork in anthropology. It has been suggested that we talk about this through personal narratives from those of us who have been involved in anthropology in Australia for some time. In Papua New Guinea, where my husband (and colleague) Alan Rumsey and I have been going since 1981, I have recently written about the changing roles and relations of women to warfare, which was colonially suppressed but then has re-emerged at times in the region of the Western Highlands we are familiar with. The continuity of some forms and grounds of hostility through significant change at many levels has provided a way of looking at some aspects of gender relations there. But today I want to focus on my experience of perhaps comparable changes in (especially northern) Australia.

There are two dimensions of my experience which now I see as related, but only relatively recently did I come to reflect on this, and to appreciate how and why that may be so. The first is the fact that, in the region in which I have mainly done fieldwork, in and around Katherine, the Northern Territory, and despite established anthropological as well as Indigenous views of considerable gender separatism, it proved relatively possible for me to form long-term familial relationships with older, “senior” Indigenous men (in the context, generally, of my association with their families, it should be said). That I could do so with women was also true, but more expected. The second is that, all things considered, I think there has been an ongoing, considerable shift in what many Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and authorities would see as significant community-level responsibilities, to women.

Indigenous Australian northern communities are ones in which, when I began fieldwork in 1976, masculinist ideologies were regularly espoused with regard to ceremonial participation, knowledge, and secrecy. There was much evidence of forms of continuity in practices that involved notions of male priority and entitlement to dominance in significant male-female relationships. Both mature men and women, of middle and older age, were bearers and proponents of such ideologies, and I met no women who overtly rejected them. On the contrary, most expressed them outright, in word and practice. With regard to brother-sister relations, which are invested with tension and adult avoidance in southern Arnhem Land, men and women so related would assert their mutual respect, the significance of such relationships, etc.; but wherever they actually interacted, there was evidence of male priority. 

Women had to get out of the way, avoid upsetting their brothers through any kind of ostentatious, especially sexualized, behavior, or by provoking negative commentary from others that could enrage or wound-up their brothers, who were considered to be particularly volatile in this respect. Mothers-in-law would ride in the back of trucks while sons-in-law rode in front with other men—a situation in which the prioritization of male entitlement trumped respect owed to a woman in the relation of mother-in-law to him. Women would be threatened with physical violence if somehow seen by their brothers to be in inappropriate situations, including being sworn at by their husbands. Mature women, while taking pride in their own participation in ceremony, regularly attributed some kind of priority to male ceremonial participation and knowledge. In a Gramscian vocabulary, hegemony, the normalization of deeply embedded, culturally delineated relationships between kinds of people as subordinate and dominant, expressed here along gender lines, was overt.

But there was a great deal of evidence of matters being more complicated. For example, younger women were clearly drinking more than they had in the past. Especially when drinking, they were often sexually fairly easily available, and males of all ages often were inclined to take advantage of this. Many married women clearly had domestically central roles, in some cases contrasting notably with their husbands. There were, nevertheless, still strong ideologies of gender separation and male priority in certain domains, which people would assert and agree with. Most public gatherings were regularly characterized by gender separation (in seating arrangements, readiness to speak, etc.), and emotions of shame were regularly articulated and, I believe, experienced if gender separation was not seen to be the case.

There was further evidence that women were achieving stronger positions in the eyes of state authorities. I will give the example of the first houses to be occupied by Aboriginal “camp” people in Katherine town in the 1970s, at a small, tucked-away circuit street. The criteria for assigning houses to Indigenous families were the typical ones that might be adopted by state authorities: evidence of family organization, sobriety, responsibility for children, and so on. Not surprisingly, then, the small cluster of “first houses” in Katherine were largely headed by women; or, if there were men on the rental agreement, it was generally understood that the most responsible parties were older women. In fact, that seemed to me to be largely the case. Mature-aged girls and women were, in the main, the ones holding these households up to standards of feeding, householding, paying bills, and so on.

Let me also take the situation at Elsey Station on the Roper River when I first went there to visit in 1977. There was a small and materially very rudimentary Aboriginal camp about 5 kilometers upstream from the European-occupied station homestead. The camp comprised people who had walked off Elsey Station when dumped unceremoniously at the town’s Mataranka racecourse some 45 kilometers away. They eventually retrieved their sheet iron and possessions from the station homestead camp and walked downriver to set up a new camp at Jilkmirngan. The person who was the “ideas man” for this camp, Clancy Roberts, had grown up at Roper River—a former mission, and in some ways a location oriented to Indigenous improvement and progress in the post-War era. He had been educated there, then trained at Bagot and around the time of the Elsey Station push-off of its Aboriginal camp, he worked for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA). He helped his two sisters, who by that time were in their mid-thirties, to come up with a plan to build up their own community separate from the station where most of their close family had been for decades. Relatedly, this was also a time when many Aboriginal stock-workers were being dismissed, and stations divesting themselves of them, as at Elsey.

This man, like so many others after him and into the present, and a couple of other prominent men at the time, was killed in a car accident on the Roper Road. Alcohol was involved. Those who were left as the effective leaders at the camp were his two sisters, Jessie and Sheila Roberts. After Clancy’s death, they were the ones in residence and working towards establishment of the new camp on behalf of perhaps 80 people or so. They also struggled to make themselves known to and acknowledged by the DAA and other authorities as the leaders. This remained their pride for many decades: that they kept the camp together, built it up, fought for its facilities, provisioning, eventually for secondary schooling in the community, and many other things.

I did not immediately see the Elsey case as representative of wider generational change in various dimensions, notably in gender relations and their intersections, but I do now. As mentioned, there was occurring an effective stand-down (dismissal of their workers) on such properties from cattle work; it was largely in this sphere that rurally residing men had distinguished themselves. Women had tended to work at the station cooking, doing laundry and all kinds of domestic work, but this, while a source of pride and sense of accomplishment to many, was not glorious, whereas cattle work had its glory moments—wider experience, droving, bringing home meat, training of younger men in this context as well as in ceremony, and so on. As pastoral work changed in character, women too were much less in regular demand at stations; but their domestic role in camp remained fundamental. Ceremonial life was still fairly active, certainly within the life experience of all people of middle-age and older; and it carried with it some of the main force of asymmetrical recognition of men and women, but its organization was becoming more fragile. As elsewhere, alcohol availability and consumption had made its way into all domains of life: ceremonial, domestic, work, and so on. Older women were still much less likely to be, or have been, drinkers, but this was leveling out, especially for younger people.

In short, there were all kinds of reasons for which leadership and responsibility were shifting to women, and this was partly because of the changing nature of roles and their attribution to Indigenous people from outsiders, rather than principally or only from within. Seeing this was perhaps obscured for me a bit in the case of Elsey because of the dramatic death of Clancy Roberts, which seemed like an inexorable fatality. Clancy had been trained in administration and worked in the administration of Indigenous affairs in Darwin, the Northern Territory capital. He had far more experience outside the local and regional setting than did his sisters, but he remained in touch with them and their home community, and he sought to help them make the difficult transition from a dependent, station-based community to one trying to establish itself in a period of considerable change. His passing and the rise of his sisters was an instance of the conjunction of a whole range of circumstances which had other, often less dramatic, parallels elsewhere.

In that older generation, the dynamics of generational change in which gender was intimately bound up were already visible: these capable women were often married to less capable and less socially committed men; also, a number of younger and quite capable women were married to older men, and seeking escape from them partly because of their alcohol abuse, which was still much less common among women. Among various communities I came to know, women were bearers of cultural information and memories in ways equivalent to, and in some cases much more than, men. Exception should be noted for some (generally quite senior) men who retained ceremonial reputations and roles that were attributed to them as of high and unassailable significance, but which were not readily convertible into or matched by their everyday performances of socially valued roles.

In the Katherine town precinct, some aspects of the two factors I began with—the rapidly changing and highly impacted senior male role, and the on-going shift of social responsibilities to women—were, by and large (and with exceptions) especially obvious. Some senior men remained socially and communally engaged, but many were victims of alcohol abuse. One peri-urban non-Indigenous farmer, a person who had regularly employed workers (mainly men) at the town-based CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organization, a federal agency) camp, said to me: “Five years after the grog came in [1964], all my best workers were dead.” Another peri-urban farmer told me that he had, on a regular annual basis from the 1950s to 1965, hired about a dozen Aboriginal workers (mostly men, and there was a total camp of about thirty, including their dependents)—but that once large-scale peanut producers came into the picture, smaller farmers like himself could no longer compete with them and he had to let all his workers go. Change was occurring in farming as well as in the pastoral sector.

It was evident that the town environment was in some ways more destabilizing than that of remote communities. Alcohol was more readily available. There was more coming and going of different groups of people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Family and community solidarity was more difficult to sustain. And, as I learned, after about 1970 ceremonies were not held in or near town; any such activity occurred in outlying locations, and so required even more strenuous kinds of cooperation to enable participation on the part of town-dwellers than was typical in outlying locations. Into the town environment had been drawn a considerable number of families and persons who had experience of country, of ceremony, but who now found themselves relatively without work and daily routine, given changes in employment, in availability of alcohol, of money. Eventually entering into this mix came the new era of land claims, bringing with it, gradually, a demand for knowledge of the Aboriginal landscape and human relations to it that would contribute to research, in relation to both more and less remote locations. 

When I first came to Katherine, there were two Aboriginal men who were prominent in the town—by which I mean not only known to Indigenous people, but also reported in the newspaper, known to non-Aboriginal people, etc. Both were non-locals. One worked for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and was an outspoken opponent of alcohol use. He was very committed, but also coopted by the very conservative non-Indigenous Member of the Legislative Assembly who represented the area, and it was made to seem as if the two were in agreement in their attitudes. The other prominent Indigenous man was also non-local in origin, though he had been in Katherine for some years. He was an outspoken Christian in a town and region where there had been relatively little effort at Christian proselytization of Aborigines by either Indigenous or non-Indigenous people. It seemed that prominence was related to their being seen as able to help manage Aboriginal “problems.”

Over time, with the growth of land claims and an Indigenous sector (Rowse 2002), there opened up new possibilities for older Aboriginal people, and men in particular, to contribute to institutionalized and somewhat structured processes of collection and consolidation of information. Indigenous people who had this sort of information were important in ways they had not been before; and those of us who became involved in these processes were pivotally placed in the relation between new liberal-hegemonic processes of “recognition” and Indigenous people, who were largely unknowable to most non-Indigenous people and agencies. It was under such circumstances, I think, that it became possible for people like me to become known to, even taken in by, Aboriginal families and to work across gender divides in circumstances in which kinds of information were re-valued. The earlier contexts in which, e.g., Indigenous familiarity with the country and the ability to maneuver in it were gone—rural work was moribund. The earlier contexts in which ceremony had played a community role were not completely gone, but were certainly endangered in town contexts, and in the influences which radiated from towns and other places where Indigenous-non and Indigenous people came into contact out into more remote communities.

In conclusion, I would see these circumstances of traditional gender hegemony, change, and diversification in Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations as coming together in ways that open up many questions requiring both ethnographic research and theoretical consideration. Among these are: the ways in which long-standing (group-internal) hegemonies are affected by external-internal power dynamics, and in relations between dominant and subordinate groupings; the implications of changes in those power dynamics for cross-generational differences in socialization in both dominant and subordinate groupings (in other words, how different are parents and children?); and the implications of changing valuation and devaluation of the perceived characteristics of subordinate groups for the social health and engagement of emergent generations.

Read another piece in this series.

Works Cited

Rowse, Tim. 2002. Indigenous Futures: Choice and Development for Aboriginal and Islander Australia. Sydney: UNSW.

In addition to the work of the guest editors, this piece was edited by Adrianna Link.