Carolyn Brewer

In Shamanism, Catholicism and Gender Relations in Colonial Philippines, 1521–1685, Carolyn Brewer explores the cultural clash that ensued when Hispanic Catholicism came into contact with Filipino Animism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Brewer explores the way indigenous women were represented in various early modern sources. She writes the female shamans back into the history of the Philippines and elucidates the processes by which the Christian missionaries reviled and then supplanted them. Finally, using inquisition documents, she reconstructs indigenous gender relationships, showing how high class Zambal men and boys collaborated with the Spaniards to banish the shaman women and eradicate their influence. Brewer demonstrates the connections between religion, ideology and power. A meticulously researched book, Shamanism, Catholicism, and Gender Relations constitutes a sustained examination of how contact with Christianity reshaped gender roles in the early modern Philippines.

Shamanism, Catholicism, and Gender Relations in Colonial Philippines, 1521-1685

Religion, Gender, and Sexuality in the Philippines, 1521-1685

Holy Confrontation

Margaret Jolly

Christine Stewart

This collection builds on previous works on gender violence in the Pacific, but goes beyond some previous approaches to ‘domestic violence’ or ‘violence against women’ in analysing the dynamic processes of ‘engendering’ violence in PNG. ‘Engendering’ refers not just to the sex of individual actors, but to gender as a crucial relation in collective life and the massive social transformations ongoing in PNG: conversion to Christianity, the development of extractive industries, the implanting of introduced models of justice and the law and the spread of HIV. Hence the collection examines issues of ‘troubled masculinities’ as much as ‘battered women’ and tries to move beyond the black and white binaries of blaming either tradition or modernity as the primary cause of gender violence. It relates original scholarly research in the villages and towns of PNG to questions of policy and practice and reveals the complexities and contestations in the local translation of concepts of human rights. It will interest undergraduate and graduate students in gender studies and Pacific studies and those working on the policy and practice of combating gender violence in PNG and elsewhere.

Carolyn Brewer

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