Economies of Care: Market Women in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

(Hardback)

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In this major, open access intervention in feminist anthropology - which remains largely rooted in western feminist ideologies - Economies of Care examines emotional aspects of economic life in the marketplaces of Papua New Guinea; where market womens labour is a nexus not only for gender relations, but also for wider spiritual, cosmological and reciprocal ones. What role do emotions and care for others play in the relational economy in which this marketplace is embedded

Against a background of rapid urbanisation and social change, this book analyses notions of exchange from the perspective of these women, demonstrating that what motivates their choices, and what gives them their agency, is a system of reciprocal care. Equally, by examining new tendencies in production and exchange which have been imposed as a result of colonial power, this ethnography makes proposals for agro-ecology as a solution to global food insecurity, showing the ways in which many small-scale farmers choose unsustainable methods due to economic challenges.

Countering common western feminist perspectives - that to be responsible for social reproduction is symbolic of exploitation - Barnett-Naghshineh proposes that care for others remains a key route to prestige, influence, and recognition for women, and that embodied acts of care produce value in the broader structures of economic life.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.

Author Bio

Olivia Barnett-Naghshineh is a Post-doctorate Research Associate at the University of Exeter, UK, and Fellow at the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, UK. She is an editor for the Goldsmiths www.decolonialanth.co.uk website and convenor of the Decolonising Anthropology short course at Goldsmiths.