Anger, Gender, Language Shift, and the Politics of Revelation in a Papua New Guinean Village

Abstract

Abstract In a number of recent publications, Catherine Lutz (1986, 1990) has explored the network of associations in Western culture that link women with emotion, which in most cases is overtly devalued. A contrasting situation is described by Bambi Schieffelin (1990), E. L. Schieffelin (1976, 1985), and Steven Feld (1990), all of whom argue that among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, it is males who are “stereotypically culturally constructed as the emotional gender” (Feld 1990:262) and that this emotionality is encouraged and strongly valued in a wide variety of ritual and mundane contexts. Studies like these, as well as many others by anthropologists (e.g., articles in Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990, Bloch and Parry 1982, Watson-Gegeo and White 1990, White and Kirkpatrick 1985), have shown that in probably all communities throughout the world, the expression of affect is engendered and that, therefore, in Catherine Lutz’s words, “any discourse on emotion is also, at least implicitly, a discourse on gender” (Lutz 1990:69; see also Ochs 1988:177-83, 215-16).

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