Mark Collins's contribution to the ESFO 2025 conference

"The gender of the fish: problems with marine life and problems with society in Island Melanesia"

The inhabitants of the island of Lavongai (Papua New Guinea) are primarily horticulturalists and fishers. Fishing is gendered inasmuch as some of its tools are associated with men, specifically canoes, spears and nets. This leads to certain spaces and fishing techniques also being associated with one gender rather than another: fishing from canoes in deep waters with men, and fishing while standing on the reef flat with hand-lines and hooks with women. Interestingly, Lavongai people also associate certain birds with these gendered, technical, and spacial partitions. For example, diving into deep water for large fish is the purview of the Osprey, while walking in the shallow waters and catching small fish is that of the Pacific Reef-Heron. This resonates – but does not strictly overlap – with the way Lavongai society is organised into twelve clans that are each named after a bird whose members have specific associations with “their” respective birds, in ways that evoke a “totemic” ontology. Similarly, fish and other marine animals are associated with certain spaces rather than others in particular through their reproductive and ontogenic processes. The question then becomes: how do these “ontological” considerations associating categories of living beings (humans, birds, fish, and others) with particular places interact with the gendered aspects of social life? In other words: how do gender and ontology “fit together”?