Writing about Oceanic sexualities involves vast travel in space and time to appreciate the striking diversities in Indigenous sexualities across Oceania and to witness how these have transformed over centuries in relation to and resistance against global influences, especially those originating in Euro-American imperialism. Focusing on three different places in the Pacific – Hawai’i, Papua New Guinea and Samoa – this chapter critically considers how Indigenous sexualities have been represented by both foreign and Indigenous scholars and how far contemporary sexualities are seen as a rupture or a persistence from the past. It explores the pervasive conversion to Christianity as part of imperial processes of dispossession and depopulation. It analyses how the valorization of a patriarchal gendered binary and monogamous heterosexuality challenged and transformed prior gender and sexual configurations. It observes the impact of sexually transmitted diseases, from the ‘venereal’, spread by early European explorers, to the twentieth century epidemic of HIV. It critiques the role of foreign observers and anthropologists like Malinowski and Mead in the ‘othering’ of Oceanic sexualities and discusses how Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists have resisted such representations and offered alternative, anti-imperial perspectives.

The link between maternities and modernities is more than an alliterative conjunction. These essays attest to how projects of modernity have also entailed remoulding maternity. But, whereas some recent studies have seen this relationship as singular and have typically privileged Euro- American experiences, we pluralize understandings both of maternity and of modernity and problematize the way we plot their relation. Moreover, the focus on Asia and the Pacific not only provides a different site for experiences of, and discourses about, maternity but suggests how these sites were and are connected in the processes of colonialism and postcolonial development. We highlight how class-based interventions in mothering in many countries of Europe and North America were paralleled by projects in European colonies where race, ethnicity and class compounded pre-existing local differences between women. In many Asian and Pacific countries indigenous patterns of mothering have been challenged and to some degree transformed, first in the colonial period and second in the postcolonial epoch, in the name of civilization, modernity and scientific medicine. But women in these places have not simply succumbed to the message of ‘enlightenment’ through maternal improvement, but have variously rejected or embraced such advice or accommodated it selectively. Such exercise of agency should not be construed as a matter of voluntaristic choices however, as if choosing between modes of mothering is akin to wheeling a supermarket trolley (Ram 1994:20). Indeed, this volume shows that such choices are saturated not just by the power of gender difference, but class and ethnicity. The embodied maternal subject is pervaded by a profound tension, perhaps even a split, as the mother is sundered in contests between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’.

Introduction

Maternity has often been proclaimed as a source of sameness and identification between women – we are all born of mothers, and although some of us cannot or do not become mothers, our being in a woman's body is often identified with its procreative potential. The identification of woman with the maternal has been implicated in many Western theories which purport to explain woman's essential condition – either our alleged universal subordination (Chodorow 1978; de Beauvoir 1972 (1949); Ortner 1974; Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974) or to explain and celebrate our difference from men (Gilligan 1982; Irigaray 1985; Kristeva 1980; Trebilcotl983).

Although maternity will, I imagine, continue to be a powerful factor in and a potent metaphor of women's identity and unity, what I consider here is rather how maternity has divided women – how class, race and nation have constituted us as ‘other mothers’.

Pacific historians and anthropologists have long observed and commented upon the dramatic social and political changes that have occurred in response to colonial intrusion and pacification. As they describe the demise of indigenous political systems or the upheavals concomitant with new forms of economic activity there is often the implicit assumption that certain core institutions persist or that essential cultural characteristics are retained. In the Australian context, Aborigines, and even those who oppose their struggle for autonomy, subscribe to an idealised view of the desert or the ‘outback’ as the true locus of traditional continuity. The nomadic band of hunter-gatherers subsisting on their country is an image so compelling that it obscures the harsh realities of poverty both in large cities and rural regions and the facts of land alienation and cultural displacement. Similarly the idea of the unchanging village is as comforting to anthropologists as it is to many urban peoples in Pacific nations. The relative simplicity and monotonous regularity of quotidian activities in rural regions is seen to set them apart from the complexities and fast changes of the urban centres. And while some view outback Aborigines or Pacific villagers as those deprived of the benefits of technological and cultural advances, condemned to underdevelopment in remote backwaters, others see them as the guardians of custom, the true defenders of tradition. Both views fail to acknowledge how rural life has changed at its very core and that these processes of change began a long time ago.