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Kalsa blong hu nao woman no garem raet? Rethinking the culture and gender narrative in Solomon Islands

Anna Kwai

In 2015, I had a short-term engagement with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) in Honiara. One of my first tasks in my new role was to develop a gender action plan. The most fascinating thing about this was the realisation that many versions of a ‘bucket list’ of activities for this program had been produced but never implemented. With the drive to produce a list of activities that could work, I launched into a series of consultations with local women within DFAT and across the Solomon Islands Government. These consultations evolved into informal chats over morning tea, lunch and beyond. These conversations left an impression on me as they revealed the opinions and concerns of local women that were raised but often brushed aside by their superiors or experts in the gender and development (GAD) field. These conversations also revealed a particularly concerning trend; I found great hesitancy among Solomon Islanders about when and where to draw the line in the discussion of culture and its compatibility with key tenets of the GAD framework. Trained as a historian and with a rural upbringing that was entrenched in both Christian and cultural processes, I am troubled by the confusion brought by GAD. I always see women in my culture of Kwara’ae as central and crucial to the stability of the community but why are they reduced so significantly in GAD literature to be victims of the same culture that holds them in such high esteem? This quandary became the motivation for this chapter.

In this chapter, I use the metaphor of the spotlight to argue for the prominence of culture for women and their prominence within culture as individual members of Indigenous societies.¹ The word ‘spotlight’ has been widely used in GAD literature to celebrate, promote, publicise, bring attention to and/or acknowledge women’s achievements in various sectors of society.² Metaphorically, the spotlight can be projected onto someone or something to highlight a positive or a negative, or can highlight something positive yet yield a negative result. The same goes for shining the spotlight on something negative for a positive result. While to spotlight someone or something is a useful tool in GAD, the practice of picking an individual to showcase creates a group of women who are deemed remarkable—and not by the society as a whole. The curated nature of this approach to women’s profiles may lead to a lack of broader relatability and the stigmatisation of featured individuals, while simultaneously oversimplifying the complex challenges women face on a daily basis. This is symbolic of the interpretative metaphor of the spotlight. It can only shine exclusively at a certain spot in each time and fails to capture women’s activities and accomplishments in areas beyond its reach. This singular focus can be to the detriment of the bigger, more comprehensive picture. The exclusive light shone by the spotlight and, importantly, those shining the spotlight ignore and thereby misinterpret the larger context. To lessen this risk, I suggest that the spotlight should either be moved around constantly or GAD practitioners must be more attentive to the areas surrounding the spotlight that are not captured.

This chapter use the interpretative spotlight metaphor to engage in a historical analysis of the relationality of gender and culture in Solomon Islands. The chapter begins by discussing the problems with GAD as a discourse and where it fails to see Indigenous cultures as an asset in its practice. It then uses the metaphor of the spotlight to consider three ways in which its light, or focus, has been to the detriment of women in Solomon Islands: in GAD analysis, historical photography and the contemporary understanding of bride price. Finally, I consider the implications of the spotlight analysis and offer some suggestions that development practitioners might find useful when working in projects that focus on gender in Solomon Islands and beyond.

The GAD discourse in Solomon Islands

As a discourse, GAD has its shortfalls. Edward Said’s publication of Orientalism (1978) marked a period of rethinking discourse and the ways in which knowledge was produced and maintained by Western institutions. Said saw a problem with the portrayal, characterisation and perception of cultures and peoples of the Middle East. He argues that the perception and portrayal of the East through Western scholarship and media are a ‘political intellectualism’ of ‘self-affirmation’ (Said 1978). In this context, the relevance of the narrative to peoples of the West has nothing to do with the realities of the existence of those in the East.³ Yet, the inaccurate knowledge of ‘the Orient’ persists because it was reinforced over time through various mediums including colonial governments. Drawing on Michel Foucault,⁴ Said saw that power and knowledge propel the West’s conceptualisation of the East.

To the extent that Western scholars were aware of contemporary Orientals or Oriental movements of thought and culture, these were perceived as silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalist and brought into reality by them or as a kind of cultural and international proletariat useful for the Orientalist’s grander interpretative activity (Said 1978: 208).

Said’s criticism of Orientalism also resonates with the observations of prominent subaltern scholars such as Ranajit Guha (1982), Gayatri Spivak (1988) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000). Similarly, in the Pacific, the transition from postcolonialism to decolonisation has created a space for colonised voices such as Epeli Hau’ofa (1994), Konai Thaman (2003) and Tracey Banivanua-Mar (2006), among many others. While the decolonising approach of Pacific scholarship is gaining traction, the GAD literature seems mired in the decades-old culture-blame narrative that is often at odds with Indigenous epistemologies, traditions and culture more broadly. Culture and traditions that form the complex and changing fabric of Pacific societies became oversimplified in a one-size-fits-all category (Guttenbeil-Likiliki 2020, 2022). Yet, the assumption that gender–culture relations in Fiji must be the same as in Papua New Guinea or Solomon Islands has become the epitome of gender analysis, action plans, reports and policy documents (see, for instance, DFAT 2021).⁵

In a 2003 article, Sally Engle Merry observes that the language and idea of culture as a monolithic essence stem from global knowledge production, driven in many cases by non-Indigenous peoples. The process of producing reports against international standards such as the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women ‘is a very legalistic domain of activity’ (Merry 2003: 60) that sees the cultures of developing nations as being of an unchangeable primitive nature that is detrimental to women and ‘a barrier to progress’. Merry (2003: 60) notes that the critique of culture in this context ‘builds on imperial understandings of culture as belonging to the domain of the primitive or backward, in contrast to the civilisation of the coloniser. Residues of this understanding of culture emerge in contemporary human rights law.’ Such residues seem to permeate knowledge production at both the international and the local levels of development practice. Culture and traditions within this context and especially of developing nations become classified as ‘obstacles to human rights’, as Margaret Jolly (1996) observes in the case of Vanuatu.

The concept of ‘gender equality/inequality’ is also relatively new in the case of Solomon Islands society. Gender-related developments only began in 1975 with the establishment of the Young Women’s Christian Association, followed by the Solomon Islands Council of Women in 1983 (Solomon Islands in Focus 2015–25). These institutions became active advocates for the elimination of violence against women and the collective voice for the equal participation of women in political decision-making. In 1994 the country signed the Pacific Platform for Action on Gender Equality and Women’s Human Rights and the following year ratified the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (Mulder 2019).⁶ As part of the Solomon Islands Government’s commitment to the Beijing Platform for Action, the Department of Women, Youth and Sports and the Child Care and Social Welfare Unit within the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development were formed in 1997.⁷

By the dawn of the new millennium, the global movement for gender equality had accelerated in response to national commitments to the Millennium Development Goals and, subsequently, the Sustainable Development Goals, in 2015. Yet at this time, Solomon Islands faced civil unrest and the collapse of law and order. The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) contingent arrived in the country in 2003 to begin the peace-building process. Local advocacies regained momentum under RAMSI’s presence and the movement for women’s rights and equality regained traction. The narrative during this period maintained the dominant understanding of men as active participants in the conflict and women as active peacemakers (Pollard 2000). Women who were participants in the conflict who were known to many locals were rarely mentioned or referenced (if at all) because their participation fitted neither the context of violence as a masculine activity nor the feminine role of a peacemaker.

By 2007, the Solomon Islands Government finally formed the much-needed Ministry of Women, Youths, Children and Family Affairs, which became the government arm responsible for drafting legislation and implementing, monitoring and evaluating the national gender plan, among other ministerial responsibilities. The presence of RAMSI during this period also saw an increased production of GAD grey literature (mostly technical reports) resulting from an increase in stakeholders participating in GAD programs in Solomon Islands. In 2010, the Solomon Islands Government endorsed the Gender Equality and Women’s Development Policy and the Family Protection Bill passed parliament in 2014, becoming the Family Protection Act, making Solomon Islands one of the leading Pacific countries in the push for gender equality.

With the recent transition from GAD to gender equality, disability and social inclusion in the aid and development space, the emphasis firmly centres on human rights (see Hermkens 2013; Jolly 2000). A development bulletin by Corrin Care (2000) on customary law and women’s rights in Solomon Islands emphasises the incompatibility of customary law and human rights ingrained in the country’s Constitution. As Corrin Care notes: ‘Customary law is based on male domination … [while] human rights … are founded on principles of equality’ (2000: 20). Corrin Care makes a careful discussion of cases that show where state law and customary law disagree in practice. Although both categories of law are recognised by the Constitution, their conflicting functions, as Corrin Care concludes, are the result of the ‘assumption by the British drafters that international human rights norms are universal’. Corrin Care argues that the approach to recognise both strands of law ‘fails to take into account the fact that traditional Solomon Islands societies are founded on community values and duties, rather than on individual rights’ (2000: 22). It is hard to imagine that the colonial drafters of Solomon Islands’ Constitution could assume that human rights norms were universal. By 1978, Solomon Islands societies had endured more than eight decades of colonial rule over their affairs and had well embraced and were reliant on the colonial rule of law. There was no customary law like the one recognised by the Constitution in Solomon Islands traditional societies before colonialism. The male-dominated customary law critiqued by Corrin Care was created and enforced by the colonial state. Traditional societies were also made up of individuals who collectively determined which values and duties to abide by as a community. It is odd to suggest that ‘community values and duties’ as a static entity determine where human rights lie in local context. Traditionally, physical spaces were never permanent and people moved constantly either to a new location within an existing village or hamlet or to a completely new location. Such patterns of movement are important to understand to grasp the fluidity of communities and individual (not just men’s) influence within such fluid spaces.

While human rights arguments are important contributions to the discussion of the inequalities and forms of discrimination women face in contemporary society, they minimise and exclude the complex entanglements of cultural change that slowly overwhelmed island societies over decades of encounters with Western cultures, peoples, institutions and processes. Those encounters were often violent and forced on islanders under circumstances of deliberate inequality that was overwhelmingly racial in nature (see Banivanua-Mar 2006). In Solomon Islands, for instance, by the time political autonomy was transferred to islanders in 1978, they had experienced more than eight decades of colonialism. That time (and the years before) entailed decades of normalising a white male–dominated system of colonial governance and religion. It is important to point out that Solomon Islands women did not struggle for voting rights nor were they legally barred from opportunities, employment or education at the time of independence. However, this does not mean that women have equal access to opportunities within the masculinist structure of a colonial state, or even in the postcolonial state, which continues to uphold the legacy of its predecessor. In other words, the inherent examples of a male-dominated structure of colonialism—embedded in governance institutions and amplified by the processes of missionisation and modernity—became a widely accepted norm in societies throughout Solomon Islands by the late 1970s. Certainly, the ‘structural bias’ towards men inherited from such a long history cannot be overstated.

In her chapter in the 2007 edited volume Britishness Abroad, Anne Dickson-Waiko analyses the ‘colonial enclaves and domestic spaces’ of British New Guinea. She argues that the demarcation of spaces for the colonised and the coloniser was not the only example of spatial limitation. Indigenous peoples of British New Guinea were further divided into categories based on the status of their engagement in the colonial enclave.⁸ While white women in the ‘colonial enclave’ experienced ‘racial dominance’, they were also subjected to the ‘misogynist notions transplanted from the metropole’, which placed them in a less equal position to men in the colony (Dickson-Waiko 2007: 210). But their experiences were different from those of Indigenous women. Their space within these segregated enclaves (colonial, domestic as well as mission), as Dickson-Waiko shows in the case of British New Guinea, were ‘legally enforced’ by the coloniser (see also Hall 1992). In terms of the mission enclave, Dickson-Waiko (2007: 206) found that it extended the colonial enclave beyond the urban environment to create a ‘new layer of patriarchy’.⁹ She argues:

It was the European missionaries and their wives who cultivated the cult of domesticity and the civilising mission among the colonised through Christianity and mission education. A model of clean Christian living formed an essential part of the nuclear family unit as represented by the missionaries. (Dickson-Waiko 2007: 210)

In the Solomon Islands public service, Pauline Soaki (2017) observes that structural bias is one of the reasons it is difficult for women to be elected to parliament and hold leadership positions, even today. Yet, as both Debra McDougall (2014) and Dickson-Waiko (2007) note, masculine bias was a colonial strategy to restrict the ‘movement and settlement’ of colonised peoples in colonisers’ spaces. Even keeping women in villages was a colonial strategy that, as McDougall argues,

ensured that men would return there when their labour was no longer required, that wages would not have to be high enough to support whole families, and that labour would be available for the rural cash cropping that was the heart of the economy. (2014: 199)

McDougall notes that women were faced with overwhelming domestic responsibilities in the men’s absence from villages. This observation resonates with Margaret Jolly’s (1991: 39) observation in Vanuatu that Western perceptions of domesticity became models for colonised peoples and especially girls, who were groomed in schools run by missionaries in the proper behaviour and manners that would make them into an ideal Christian wife and hence produce a civilised family. However, Hyaeweol Choi and Margaret Jolly (2014: 4) argue that the ambition to create an ideal Christian wife of Indigenous girls is a paradox as missionary women were allowed to work in the ‘public sphere, even at a global level’.

In Canada, Kiera Ladner (2009) found that the internalisation of colonialism by Indigenous peoples was in many cases involuntary. The 1867 Indian Act in Canada, for instance, was a colonial effort to civilise and integrate Indigenous peoples into the newly created white society. The provisions of the Act were predominantly patriarchal yet translated into policies and practices that ‘eliminate[d] the “Indigenous” and replace[d] it with the “civilised”’ (Ladner 2009: 65). Ladner argues that the patriarchal provisions of the Act, such as status and rights (both political and property), became pathways through which colonialism was internalised by Indigenous peoples. Such internalisation, as Ladner (2009: 65) argues, resulted in the ‘inharmonious plurality of cultural identities and understandings of gender’ by Indigenous peoples. As Macintyre and Spark (2017: 13) note in the case of the Pacific, consequently:

The changes in gender relations since colonisation, and in ways of life more generally, ensure that what counts as ‘traditional’ is often quite different from past construction of customary practices and values.

While knowledge production in general is a key component of awareness of social issues, its context-specific positionality means it does not always fit other cultural contexts. Development practitioners must be cautious in their application of frameworks and concepts that are not culturally monolithic.

Monolithic culture and patriarchy in GAD analyses

The shortcomings of GAD as a discourse become clearer as we move our spotlight to different areas. First, GAD analyses in reports systematically fail to see the value of local cultures to women. Culture and women appear in GAD analysis as contradictory categories (Merry 2003). Phrases such as ‘Solomon Islands’ cultures are predominantly patriarchal’ (Homan et al. 2019), ‘patriarchal society’ (DFAT 2021), ‘[p]atriarchal systems of social organisation reinforce the dominance of men and boys over women and girls’ (World Vision 2024), ‘patriarchal attitudes and gender stereotypes are pervasive in Solomon Islands’ (Equal Rights Trust 2016) and ‘culture is a barrier’ (Hedditch and Manuel 2010) are just a few examples of the references characterising women’s societal position in culture in GAD reports and analyses.

An Asian Development Bank (ADB) country gender assessment report carries a similar message on culture and traditional norms to explain the context of gender inequality:

Customary norms may be invoked throughout Solomon Islands in relation to issues such as men’s and women’s control over family decisions, land rights, marriage and bride-price, division of labor, and the custody of children. Custom is often used to justify the notion that women are inferior to men, and that men’s oppressive behavior and violence is acceptable. This places Solomon Islands women in a dilemma, as few wish to criticise their traditional culture in defense of their rights, although a few courageous writers have done so. (ADB 2015: 5)

If we broaden the spotlight to understandings of culture, however, a new dimension of knowledge emerges. The reference to ‘courageous writers’ who wish to criticise their traditional culture in the quote above refers to a series of poems written and published by Solomon Islands poet Jully Makini (later Jully Sipolo) under the title of one of the poems in the series, Civilized Girl (Sipolo 1981).¹⁰ Among the 20 poems published in this series, ‘A Man’s World’ is the only one with a direct reference to culture and gender norms. But this poem is more than just a criticism of culture; it is a description of the struggle of maintaining traditions in a society that is becoming more and more pressurised because of modernity and in which men are seeing themselves as more powerful or at least are regarded as such by women. Sipolo speaks of the struggle to maintain traditions within a household that comprises both male and female members of the family living under the same roof, which entails negotiating different power dynamics daily.

In the case of Kwara’ae, there used to be greater gender separation between older children and adults. Men used to live in a separate hut (heara, also spelt hera/fera) from women and younger children in the village. This practice loosely continues in many villages of Kwara’ae where unmarried men live in a separate hut in the village until they are married. I have witnessed during my lifetime the normalisation of young men in rural eastern Kwara’ae living under the same roof as their parents and siblings—more like in urban areas. While gendered habitation may be seen as segregation, for Kwara’ae people, it was a practice that upheld morality and ensured societal sanctity. Unlike cultures such as the Huli in Papua New Guinea, where polygyny was practised and co-habitation involved much negotiation between spouses (Wardlow 2006), it is uncommon in Kwara’ae for men to openly practise tau’wunga ang or polygamy. Rather, Kwara’ae married couples in the past lived in separate domestic spaces. This was seen as an efficient way to uphold morality and mitigate the risk of the spread of diseases, sickness and death within the village. For instance, women in Kwara’ae were responsible for younger children from birth up to an age when boys were old enough to move to the heara/hera to be under the daily guidance of their father and male relatives. However, these were very fluid spaces. Even places such as bis (‘menstruation huts’) were not inaccessible to men and there are many local stories of men who courted or eloped with women from the safety of the bis. These domestic spaces became infiltrated and fractured with the introduction of foreign diseases and eventually demoralised by the processes of colonisation and missionisation in their creation of an ideal Western-centric domestic space.

A broader spotlight also highlights the fact that non-local gender ‘experts’—often consultants of institutions who have little understanding and knowledge of local cultures and cultural processes—wrote most of these reports. It is important to note that most of the international institutions that are based in countries such as Solomon Islands are very risk-averse and work diligently to ensure the maintenance of a favourable public image. In other instances, they present an unfavourable image on the situation to create a humanitarian need or to justify the institution’s position as an advocate for the needy. The narrative used in this case is often to maintain or further that public image. Where qualitative evidence is used as the basis for such assertions, it draws excessively from ethnographies by Western anthropologists and scholars who did research at some point in the country. When they are drawn from local scholars, as in the previous paragraphs, they become a conflation of poor cultural understanding (for example, in the application of Pollard 2000) with a disregard for the broader context of discussion (for instance, in the application of Sipolo 1981). When local women produce consultation reports, these are often heavily edited by overseeing experts or aligned closely to fit the mainstream GAD narrative. In the case where quantitative research substantiates the claims made, it is either based on an urban sample or with questionnaires formulated by technical expertise¹¹ that has not considered or concisely incorporated local cultural knowledge.

By directing our spotlight onto individuals who work in GAD institutions, we can also see the manifestation of the ‘saviour complex’. Lila Abu-Lughod (2013) captured this perception succinctly in her monograph Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, in which she sees that ‘gendered Orientalism’ has clouded conceptualisations and the global, predominantly Western imagination of Muslim women and culture to a degree that distracts from the real need to listen to women’s voices. Such conceptualisations become a blanket that covers the need to be more attentive to other cultures, women’s voices and their position within their own societies. Cecile Jackson (2006) argues that feminist epistemologies can be a crucial contributor as they can move the spotlight to women’s testimonies of lived experiences. But Jackson cautions that the interpretation of personal testimonies risks women’s voices being treated as either a ‘conflation of individual voices with collective representation’ or a ‘recognition of false consciousness’ (Jackson 2006: 539; see also Torjer 2017). Such false consciousness can mischaracterise muteness as either an indication of feminine subordination or a form of agency. So often when Indigenous women’s voices are captured, they are reduced to the simplistic and ‘readily put down to the mystification of gender inequality’ (Jackson 2006: 539), as in the case of Jully Sipolo’s poetry.

It does not require much research to see the overall picture of the absence (or sporadic presence) of women, their voices and how they have been characterised in the broader historiography of Solomon Islands. In the precolonial and colonial past, the literature on people, society, culture and environment was driven predominantly by European/white male explorers, from those as early as Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira (Amherst and Thomson 1901) to naturalists like Charles Woodford (Lawrence 2014), missionaries, scholars (anthropologists, linguists and so on) and photographers (like Northcote Deck and John Beattie). Their work is essential yet offers us very little on gender relations in history to reconstruct feminine agency that is absent from written records of our past.¹² When feminine agency is discussed, it is in the context of pollution, taboos, sorcery, suicide or the effects of these practices on women (Garrett 1992). In 1985, Roger Keesing revealed what is seen as a change in his perception of Kwaio women’s social status in their societies. Keesing observes that the Kwaio culture exemplifies a ‘sexually polarised Melanesian society’, in which women were ethnographically perceived as inferior to men in social and religious rituals. However, as Keesing observes from his long engagement with the Kwaio people, the opposite was true. Kwaio women held esteemed positions in their communities and were central to social life and religious rituals (1985: 28). Keesing states that in a deeper understanding of the Kwaio society, he observes that ‘domestic male–female relations were characteristically close rather than antagonistic’ and, because of this closeness, women’s ‘bodies and reproductivity are sources of power that have to be properly compartmentalised (as does contact with the ancestors) but are not inherently polluting’ (1985: 28). However, not all scholars of contemporary Solomon Islands studies engaged at a level of interactions as deep as Keesing’s in the communities in which they worked to be able to project the spotlight in areas that Keesing projected his. Those who relied predominantly on local surveys to collect data and fill questionnaire sheets had a much narrower perception of aspects of local culture.¹³

Oral history and my personal experiences also counter the view that women assume a submissive role in all spheres of life in my culture.¹⁴ Yet, the manifestation of gender inequalities fashioned by the processes of colonisation and missionisation that could explain the historical discrepancies in gender roles that are assumed by the GAD discourse to be qualities of Indigenous cultures are rarely criticised. Why, then, should institutions and individuals who produce knowledge continue to snuff out Indigenous cultures when they know little about them to begin with? In a recent interview with elders of my society, I was schooled in the crucial space women occupy in our culture and the agency of their voice and actions. There is a concern among the elders that contemporary cultural change is influencing the way many men regard women in society. As an Indigenous woman of Kwara’ae, phrases such as bib ahn hanoa (‘main fabric’ or ‘foundation of the society’), aeh iontwa’a (‘an important woman’) and aeh aub (‘a sacred woman’) matter for me personally. When those terms are used to describe my place in society, it reasserts my agency as a woman and valued member of my society. However, the absence of such language in the Kwara’ae literature means these words mean nothing to the non-Kwara’ae people who write about Kwara’ae women. It is evident, then, that what is crucial is an intimate knowledge and experience of culture that many non-Kwara’ae scholars lack. The solution here is to redirect the spotlight onto Indigenous cultures, practices of Indigenous knowledge production and the recognition of forms of Indigenous women’s agency in local communities.

Historical photographs: Men as warriors, not fathers

The historical literature on Indigenous peoples is ridden with the white saviours’ desire to rescue Third World/Indigenous women from the madness of our own cultures and the backwardness of our state of being. Irrespective of how gender was perceived by our ancestors and in our own ways of knowing, the hierarchy of gender roles was projected onto us by our white saviours from first contact. Men were regarded with high esteem as warriors, not as fathers, and women were seen as no different to domestic slaves. Women are never portrayed as warriors. Yet, when we redirect our spotlight onto early colonial photography, we see gender relationships that were more fluid and dynamic than our contemporary ones. These discrepancies are likely not conceptualised in gender analysis because of poor cultural awareness. On childrearing, for instance, an NGO shadow report for the period 2002–12 claims that men ‘often refuse to participate in unpaid work in the home, including child-rearing, as it is customarily perceived by many men and women as the role of a woman’ (Christian Care Centre et al. 2012: 16–17). While this statement holds some truth to the extent that domestic responsibilities vary between families, it is also shows a fixation on a cultural deficit that is arguably a product of the gender imbalance due to the absence of men since the onset of depopulation from introduced diseases, the labour trade, colonial labour migrations throughout Solomon Islands and the patriarchal nature of Christian biblical teachings. At a time when photographic technology required people to sit still, young children were not ideal subjects for the lens, so were often excluded, although there are some images of men holding their babies (see Plates 3.1a and 3.2).

Plate 3.1a: The original caption for this image by John Watt Beattie read, ‘Cannibal men at [Fote], Malaita, Solomon Islands, 1906’

Source: PIC Album 463 #PIC/7580/, National Library of Australia, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-141127709/view.

Photography and Indigenous cultural experiences disturb the notion of a disrespectful and sexist culture. Yet, these are often ignored, poorly explained or brushed aside as irrelevant to the context of perceived feminine marginality. For instance, Plate 3.3, a photo taken by Australian photographer John Watt Beattie in 1906, originally captioned ‘Local people gathered near the women’s landing place of Ferasiboa, Malaita, Solomon Islands, 1906’,¹⁵ clearly contradicts a UN Women article that states:

The list of things women shouldn’t do according to Solomon Islands’ culture is long: no wearing shorts, no lingering eye contact with men, no sitting near your brothers and no speaking up, among them. The rules are nuanced and vary by province and tribe. But overall, cultural predispositions across the country leave women without the same level of respect and representation as men. (UN Women Asia and the Pacific 2019)

Plate 3.1b: Beattie’s photo as edited and reproduced in A Solomon Islands Chronicle, with the man holding the baby and the boy cropped out

Source: Alasa’a et al. (2001).

Through the spotlight, Plate 3.3 portrays a vibrant society with less restrictive gender disparities than is often characterised in contemporary gender analysis and reporting. This image disputes assumptions that women did not have the same respect as men. The images that follow also feature fathers holding their children rather than the selective image of all men as warriors.

Plate 3.2: Northcote Deck, ‘Lau men and a toddler (Malaita)’ (c. 1908?), lantern slide

Source: The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license. www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/563277001.

Plate 3.1a, also taken by Beattie in the same visit in 1906, is yet another pictorial example of an important detail that is often ignored in such reproductions. Originally captioned as ‘Cannibal men at [Fote], Malaita, Solomon Islands’, the photo is often reproduced in the context of male agency, ignoring the man on the right who is holding a baby and sometimes the older child on the left because they disturb a narrative of masculine agency, tribalism or the integration of superior European materials, especially weapons, into local cultures (see Plate 3.1b).¹⁶

Plate 3.3: The original caption for this image by John Watt Beattie read, ‘Local people gathered near the women’s landing place of Ferasiboa, Malaita, Solomon Islands, 1906’

Source: PIC Album 463 #PIC/7580/794, National Library of Australia, catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/6387675.

Tampering with images is not a new thing in photography; it is, to some extent, part of the art of photography itself. Photographs are sometimes altered to make a point, as in the case of the photograph in Plate 3.1b, or as in the case of American photographer Edward Curtis (Lawlor 2005). Curtis, who aimed to depict Native American life before colonisation, is known for manipulating his images by editing and airbrushing out objects of European origin to re-enact his perception of an authentic Indigenous culture and give a sense of Native Americans as a vanishing race confronting modernity. Altering images, whether by cropping or airbrushing, serves a particular narrative that critically removes details that are essential to our present understanding of specific periods in Indigenous cultures.

Reflections on traditional practice: The case of bride price

Although it has been two decades since Solomon Islands signed the 1994 Pacific Platform for Action, the concept of gender and the associated discourse are still new. This does not mean that individual Solomon Islanders are content with issues of gender inequality or human rights violations or ignorant of the growing advocacy for gender equality, but the discourse on gender offers a new lens through which to evaluate domestic and societal relationships. Sociocultural practices that weave together tradition, reciprocity, individuality and kinship have been filtered through this new lens. An elaborate example is the stereotype of bride price that is used to rationalise the threat of culture to women’s aspirations for progress in the country. A development report produced by the International Finance Corporation (Hedditch and Manuel 2010) emphasises the damage done to women’s entrepreneurial aspirations by the ‘bride price system’. A textbox with a quote from a foreign-born male businessowner in the country is used as evidence of this damage:

It’s a male dominated culture here [in Solomon Islands]—it comes from the bride price system. Men think they own women. If a woman starts a business and her husband doesn’t like it, he says stop and she does. Society here says if a woman wants to achieve something she can’t because she’s just a woman. (Hedditch and Manuel 2010: 7)

In Kwara’ae the tradition of daurai’ia (poorly translated as ‘bride price’) is at the forefront of criticisms of gender inequalities on islands such as Malaita, yet many individuals who are outspoken against these traditions are often active participants in such practices.¹⁷ The danger of such filtering is that women are now seen as monetised, branded commodities, who can be owned. When such branding is normalised, it gives male perpetrators power and the excuse to be abusive and violent towards their female partners (Honda et al. 2022).¹⁸ While this could be a result of modernisation and a rapidly changing society (and culture), it is also the direct outcome of a discourse that demonises our cultural processes. In Are’are, Pollard (2000) explained that bride price is a matrimonial gift-exchange ceremony that brings families, clans and communities together and is not perceived as transactional. In Kwara’ae, the term ‘bride price’ or its contemporary equivalent, ‘huail kin ang’, became a catchphrase to simplify what Underhill-Sem (2010) referred to as a ‘complex constellation of power’. Within this constellation, all the participants have some power to leverage or contribute. As Underhill-Sem (2010: 7) warns,

[S]implistic accounts of bride price, bride wealth and marriage exchanges expose contemporary prejudices against ‘Melanesian countries’, and often diverts attention from more systematic practices that belittle many women in the Pacific in the contemporary era.

Traditional practices that persist in Solomon Islands today warrant a clear understanding as these are essential to the fabric of many societies in the Pacific. It is important to point out that traditions such as daurai’ia were for decades among the key foundations for peaceful coexistence and holding perpetrators accountable in precolonial societies, and even in societies today where the presence of state policing falls short (Braithwaite et al. 2010; Braithwaite 2002).¹⁹ As John Cox (2017) observes in the Western Solomons, accepting the notion of the incompatibility of equality and kastom ignores the diverse ways and initiatives of Melanesian women in their engagement with modernity to make their relationships with men more equal and less prone to violence. The challenge for researchers and policymakers is to ensure that these traditional practices and their functions in the contemporary context are more deeply understood.

What intrigues me as a Solomon Islands woman, reading about the vilification of the ‘bride price’ tradition in the GAD literature, is the preoccupation with the deficit of the tradition in the contemporary economy. Again, by moving the spotlight away from the deficit to local experiences and knowledge of the practice, a different picture emerges. In Kwara’ae for instance, the phrase huail kin ang implies the presence of a transaction, which indicates that the term itself could have been a reversed translation of the Western term ‘bride price’. The term for what is now a bride-price ceremony is daurai’ia in Kwara’ae and in Langalanga it is called kwatena, which is best translated as ‘giving’ (Guo 2020). The tradition of daurai’ia in Kwara’ae and many cultures of Malaita is only one component in the process and celebration of a marriage. Language, as part of culture, changes over time. These changes are important to understand, especially in traditions that continue in the present, because it shows the deeper impact of the inclusion of money rather than Indigenous valuables as well as the effects of the influx of imported commodities and the capitalistic language of property (Monson 2022). But, most importantly, our spotlight must capture these changes in the present to accommodate cultural inclusivity in gender practices.

Implications of the spotlight analysis

By introducing the spotlight metaphor, I have shown that GAD practices have produced a narrow focus on Indigenous cultures, with a sometimes negative effect. Broadening the spotlight is useful as it can reveal different images or perspectives in the ongoing practices of producing knowledge. Often what is referred to as ‘culture’ by many in contemporary Solomon Islands is the intersection of mission and colonial cultures and their incorporation into Indigenous cultures by islanders themselves (Robbins 2004).²⁰ While culture changes with time and complex hybridisation²¹ can occur, the relative newness of the gender equality movement in places such as Solomon Islands means that culture as a concept must be explicitly understood before it is applied to gender analysis.

A video made by the International Women’s Development Agency is important to discuss here as it echoes the views and experiences of Solomon Islands women who engaged in gender advocacy and who are discussing the opportunities and challenges that culture poses to their work promoting gender equality (IWDA 2012). However, it also shows the challenges of differentiating culture in a hybridised context. All the women who speak in this video emphasise the important social structure and presence of chiefs as mediators in their advocacy work. There is a strong emphasis on respect for women and elders by men in rural communities. Flora Lasi, who works for a local NGO, emphasises in her interview that, in her experience, men have great respect for women and encourage women to participate in community activities including gender workshops. But it is often women’s perceptions of their place in the home that catalyses their hesitation to engage. A similar observation was made by Judith Siota, who observes that men in Solomon Islands have immense respect for women, but it is at the domestic level that inequalities are prevalent. When asked about the challenges culture poses to gender issues, the responses varied. The challenges identified include stereotypes of men that prevent them doing domestic chores, the lack of capacity by advocates to translate messages about gender inequality for local communities, the exclusion of men from gender advocacy work as well as an observed poor understanding of the traditional practice of bride price among Solomon Islanders themselves. These responses are crucial as they point to a much deeper gap in the historiography of the gender discourse in Solomon Islands that forms the essence of the problematic use of the term ‘culture’.

Fundamentally redirecting the spotlight onto local women can allow them the space to objectively articulate their approval and disapproval of their own culture. But it must be done without judgement or criticism from outside gender and human rights experts. Institutions that practice GAD can usefully begin with the local women they employ in this process by allowing the space, time and opportunity to engage them in candid discussions about culture, the role of the church and modernity and its influence on their wellbeing as individuals. Such a focus has the potential to shine a spotlight on an area that has less to do with cultural processes than with the contemporary challenges of modernity, or intersections between the two. Ultimately, this will lead to more positive analyses and understandings of culture in gender discussions.

To conclude, I have shown in this chapter some examples of the discrepancies in the development discourse about culture and gender in Solomon Islands. I argue that women are key players in society and important participants in knowledge production and cultural continuity, and do not conceptualise themselves as marginal in their own cultures. Rather than criticisms of gender disparities and culture, what must be recognised is the historical discomfort of women’s marginal representations in the narratives so excessively produced by non–Solomon Islanders since first contact. For it is through the non–Solomon Islands lens of characterisation that women’s status and position in local societies have been viewed over the course of history. While culture may have its defects, understanding its complexity in its entirety is an essential first step for outside researchers, gender experts, advisers, consultants, advocates and activists to form a baseline understanding of its gender-related functions.

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1. 1 Anna Naupa used the term ‘spotlight’ during her presentation at the Gender Institute signature event ‘Generating Change by Generations of Women in Oceania: A Pacific Dialogue’ in July 2022. She emphasised the importance of highlighting the leadership engagements of rural women in Vanuatu. Although ‘spotlight’ has been used as a synonym for recognising women’s leadership and accomplishments in the GAD literature, it was through Naupa’s presentation that I began to imagine the limitations and possibilities of the term as an interpretative metaphor.

2. 2 An example of how women are brought under the spotlight is to recognise and celebrate their achievements in society. ‘Spotlight’ is also used in philosophy through the spotlight theory of time (Deasy 2015; Skow 2009), which is beyond the scope of the discussion in this chapter.

3. 3 While I understand that binaries such as East–West (Said 1978) and urban–rural (Guha 1982; Spivak 1988) are simplistic in broader contextual applications, they can be useful to see where marginal voices can or cannot be found or where Indigenous voices can fit in. It is also important to note that categories such urban–rural may not be applicable in island nations with small populations, where such divisions do not exist at all or where they manifest differently. In a country such as Nauru, a rural–urban divide may not be present.

4. 4 One of the key insights of Michel Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge is that power functions not only in a linear way; rather, it operates in a multidimensional manner. Foucault (1988) also argues that power can dictate the terms of knowledge. While his scholarship is quite complex to grapple with, it allows us to reason with the relationality of power and knowledge and the effects of this relationship, as in the case of Said (1978). To an extent, the victimisation of women in their cultures, as alluded to in the GAD discourse, gives men a greater sense of power to dictate the forms of knowledge produced within GAD.

5. 5 This is not to criticise DFAT or the stakeholders who are pioneering the crucial Pacific Women Lead program. But it is important to point out that if promoting gender equality at the bilateral level is challenging, how accessible would transformational change be at the regional level? The ‘Pacific values and principles’ echoed through the document are impossible to imagine from the margins of remote rural communities. As such, the promotion of Pacific values assumes there is consistency in the values and principles of various Indigenous communities in the Pacific.

6. 6 See also the discussion of the effects of the second-wave feminism in the process of decolonisation in Papua New Guinea by Anne Dickson-Waiko (2013).

7. 7 Solomon Islands became independent when the second wave of feminism gained momentum in the 1970s. By the time the ideologies of this wave gained traction in Solomon Islands in the early 2000s, categories such as ‘gender’ and ‘gender perspectives’ were well established in academia.

8. 8 Dickson-Waiko (2007: 209) notes that the categories of ‘signed-on boys’ and ‘village natives’ were used to divide and identify Indigenous New Guineans based on their employment status: ‘Signed-on boys were those under indenture, while village natives were those who remained in their villages.’

9. 9 See also Heywood (2007), who shows how the concept of patriarchy varies in its application. Different strands of feminism use the concept to refer to forms of gendered power relations. Liberal feminists, for instance, use patriarchy to draw attention to the underrepresentation of women in various sectors of society. Some socialist feminists, on the other hand, see patriarchy and capitalism as interlinked. Hence, gender subordination and class inequality are intertwined systems of oppression. Radical feminists see patriarchy as a systematic, institutionalised and pervasive form of male power that is rooted in the family. In other words, the pattern of female subordination and male domination within domestic spaces reflects the broader power imbalances in the society at large.

10. 10 For an analysis of the series of poems, see Marsh (2015).

11. 11 Although it is changing, in many international NGOs working in the Pacific, most technical expert or advisor roles are filled by international experts—expatriates rather than locals.

12. 12 Assessing the historiography of women’s presence in the broader literature of Solomon Islands is a key component of my current research and one that is beyond the scope of this chapter.

13. 13 Scholars and individual researchers from universities are also part of this process but, in many cases, they exercise more profound and longer engagement with host communities, often as part of research for a higher degree (such as the work of Keesing himself; Monson 2022; McDougall 2016; Dureau 2010). While the development literature often benefits from the more substantial academic literature produced by extended fieldwork and presence in rural communities, it also often cherry-picks the most useful references for its purposes or fails to grasp concepts concisely due to positionality barriers.

14. 14 Malaita culture and society have always been seen as among the more patriarchal cultural groups in Solomon Islands. However, phrases that speak to the status of women in my region of Kwara’ae resonate a deeper sense of women’s status and importance that are not captured in the literature on women and gender relations in Solomon Islands (see Keesing 1985; Akin 2003).

15. 15 The ‘Beattie’ photographs of Solomon Islands are available online from the National Library of Australia’s collection Scenery and Peoples of the Islands in the South and Western Pacific: nla.gov.au/nla.obj-141125607. In many coastal villages in the past, women and men were said to have separate canoe-landing areas. This was also where women’s canoes were stored.

16. 16 The photo in Plate 3.1b is reproduced in Alasa’a et al. (2001).

17. 17 Personally, I have paid compensation (ha’abua’a) demanded by other families of my family, contributed financially towards daurai’ias and have immediate family members, both men and women, who have demanded ha’abua’a from other people in response to social issues. This is because such social traditions are an essential part of the fabric of society—a twine of interdependence that links alliances, reciprocates relationships and brings people together even today. While the influence of the cash economy, modernity and new concepts such as gender equality challenge the relevance of such traditions in the contemporary setting, it does not mean that people have lost sight of their importance.

18. 18 While the report by Honda et al. (2022) is not about cultural branding, it highlights that pride price is a cultural practice that reinforces violence against women.

19. 19 It is important to understand that in most rural areas in Solomon Islands, there is no law enforcement presence. Instead of critiquing traditional social practices such as bride price and compensation, maybe we should ask how effective these practices are in holding perpetrators of violence accountable while maintaining peace and stability in rural societies where the state fails miserably.

20. 20 Robbins also observes that individualism has been emphasised in the evangelical and Pentecostal Christian sects. Christianity emphasises a nuclear domestic structure with the man as the head of the family. Such a structure may empower women to disregard societal norms, but it does not necessarily mean that it improves their lives. It simply introduces new dynamics of inequality that may not bear the same cultural meanings that define women’s position in society.

21. 21 Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity recognises that multiculturalism enables new cultural forms to materialise. Bhabha argues that while colonialism (and its processes) can be seen as ‘in the past’, its legacy lingers in the present. Therefore, our understanding of cross-cultural relations and intersections must be on par.