our garden is the sea: contingency and improvisation in Mandar women's work

Abstract

In the late 1980s, women in fishing communities on the southwest coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia, began to leave the looms on which they had woven fine silk sarongs. The alternative work they sought was fish‐trading, on a scale that gave them considerably more mobility (and income) than women had enjoyed in the past. This article explores these changes in terms of discourses and practices of gender, emphasizing complementarity and competing state visions of domesticated women and national development. It argues that cultural flexibility, including willingness to abandon older ideals linking womanhood and weaving, enabled some women to improvise at a moment of rapid technological and commercial change. [gender, work, fishing communities, weaving, Indonesia]