Malaria in Pacific populations: seen but not heard?

Most Pacific Island countries are located in the tropics, where there is an abundance of mosquitoes with the potential to carry debilitating or life-threatening vector-borne diseases. This article examines three Melanesian countries in which malaria is endemic—Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu—but the threat posed by the spread of malaria gives the issues a broader significance to the Pacific region. After discussing the spatial distribution and prevalence of malaria in the Pacific, the article examines a number of health interventions through which people have sought to control malaria. Although the disease was nearly eradicated in the Pacific in the 1970s, it is no longer in retreat. The article concludes by examining why there are still grounds for cautious optimism, and the challenges that Pacific Island countries face in reducing the impact of malaria on their populations. There is a need for prompt and concerted action on malaria at the national, regional and international levels if the public health concerns arising from the disease are to be adequately addressed.     

Faith‐based organisations and social policy in Melanesia

This paper examines the contribution that faith‐based organisations (FBOs) make to social policy in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji. The paper sets contemporary relationships between church and state in these independent states of Melanesia in their individual historical contexts of missionisation, colonisation and decolonisation. Since independence these sovereign nations have relied on the networks and social capital of faith‐based communities and organisations in policy implementation in critical areas such as health and education. FBOs, for their part, have endeavoured to participate in policy and programme implementation without losing their autonomy. This pattern of selective cooperation has produced a unique policy environment, in which policy coordination continues to challenge government officials. Despite close association between FBOs and social policy in the Melanesian states, the slow progress with human development indicators and the Millennium Development Goals highlights the need to find more effective approaches to agenda‐setting, policy articulation and implementation.     

Literal Meanings: The Case of Mekeo Sorcery

In a recent article in The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (TAPJA), Bergendorff () offers a new approach to the interpretation of traditional sorcery practices among the Mekeo peoples of Papua New Guinea involving the transcendence of certain conceptual divisions of the indigenous cosmology and local understandings of personhood and the institutional order. On the basis of the ‘literal meaning’ for various words of the Mekeo language, Bergendorff argues that his interpretation resolves an earlier debate on the topic of Mekeo sorcery between Stephen () and me (Mosko ). This essay examines the ethnographic data that Bergendroff brings to bear in support of his new interpretation and juxtaposes his methodological use of literal meanings against authoritative linguistic analyses of the Mekeo language and its several dialects (Desnoës , ; Jones ). It is concluded that Bergendorff's analysis is internally inconsistent, that his use of literal meanings is unsupportable, and that the resulting view of Mekeo sorcery, personhood, society and cosmos is profoundly distorted.     

Mapping the diversity of gender preferences and sex imbalances in Indonesia in 2010

Indonesia is usually viewed as a country free of the acute forms of gender discrimination observed elsewhere in East or South Asia, a situation often ascribed to Indonesia's bilateral kinship system. I re-examine this hypothesis by focusing on ethnic and regional variations in sex differentials. New indicators of marriage practices and gender bias derived from 2010 census microdata highlight the presence of patrilocal patterns as well as a distinct presence of son preference in fertility behaviour in many parts of the archipelago. I also present evidence for excessive child sex ratios and excess mortality of females in some areas that appear to be related to son preference and patrilocal residence systems. The findings confirm the association between son preference, sex differentials in mortality, prenatal sex selection, and kinship systems. I conclude with a more regional perspective on demographic vulnerability of females, distinguishing bilateral South East Asia from more patrilineal Melanesia.     

Emerging women leaders’ views on political participation in Melanesia

Existing explanations for why women do not get elected to parliament in Melanesia emphasize structural barriers to participation, including prohibitive costs and patriarchal norms. They are largely silent, however, on why those women who do conform to the profile of the “archetypal candidate,” and thus have the best chance of overcoming these barriers, choose not to run. Drawing on an extensive qualitative dataset, including forty in-depth interviews with emerging women leaders from three Melanesian countries, we find that many women are pessimistic about the way electoral politics are conducted. Echoing longstanding critiques of political practice, this cohort conceptualizes their political activity as being conducted in a parallel public sphere, in contexts in which they consider themselves more able to pursue programmatic reform. Rather than focusing on structural barriers, we explore their decision to eschew parliamentary elections as an act of resistance against politics as usual in Melanesia. This new material adds to the literature on why women chose to run “from” rather than “for” parliament and therefore has implications for scholars and practitioners interested in improving women’s parliamentary representation across the globe.