Engendering Sexual Desire: Love Magic, Sexuality and Agency in Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT

Through a study of love magic, this paper examines the ways in which sexual desire is culturally mediated among the Lelet of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. The Lelet regulate sexuality heavily through what Foucault refers to as ‘prescriptive discourses’ which severely constrain expressions of sexuality, especially for women, who are construed as properly lacking sexual desire. While women are readily the object of men’s desire, men are not readily the object of women’s desire. Despite passionlessness being the ideal for women, men turn to love magic as a means of cultivating sexual desire in them.

KEYWORDS:

• Love magic
• sexual desire
• sexuality
• gender
• Papua New Guinea

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Though desire is often central to discussion of incest (see Mimica 1991).

2 The validity of applying Foucault’s thought to non-European social orders such as PNG has been questioned, the argument being that Foucault grounded his works specifically in the social and cultural orders of Europe. While this is true in regard to Foucault’s account of the emergence of institutional sites that regulate the production and circulation of knowledge, I do not believe that his entire work should be read so narrowly. In fact, his work provides very valuable insights into the functioning of power in cultures other than European.

3 This paper is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, including fifteen months’ doctoral fieldwork in 1990–1991 and shorter periods including a month in each of 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004/2005 and 2008.

4 The vernacular Mandak language is indicated by italics and the lingua franca Tok Pisin, by underlining.

5 Male ego: MBD, MBD, ZSD and ZSS and female ego: FZD, FZS, BDS and BDD.

6 Male ego: Z, FBD, MZD, ZDD and female ego: B, MZS, FBS and BSS.

7 Male ego: MBW, and ZSW and female ego: HZS and HMB.

8 I say ‘claimed’ because it is hard to adjudicate the veracity of such statements. Certainly, representations of past violence are often refracted through a Christian lens in which the pre-Christian past was unassailably violent but the Christian present is peaceful.

9 While some of these institutional contexts facilitate partner selection, either for unmarried young men and women or for men who wish to take another wife, whether the participants engage in sex varies. So, while Cook says that courtship parties may involve a man fondling a woman’s breast, woman grasping the men’s penis and sex in the bush (Cook 1969, 101), Strathern and Strathern say sexual advances should not be made (Strathern and Strathern 1969, 145). Although many of these institutional forms of courtship no longer take place, some that have remained have changed considerably (see Wardlow 2006a, 195–220).

10 This differs from some other examples of love magic in PNG where the personal leavings of the desired person are used (Lepowsky 1998, 134). However, the Lelet use personal leavings in sorcery.

11 Other variations of this magic may entail using other substances from the body, such toenail scrapings, eyelashes or sweat from the armpit.

12 Women may inherit minor forms of magic, from a parent or other relative, such as the spells for healing minor illnesses, but it is unheard of for women to own and use major heirloom forms, such as weather or taro magic, though some components of the taro magic sequence are the preserve of women (see Eves 1998, 259).

13 In fact one woman did confide to me that she had prepared some love magic, the formula for which she had procured from a well-known magician, but she said she had not yet used it. She was unmarried and in her late twenties which is generally considered to be too old for marriage, as this normally occurs in the teens or early twenties. She was also believed to have had several sexual partners and was considered less marriageable as a result.

14 Women’s names often reflect the passive and immobile state that they are perceived to embody relative to men and should ideally embody, and this is why the verb to sit or to be seated, i kis, is often used (see Eves 2010a, 5).

15 Coerciveness is also a common feature of men’s sexual encounters with women and this was illustrated to me when several young men gathered in my house nonchalantly described how they once engaged together in coercive sex. There are also a number of forms of magic which a man can reputedly use to make a woman sleep so deeply that he can enter her house and do what he wishes totally unknown to her.