Journal articles on the topic 'Catholic Church in Papua New Guinea'

In the Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARoB) in Papua New Guinea, the changes of Vatican II led to significant Church reform, creating “Liklik Kristen Komuniti” (small Christian communities) that gave more responsibility to the laity. Moreover, as elsewhere in the world, Charismatic Catholicism was introduced and embraced. At the same time, private devotions, and in particular devotions to Mary, became immensely popular and powerful in Bougainville. This is partly due to the Bougainville crisis (1988–1998), which caused immense suffering, but also triggered a surge in popular devotions as people looked for spiritual guidance to deal with the hardships of the crisis. This paper shows how in the context of social and economic upheaval, charismatic popular devotions became increasingly influential with rosaries and statues becoming important mediums in facilitating healing and socio-political renewal. This shows the strength of popular devotions and the importance of material religion in particular. It also elucidates how popular devotions in Bougainville are part of global Catholic developments, as well as transnational practices that place Mary in the center of devotional practices.

AbstractIt is possible for all religions to work together for lasting peace. This possibility of interfaith collaboration for peace in the midst of violent has been demonstrated in West Papua, the Western half of the Island of New Guinea. The territory has been a land of violent conflict both under the Dutch and Indonesian rules. The collaboration among the religions, including Islam, Christianity (Catholic and Protestant Churches), Hinduism, and Buddhism, for peace in West Papua was formally begun in 2000. Led by the religious leaders, the interfaith commitment for peace is manifested through the joint statements and activities. All the peace-related activities are now conducted under the motto 'Papua, the Land of Peace', which is also the shared vision of West Papua. This article explores the concept of peace, describes the threats to peace under Indonesian rule, introduces the concept of 'Papua, the Land of Peace' and its underlying values, and looks into interfaith commitment and activities for peace.

This article presents an overview of the role mainstream churches can play in mitigating the climate change crisis in the Pacific and their role in facilitating climate induced migration. It builds on earlier work by the author (Cass, 2018; 2020) with a focus on Fiji, Tonga and Papua New Guinea. Both Catholic and Protestant churches share a concern for the future of the planet based on the principles of economic, social and climate justice, which complement moral and ecumenical imperatives. The article examines what message the churches convey through the media and the theology that underlines them.

This article focuses on the enigma of Catholic Marian revolutionary movements during the decade-long conflict on the island of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea at the end of the twentieth century. These religious movements embody the legacy of a colonial history as well as people’s responses to poorly monitored resource extraction, social and economic displacement, regional factionalism, and years of fighting by Bougainvilleans against the Papua New Guinea Defence Force. At the same time, the movements’ popularity throve on leaders’ reputations for their religious knowledge and their mobilization of people based on religious faith. During the conflict Bougainville came to be seen by many residents as holy land (Me’ekamui). According to Francis Ona’s Marian Mercy Mission and Peter Kira’s Our Lady of Mercy movements, the covenant land of Bougainville had to be safeguarded from Satan, represented by Papua New Guinea and an Australian copper mining company, in the freedom struggle conceived as a Marian holy war.

AbstractThis article addresses the colonial project of “civilizing” and educating indigenous people in the farthest corners of the Dutch empire – South Dutch New Guinea (1902–1942), exploring the entanglement between colonial education practice and the civilizing mission, unravelling the variety of actors in colonial education in South Dutch New Guinea. Focusing on practice, I highlight that colonial education invested heavily in disciplining the bodies, minds, and beliefs of indigenous peoples to align them with Western Catholic standards. This observation links projects to educating and disciplining indigenous youth to the consolidation of colonial power. Central to these intense colonial interventions in the lives of Papuans were institutions of colonial education, managed by the Catholic mission but run by non-European teachers recruited from elsewhere in the Dutch colony. Their importance as proponents of the “civilizing mission” is largely unappreciated in the historiography of missionary work on Papua.

In early August 1942 an English Anglican missionary priest named Vivian Redlich met his death at the hands of the Japanese in Papua, then in the Anglican diocese of New Guinea. Redlich is one of a group of Papua New Guinea martyrs commemorated by the Anglican Church. I first heard his story when I joined the staff of his former theological college at Chichester, where he is remembered every year with a Eucharist at which an account of his martyrdom is liturgically read, and where he stands as a model of priestly dedication and sacrifice for those approaching ordination. I have prepared this paper to remember him on this fiftieth anniversary of his death, and in particular to set his story in the context of the earliest tradition of martyrology.

In this paper I explore two related questions: how does a particular site come to be perceived as sacred, and what is the impact of the destruction of something sacred when it occurs in a place of ‘refuge’? This study is situated on the island of New Guinea, in the experiences of West Papuan people from the Indonesian Province of Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), living as refugees across the international border in Papua New Guinea. The inquiry is grounded in two instances involving a refugee population in a place of refuge. The first instance involves the burning of a church built by a refugee congregation, and the second involves the large-scale occupation by a refugee population of another people’s land. A doubling effect is intended here. Forced migration can simultaneously render refugees vulnerable to the violence of others, and in the process of resettlement, refugees may have no real choice but to engage in actions that violate the land of others.

Abstract Christianity and politics seem to be intrinsically linked. In Central Bougainville, which is part of the autonomous region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Catholic faith introduced by Marist missionaries has been instrumental in building a national Bougainville identity and sustaining the political struggle for sovereignty. Although the first missionaries were often cautious not to disrupt socio-political organisations, Marists have been advocating both local and Marist political interests and views in the continuously shifting religious, and socio-economical political context of colonial and “post”-colonial Bougainville. This article follows the early Catholic missionaries to Bougainville, elucidating dialectics, tensions and politics of conversion. Moreover, it shows how devotion to Mary became entangled with a particular representation of Bougainville land as Holy, and the engendering of an ethnic-religious nationalism in the context of a ten-year-long devastating conflict and struggle for sovereignty.

This paper examines the role of literacy as it is practiced in a multilingual community on the Gazelle Peninsula in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. Ethnographic observational fieldwork and semi-structured interviews reveal how literacy plays out in six common domains of everyday life: public discourse, home, school, church, health care, and government. Following Street (1984, 1995), an ideological framework is used to explore the unique cultural context of literacy in this community. It is found that: (a) the community venerates external standards of literacy, at the expense of local practices; nevertheless, (b) literacy practices reflect the multilingual skills of the general population; and (c) literacy events provide an opportunity for oral discourse and social bonding. It is also argued that the community would benefit if local literacy practices were recognised and validated on their own merit.

In the Huon Gulf area of Papua New Guinea, the indigenous language Jabêm was one of the languages of first contact for Lutheran German Missionaries, circa 1900. As a result, Jabêm became a language of the church and, later, a language of education. In both domains, written materials were commonly produced and generations of children were schooled in Jabêm rather than their own mother tongues. This paper discusses the relationship between Jabêm and Kala, an indigenous language spoken in six villages along the Huon Gulf Coast. Kala was without a standard orthography until recent collaborations between members of the communities and researchers from UBC Okanagan. This paper, therefore, also describes the development of the Kala standardized orthography and examines the distinct influences Jabêm has in both spoken and written domains. For instance, Jabêm’s role as a written authority retains positive connotation, which influenced the newly created Kala orthography.

This article describes the historic conditions governing newspaper and media ownership in the Pacific. It argues that historically there have been three kinds of media in the Pacific: Mission or church-owned or directed, governmen- owned or directed and commercial. The missions and churches were responsible for the first newspapers aimed exclusively at indigenous populations and in Papua New Guinea have continued to play a key role in the media. The commercial press could only exist when there was a sufficient population to support it and so it tended to appear in those countries with the largest expatriate populations first. The continued dominance of the commercial media by Western companies in the largest islands has been largely due to the cost of producing these commodities. Locally-owned commercial media have been on a much smaller scale, but they have nonetheless had an impact. The national or government-owned or directed media were generally inherited from the departing metropolitan powers and represent a much diluted version of the public service model. While the article argues that the dominance of the commercial press in such markets as PNG, Fiji and New Caledonia by Murdoch and Dassault- Hersant is probably commercially inevitable, it also argues that the media scene in the Pacific is actually remarkably diverse.

Background: Sex and death have traditionally been linked in Huli culture in the Southern Highlands in Papua New Guinea. Huli regarded that close contact with women could result in men becoming sick or dying. However, there has been rapid social and economic development in the area and Huli traditions are changing. At the same time, HIV prevalence is rising. Methods: Twenty-five semistructured in-depth interviews were carried out with key informants during a study on HIV risk in the Southern Highlands. Interviews were conducted mostly in Tok Pisin. Interviews were transcribed and the data were analysed though thematic coding. Results: Huli people use ‘eating coffee candy’ as a metaphor for engaging in sex at funerals. This is very new and against traditional values, where women attended funerals and men only built the coffins and buried the body. Nowadays, sex occurs at funerals. This change has disturbed older people because it has not only changed the customary meaning of the funeral space, but it has also encouraged the spread of HIV. Huli use the fatalistic expression ‘Eat coffee candy and die,’ to refer to funerals as a space of HIV risk. Conclusion: Huli community and church leaders, and health workers are attempting to deal with the situation by not allowing men to stay at the funeral site overnight, burying the dead on the same day they die and using customary village law to charge men caught having sex at a funeral. However, traditional beliefs and rapid social change in the context of an HIV epidemic need to be taken into account.

Arambam Saroj Nalini was born in Imphal, in the then princely state of Manipur, on June 2nd 1933. Her father was a well-known and respected educationalist and government officer. During the war years he was posted to Jiribam, where she received her first education, and later transferred to a convent school in Haflong. She proceeded to Calcutta University, where she became the first Meetei woman to obtain BA and MA degrees, majoring in Philosophy. While in Calcutta she enjoyed close friendship with Christian Naga students, and converted to Christianity. She was baptised at the Lower Circular Road Baptist church, whose minister, Walter Corlett had himself served in Imphal during the war years. The Christian faith was to become a dominant influence on her future life. She came to Britain in the late 1950s to study theology, and obtained a Bachelor of Divinity degree from London University in 1961. Shortly after she married John Parratt. When their desire to work in India was frustrated they decided to work elsewhere in the developing world, initially in Nigeria, where Saroj became a tutor in philosophy at the University of Ile-Ife. When her husband was offered a research fellowship by the Australian National University she enrolled for a PhD in the Department of Asian Studies there, under the supervision of the eminent indologist A.L.Basham. Despite the frequent absences of her husband on field work in Papua-New Guinea and having to care for three young children, the bulk of the thesis was completed before she returned to Manipur for further extended field work in 1972. The doctorate was awarded three years later, one of her examiners being Professor Suniti Kumar Chatterji, who (unusually for the time) himself had a deep interest in India's north-eastern region. Her thesis was published in 1980 (Firma KLM, Calcutta) as The Religion of Manipur. It marked the beginning of a new phase in writing on Manipur by its rigorous application of critical methodology both in the collection and in the analysis of field data, and had considerable influence on younger Meetei scholars.

Abstract Knowledge among the rural parents about the vaccinations and vaccination coverage of children in the first year of life in Papua New Guinea – analysis of data provided by Christian Health Services. Background This analysis aimed to assess rural parents’ knowledge about the diseases prevented by vaccinations and establish vaccination coverage in PNG. Methods Knowledge of vaccinations was checked through a standard questionnaire (five closed questions). We analyzed data on vaccination coverage from 2016 to 2018 from all Catholic health facilities. Analyzed vaccinations were the pentavalent vaccine (DTaP-HiB-HepB) and measles vaccine given in the first year of life. Coverage was calculated based on the number of vaccines used compared to the number of eligible children. Analyzed vaccinations were the pentavalent vaccine (DTaP-HiB-HepB) and measles vaccine given in the first year of life. Results Fifty-six parents, including 52 mothers and four fathers, participated in the interview. Many parents (46%) understood that the vaccine prevents diseases. During the analyzed period, 25,502 doses of measles vaccine were given, 31,428 children were vaccinated with the pentavalent vaccine. In 2016, the measles vaccine coverage rate was 26.6 and 33.4% for the pentavalent vaccine. In 2017, measles and pentavalent vaccines’ coverage rate was 12.5 and 16.6%, respectively. There were significant differences in immunization coverage between provinces. A decreasing trend in the number of administered vaccinations was observed. Conclusion The results of this analysis demonstrate that in PNG, the majority of children are not fully immunized. There are significant differences in the vaccination coverage between provinces. As protection from diseases is low, there is a very high risk of an outbreak of the vaccine-preventable disease in the community. Delivery of vaccinations in PNG encounters many barriers, from access to healthcare services to natural disasters and inter-tribial conflicts.

Introduction Lillian Ng was born in Singapore and lived in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom before migrating to Australia with her daughter and Ah Mah Yin Jie (“Ah Mahs are a special group of people who took a vow to remain unmarried … [so they] could stick together as a group and make a living together” (Yu 118)). Ng studied classical Chinese at home, then went to an English school and later on studied Medicine. Her first book, Silver Sister (1994), was short-listed for the inaugural Angus & Robertson/Bookworld Prize in 1993 and won the Human Rights Award in 1995. Ng defines herself as a “Chinese living in Australia” (Yu 115). Food, flesh and meat are recurrent topics in Lillian Ng´s second novel Swallowing Clouds, published in 1997. These topics are related to desire and can be used as a synecdoche (a metaphor that describes part/whole relations) of the human body: food is needed to survive and pleasure can be obtained from other people´s bodies. This paper focuses on one type of meat and animal, pork and the pig, and on the relation between the two main characters, Syn and Zhu Zhiyee. Syn, the main character in the novel, is a Shanghainese student studying English in Sydney who becomes stranded after the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. As she stops receiving money from her mother and fears repression if she goes back to China, she begins to work in a Chinese butcher shop, owned by Zhu Zhiyee, which brings her English lessons to a standstill. Syn and Zhu Zhiyee soon begin a two-year love affair, despite the fact that Zhu Zhiyee is married to KarLeng and has three daughters. The novel is structured as a prologue and four days, each of which has a different setting and temporal location. The prologue introduces the story of an adulterous woman who was punished to be drowned in a pig´s basket in the HuanPu River in the summer of 1918. As learnt later on, Syn is the reincarnation of this woman, whose purpose in life is to take revenge on men by taking their money. The four days, from the 4th to the 7th of June 1994, mark the duration of a trip to Beijing and Shanghai that Syn takes as member of an Australian expedition in order to visit her mother with the security of an Australian passport. During these four days, the reader learns about different Chinese landmarks, such as the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Ming Tomb and the Summer Palace, as well as some cultural events, such as a Chinese opera and eating typical foods like Peking duck. However, the bulk of the plot of the book deals with the sexual relationship, erotic games and fantasies of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in the period between 1989 and 1992, as well as Syn´s final revenge in January 1993. Pigs The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher allows Lillian Ng to include references to pigs and pork throughout the novel. Some of them refer to the everyday work of a butcher shop, as the following examples illustrate: “Come in and help me with the carcass,” he [Zhu Zhiyee] pointed to a small suckling pig hung on a peg. Syn hesitated, not knowing how to handle the situation. “Take the whole pig with the peg,” he commanded (11).Under dazzling fluorescent tubes and bright spotlights, trays of red meat, pork chops and lamb cutlets sparkled like jewels … The trays edged with red cellophane frills and green underlay breathed vitality and colour into the slabs of pork ribs and fillets (15).Buckets of pig´s blood with a skim of froth took their place on the floor; gelled ones, like sliced cubes of large agate, sat in tin trays labelled in Chinese. More discreetly hidden were the gonads and penises of goats, bulls and pigs. (16)These examples are representative of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee´s relationship. The first quotation deals with their interaction: most of the time Zhu Zhiyee orders Syn how to act, either in the shop or in bed. The second extract describes the meat’s “vitality” and this is the quality of Syn's skin that mesmerised Zhu when he met her: “he was excited, electrified by the sight of her unblemished, translucent skin, unlined, smooth as silk. The glow of the warmth of human skin” (13). Moreover, the lights seem to completely illuminate the pieces of meat and this is the way Zhu Zhiyee leers at Syn´s body, as it can be read in the following extract: “he turned again to fix his gaze on Syn, which pierced and penetrated her head, her brain, eyes, permeated her whole body, seeped into her secret places and crevices” (14). The third excerpt introduces the sexual organs of some of the animals, which are sold to some customers for a high price. Meat is also sexualised by Zhu Zhiyee´s actions, such as his pinching the bottoms of chickens and comparing them with “sacrificial virgins”: “chickens, shamelessly stripped and trussed, hung by their necks, naked in their pimply white skin, seemed like sacrificial virgins. Syn often caught Zhu pinching their fleshy bottoms, while wrapping and serving them to the housewives” (15-16). Zhu also makes comments relating food with sex while he is having lunch next to Syn, which could be considered sexual harassment. All these extracts exemplify the relationship between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee: the orders, the looks and the implicit sexuality in the quotidian activities in the butcher´s shop. There are also a range of other expressions that include similes with the word `pig´ in Ng´s novel. One of the most recurrent is comparing the left arm and hand of Zhu Zhiyee´s mother with a “pig´s trotter”. Zhu Zhiyee´s mother is known as ZhuMa and Syn is very fond of her, as ZhuMa accepts her and likes her more than her own daughter-in-law. The comparison of ZhuMa´s arm and hand with a trotter may be explained by the fact that ZhuMa´s arm is swollen but also by the loving representation of pigs in Chinese culture. As Seung-Og Kim explains in his article “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China”: In both Melanesia and Asia, pigs are viewed as a symbolic representation of human beings (Allen 1976: 42; Healey 1985; Rappaport 1967: 58; Roscoe 1989: 223-26). Piglets are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention, and they in turn express affection for their human “parents.” They also share some physiological features with human beings, being omnivorous and highly reproductive (though humans do not usually have multiple litters) and similar internal anatomy (Roscoe 1989: 225). In short, pigs not only have a symbiotic relationship with humans biologically but also are of great importance symbolically (121). Consequently, pigs are held in high esteem, taken care of and loved. Therefore, comparing a part of a human´s body, such as an arm or a hand, for example, to a part of a pig´s body such as a pig´s trotter is not negative, but has positive connotations. Some descriptions of ZhuMa´s arm and hand can be read in the following excerpts: “As ZhuMa handed her the plate of cookies Syn saw her left arm, swollen like a pig´s trotter” (97); “Syn was horrified, and yet somewhat intrigued by this woman without a breast, with a pig´s trotter arm and a tummy like a chessboard” (99), “mimicking the act of writing with her pig-trotter hand” (99), and ZhuMa was praising the excellence of the opera, the singing, acting, the costumes, and the elaborate props, waving excitedly with her pig trotter arm and pointing with her stubby fingers while she talked. (170) Moreover, the expression “pig´s trotters” is also used as an example of the erotic fetishism with bound feet, as it can be seen in the following passage, which will be discussed below: I [Zhu Zhiyee] adore feet which are slender… they seem so soft, like pig´s trotters, so cute and loving, they play tricks on your mind. Imagine feeling them in bed under your blankets—soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands … this was how the bound feet appealed to men, the erotic sensation when balanced on shoulders, clutched in palms, strung to the seat of a garden swing … no matter how ugly a woman is, her tiny elegant feet would win her many admirers (224).Besides writing about pigs and pork as part of the daily work of the butcher shop and using the expression “pig´s trotter”, “pig” is also linked to money in two sentences in the book. On the one hand, it is used to calculate a price and draw attention to the large amount it represents: “The blouse was very expensive—three hundred dollars, the total takings from selling a pig. Two pigs if he purchased two blouses” (197). On the other, it works as an adjective in the expression “piggy-bank”, the money box in the form of a pig, an animal that represents abundance and happiness in the Chinese culture: “She borrowed money from her neighbours, who emptied pieces of silver from their piggy-banks, their life savings”(54). Finally, the most frequent porcine expression in Ng´s Swallowing Clouds makes reference to being drowned in a pig´s basket, which represents 19 of the 33 references to pigs or pork that appear in the novel. The first three references appear in the prologue (ix, x, xii), where the reader learns the story of the last woman who was killed by drowning in a pig´s basket as a punishment for her adultery. After this, two references recount a soothsayer´s explanation to Syn about her nightmares and the fact that she is the reincarnation of that lady (67, 155); three references are made by Syn when she explains this story to Zhu Zhiyee and to her companion on the trip to Beijing and Shanghai (28, 154, 248); one refers to a feeling Syn has during sexual intercourse with Zhu Zhiyee (94); and one when the pig basket is compared to a cricket box, a wicker or wooden box used to carry or keep crickets in a house and listen to them singing (73). Furthermore, Syn reflects on the fact of drowning (65, 114, 115, 171, 172, 173, 197, 296) and compares her previous death with that of Concubine Pearl, the favourite of Emperor Guanxu, who was killed by order of his aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi (76-77). The punishment of drowning in a pig´s basket can thus be understood as retribution for a transgression: a woman having an extra-marital relationship, going against the establishment and the boundaries of the authorised. Both the woman who is drowned in a pig´s basket in 1918 and Syn have extra-marital affairs and break society’s rules. However, the consequences are different: the concubine dies and Syn, her reincarnation, takes revenge. Desire, Transgression and Eroticism Xavier Pons writes about desire, repression, freedom and transgression in his book Messengers of Eros: Representations of Sex in Australian Writing (2009). In this text, he explains that desire can be understood as a positive or as a negative feeling. On the one hand, by experiencing desire, a person feels alive and has joy de vivre, and if that person is desired in return, then, the feelings of being accepted and happiness are also involved (13). On the other hand, desire is often repressed, as it may be considered evil, anarchic, an enemy of reason and an alienation from consciousness (14). According to Pons: Sometimes repression, in the form of censorship, comes from the outside—from society at large, or from particular social groups—because of desire´s subversive nature, because it is a force which, given a free rein, would threaten the higher purpose which a given society assigns to other (and usually ideological) forces … Repression may also come from the inside, via the internalization of censorship … desire is sometimes feared by the individual as a force alien to his/her true self which would leave him/her vulnerable to rejection or domination, and would result in loss of freedom (14).Consequently, when talking about sexual desire, the two main concepts to be dealt with are freedom and transgression. As Pons makes clear, “the desiring subject can be taken advantage of, manipulated like a puppet [as h]is or her freedom is in this sense limited by the experience of desire” (15). While some practices may be considered abusive, such as bondage or sado-masochism, they may be deliberately and freely chosen by the partners involved. In this case, these practices represent “an encounter between equals: dominance is no more than make-believe, and a certain amount of freedom (as much as is compatible with giving oneself up to one´s fantasies) is maintained throughout” (24). Consequently, the perception of freedom changes with each person and situation. What is transgressive depends on the norms in every culture and, as these evolve, so do the forms of transgression (Pons 43). Examples of transgressions can be: firstly, the separation of sex from love, adultery or female and male homosexuality, which happen with the free will of the partners; or, secondly, paedophilia, incest or bestiality, which imply abuse. Going against society’s norms involves taking risks, such as being discovered and exiled from society or feeling isolated as a result of a feeling of difference. As the norms change according to culture, time and person, an individual may transgress the rules and feel liberated, but later on do the same thing and feel alienated. As Pons declares, “transgressing the rules does not always lead to liberation or happiness—transgression can turn into a trap and turn out to be simply another kind of alienation” (46). In Swallowing Clouds, Zhu Zhiyee transgresses the social norms of his time by having an affair with Syn: firstly, because it is extra-marital, he and his wife, KarLeng, are Catholic and fidelity is one of the promises made when getting married; and, secondly, because he is Syn´s boss and his comments and ways of flirting with her could be considered sexual harassment. For two years, the affair is an escape from Zhu Zhiyee´s daily worries and stress and a liberation and fulfillment of his sexual desires. However, he introduces Syn to his mother and his sisters, who accept her and like her more than his wife. He feels trapped, though, when KarLeng guesses and threatens him with divorce. He cannot accept this as it would mean loss of face in their neighbourhood and society, and so he decides to abandon Syn. Syn´s transgression becomes a trap for her as Zhu, his mother and his sisters have become her only connection with the outside world in Australia and this alienates her from both the country she lives in and the people she knows. However, Syn´s transgression also turns into a trap for Zhu Zhiyee because she will not sign the documents to give him the house back and every month she sends proof of their affair to KarLeng in order to cause disruption in their household. This exposure could be compared with the humiliation suffered by the concubine when she was paraded in a pig´s basket before she was drowned in the HuangPu River. Furthermore, the reader does not know whether KarLeng finally divorces Zhu Zhiyee, which would be his drowning and loss of face and dishonour in front of society, but can imagine the humiliation, shame and disgrace KarLeng makes him feel every month. Pons also depicts eroticism as a form of transgression. In fact, erotic relations are a power game, and seduction can be a very effective weapon. As such, women can use seduction to obtain power and threaten the patriarchal order, which imposes on them patterns of behaviour, language and codes to follow. However, men also use seduction to get their own benefits, especially in political and social contexts. “Power has often been described as the ultimate aphrodisiac” (Pons 32) and this can be seen in many of the sexual games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in Swallowing Clouds, where Zhu Zhiyee is the active partner and Syn becomes little more than an object that gives pleasure. A clear reference to erotic fetishism is embedded in the above-mentioned quote on bound feet, which are compared to pig´s trotters. In fact, bound feet were so important in China in the millennia between the Song Dynasty (960-1276) and the early 20th century that “it was impossible to find a husband” (Holman) without them: “As women’s bound feet and shoes became the essence of feminine beauty, a fanatical aesthetic and sexual mystique developed around them. The bound foot was understood to be the most intimate and erotic part of the female anatomy, and wives, consorts and prostitutes were chosen solely on the size and shape of their feet” (Holman). Bound feet are associated in Ng’s novel with pig´s trotters and are described as “cute and loving … soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, [that] makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands” (224). This approach towards bound feet and, by extension, towards pig´s trotters, can be related to the fond feelings Melanesian and Asian cultures have towards piglets, which “are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention” (Kim 121). Consequently, the bound feet can be considered a synecdoche for the fond feelings piglets inspire. Food and Sex The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher and works with different types of meat, including pork, that he chops it, sells it and gives cooking advice, is not gratuitous in the novel. He is used to being in close proximity to meat and death and seeing Syn’s pale skin through which he can trace her veins excites him. Her flesh is alive and represents, therefore, the opposite of meat. He wants to seduce her, which is human hunting, and he wants to study her, to enjoy her body, which can be compared to animals looking at their prey and deciding where to start eating from. Zhu´s desire for Syn seems destructive and dangerous. In the novel, bodies have a price: dead animals are paid for and eaten and their role is the satiation of human hunger. But humans, who are also animals, have a price as well: flesh is paid for, in the form of prostitution or being a mistress, and its aim is satiation of human sex. Generally speaking, sex in the novel is compared to food either in a direct or an indirect way, and making love is constantly compared to cooking, the preparation of food and eating (as in Pons 303). Many passages in Swallowing Clouds have cannibalistic connotations, all of these being used as metaphors for Zhu Zhiyee’s desire for Syn. As mentioned before, desire can be positive (as it makes a person feel alive) or negative (as a form of internal or social censorship). For Zhu Zhiyee, desire is positive and similar to a drug he is addicted to. For example, when Zhu and Syn make delivery rounds in an old Mazda van, he plays the recordings he made the previous night when they were having sex and tries to guess when each moan happened. Sex and Literature Pons explains that “to write about sex … is to address a host of issues—social, psychological and literary—which together pretty much define a culture” (6). Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds addresses a series of issues. The first of these could be termed ‘the social’: Syn´s situation after the Tiananmen Massacre; her adulterous relationship with her boss and being treated and considered his mistress; the rapes in Inner Mongolia; different reasons for having an abortion; various forms of abuse, even by a mother of her mentally handicapped daughter; the loss of face; betrayal; and revenge. The second issue is the ‘psychological’, with the power relations and strategies used between different characters, psychological abuse, physical abuse, humiliation, and dependency. The third is the ‘literary’, as when the constant use of metaphors with Chinese cultural references becomes farcical, as Tseen Khoo notes in her article “Selling Sexotica” (2000: 164). Khoo explains that, “in the push for Swallowing Clouds to be many types of novels at once: [that is, erotica, touristic narrative and popular], it fails to be any one particularly successfully” (171). Swallowing Clouds is disturbing, full of stereotypes, and with repeated metaphors, and does not have a clear readership and, as Khoo states: “The explicit and implicit strategies behind the novel embody the enduring perceptions of what exotic, multicultural writing involves—sensationalism, voyeuristic pleasures, and a seemingly deliberate lack of rooted-ness in the Australian socioscape (172). Furthermore, Swallowing Clouds has also been defined as “oriental grunge, mostly because of the progression throughout the narrative from one gritty, exoticised sexual encounter to another” (Khoo 169-70).Other novels which have been described as “grunge” are Edward Berridge´s Lives of the Saints (1995), Justine Ettler´s The River Ophelia (1995), Linda Jaivin´s Eat Me (1995), Andrew McGahan´s Praise (1992) and 1988 (1995), Claire Mendes´ Drift Street (1995) or Christos Tsiolkas´ Loaded (1995) (Michael C). The word “grunge” has clear connotations with “dirtiness”—a further use of pig, but one that is not common in the novel. The vocabulary used during the sexual intercourse and games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee is, however, coarse, and “the association of sex with coarseness is extremely common” (Pons 344). Pons states that “writing about sex is an attempt to overcome [the barriers of being ashamed of some human bodily functions], regarded as unnecessarily constrictive, and this is what makes it by nature transgressive, controversial” (344-45). Ng´s use of vocabulary in this novel is definitely controversial, indeed, so much so that it has been defined as banal or even farcical (Khoo 169-70).ConclusionThis paper has analysed the use of the words and expressions: “pig”, “pork” and “drowning in a pig’s basket” in Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds. Moreover, the punishment of drowning in a pig’s basket has served as a means to study the topics of desire, transgression and eroticism, in relation to an analysis of the characters of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee, and their relationship. This discussion of various terminology relating to “pig” has also led to the study of the relationship between food and sex, and sex and literature, in this novel. 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