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Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society, by Holly Wardlow. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. isbn cloth, 978-0-520-24559-4; paper, 978-0-520-24560-0; xi + 284 pages, maps, photos, tables, notes, references, index. Cloth, us$55.00; paper, US$23.95.
Wayward Women is everything we've come to expect from Bruce Knauft and his former graduate students. Holly Wardlow has written a richly theorized and detailed ethnography on Papua New Guinea's "passenger women." Her account of Huli women who accept money for sex is moving and compelling reading. When a Huli wife is angry with her absent husband for failing to adequately support her or refusing to come home and avenge her rape (148-150), we excuse her decision to sell "her" body for sex at the same time as we worry over likely consequences such as sexually transmitted diseases and violence against her. Engaging in twenty-six difficult months of fieldwork in Tari and several rural areas in Southern Highlands Province, Wardlow observed numerous female victims of change in a particular postcolonial context fighting back with their most valuable "possessions"-their sexuality and reproductive capacity. Estranged from her father after he killed her mother, a young unmarried "passenger woman" decided to "ruin herself" so her father would never profit from receiving bridewealth for her (150). With Huli society's increasing reliance on cash and many women treated like market goods when their kin seek huge bridewealth payments for them, the traditional bridewealth system and the meaning of women in it have changed in ways that cause some women "to repudiate the system altogether and withdraw their sexual resources from sociality by exchanging sex for money" (150). By thwarting the system, Wardlow argues, Huli passenger women are enacting a form of negative agency against their male kin, disrupting social reproduction, and raising...