Changing Generational Values and New Masculinities Amongst Smallholder Export Cash Crop Producers in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

This article is concerned with changing generational values and aspirations and intergenerational conflicts among migrant farmers in West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. Drawing on fieldwork amongst oil palm smallholders, the paper begins by documenting how economic pressures and a conjunction of social changes are leading younger men to challenge indigenous relations of authority and obligation that underpin father-son relationships. Rising material aspirations and revised social and economic values structured by kinship are driving this challenge by young men and making it more difficult for fathers to draw on their sons’ ‘unpaid’ labour. We then describe how these challenges are enacted through demands on fathers for new relations of production that give sons more power and control over the management of the oil palm block and the distribution of the income. These demands by an aspiring generation of young men are often contested fiercely by fathers who see such demands as weakening their authority and eroding their socio-political role in daily decision-making. We illustrate how the contemporary and highly commodified environment of migrant lives has redefined father-son relationships and forms of sociality, and contributed to intergenerational conflicts and the adoption by sons of new male identities and masculinities.

Keywords:

• Migrant Identities
• Migration
• Social Change
• Household Labour
• Household Economic Relations
• Relational Economy
• Moral Economy
• Commodity Production
• Intergenerational Relations

Notes

[1] Oil palm payments for men and women are paid directly into their own bank accounts or by cheque.

[2] On the more heavily populated blocks, co-resident households may receive only three or four payments per year.

[3] Meeting notes 17 September 2004.

[4] When the Hoskins LSS was established, 75 per cent of the settlers were from East and West Sepik, Chimbu and Morobe Provinces (patrilineal backgrounds) (Hulme 1984). Fifteen per cent of settlers were from East New Britain (matrilineal backgrounds). There has been little change in the ethnic balance over time, except inter-marriage among ethnic groups is now very common.

[5] Most second- and third-generation settlers are being squeezed out of the market for LSS blocks by rising prices and limited opportunities to accumulate savings on highly populated LSS blocks. The current purchase price of a six-hectare leasehold block at Hoskins LSS ranges from K80 000 to K150 000.