This award will allow the PI to do two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Highland New Guinea. The research will compare the roles of women and men in ritual and in exchange and hostilities. The hypothesis to be tested is that where women have more roles to play in exchange and ritual, their formal social status is higher relative to the status of men. This research will measure gender status variations in behavioral as well as ideological terms, as compared with gender variations in the provisioning of exchange. The groups to be studied are the southern Min peoples of Western Province, Papua New Guinea, an area where many comparative studies exist for this research to build upon. The importance of this research lies in the light it will shed on the sources of gender inequality. In order to understand why women are treated differently than men in our own society, we need to understand how, why, and when they are trearted more and less equally in other societies.
