Pergamon

Sot. Sci. Med. Vol. 38, No. 4, 603608, pp. 1994 Copyright (Q 1994 Elsevier Science Ltd

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GENDER DIFFERENCES IN TOBACCO USE AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF TOBACCO IN CENTRAL

BORNEO

JENNIFER ALEXANDER and PAUL ALEXANDER

Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

Abstract-Historical and anthropological studies of non-western societies have concluded that there is no cultural group in which the use of tobacco is substantially more common among women, although there are societies without appreciable gender differences in tobacco use. Interpretations of this pattern, influenced by well-documented changes in the United States, have concentrated on the greater use of tobacco by men, attributing it to aspects of traditional sex roles such as male power and male control of scarce resources. This analysis places more weight on the changes in both sex roles and local economies which accompany the transition from subsistence-orientated production to a market economy. Among the Lahanan, a relatively isolated group of horticulturalists living in Central Borneo, adult women, who control the production and distribution of tobacco, are more likely than men to smoke and are also heavier smokers. Increasing contact with the industrialised world is rapidly changing this pattern with young men switching to manufactured cigarettes and the better educated of the young women not smoking at all. This study suggests that gender differences in tobacco use are probably inconsequential in societies where tobacco is grown for home consumption, but become increasingly substantial as manufactured cigarettes replace local tobacco products.

Key words-tobacco, smoking, gender, commodity, Borneo

INTRODUCTION

Surveys of the anthropological and historical Iitera- ture have found no evidence of any cultural group in which tobacco use is substantially more common among women [l, 21. While there are reports of societies without significant gender differences in the use of tobacco “in most cultural groups tobacco use has been more common among men” [ 11. Two major, but not unrelated, hypotheses have been proposed to explain this pattern of tobacco use.

The first is that ‘modernisation’ and accompanying contact with a dominant Western culture increases gender differences in tobacco use [ 1, 31. The empirical evidence for this proposition is not decisive. Christian missionaries in the Pacific, for example, while often broadly opposed to tobacco use in general, strongly disapproved of women smoking and this has had a significant impact on smoking patterns in some Oceanic societies [3,4]. Similarly, the increasing con- cern with health in Western cultures has differentially affected tobacco use in other societies, not least because the educational programs funded by foreign aid have often been directed towards younger women [S]. But Western culture, especially the version dis- seminated through the mass media and advertising, has not always been inimical to women smoking. In conjunction with other aspects of ‘modernisation’, such as higher percentages of women in the industrial labour force and expanded access of women to formal education, media portrayals of women have

tended to reduce gender differences in cigarette smok- ing in numerous South American and Asian societies, as they did earlier in the United States [l].

The second hypothesis is that gender diffesences in tobacco use are a product of ‘traditional’ sex roles, particularly men’s greater power and greater access to scarce resources [l, 2,6]. This is a compelling in- terpretation of historical data from the United States where increases in the percentage of women smoking have closely reflected increases in sexual equality [6]. The most important supporting cross-cultural evi- dence is the widespread social disapproval of women, especially younger women, smoking [l]. It should be emphasised, however, that differential disapproval of female tobacco use is strongly focussed on cigarette smoking and is often ideologically justified with references to lax morals accompanying Westernisa- tion and modernisation [l, 21. And while it is also reasonable to infer that men have better access to scarce resources in most societies-in precolonial societies men usually control trade and in developing societies are more likely than women to be engaged in wage labour-there is little reason to suppose that tobacco is an especially scarce resource in subsistence economies where it is grown. But imported manufac- tured tobacco, particularly in the form of cigarettes, is often an expensive commodity in nonindustrialised societies.

This study contributes to the further analysis of these issues by investigating tobacco cultivation, transfer and use in a relatively isolated Central

604 JENNIFER ALEXANDER and PAUL ALEXANDER

Borneo society. Unlike most previous accounts of tobacco use in nonindustrialised societies, it is based on close ethnographic observation rather than brief interviews [7]. It is apparently also the only detailed report of a cultural group in which tobacco use, and specifically smoking, is more common among women than men. Among the Lahanan, more women smoke and women smoke more.

FIELDSITE

Lahanan is one of the smallest and poorest of the eight indigenous ethnic groups living in the Belaga District of Central Borneo on the Sarawak side of the Indonesian border. The District of some 20,000 km2 is sparsely populated with the 12,000 inhabitants of 52 longhouses sited on the main rivers making a living from shifting cultivation and, more recently, wage labour and cash crops [8-131. Thirty years ago, the Lahanan and their neighbours were subsistence farmers whose very limited needs for cash were met by selling jungle products. Many women had never visited the nearest town which required a full day’s journey paddling a longboat through dangerous rapids. Today all children attend boarding school, most young men and some young women have experience of wage labour in the ever encroaching logging camps, and the community is linked by a quick, but irregular and relatively expensive, river- boat service to downriver towns. Nevertheless, sub- sistence cultivation of hill-rice and other crops remains the backbone of the Lahanan economy.

The main Lahanan community which is the site of this study had a population of 302 in 1989. As in other Borneo societies, most of the community live in a single longhouse which comprises 44 individual apartments. Each apartment, occupied by an ex- tended family or the families of a pair of married sisters, is economically and politically autonomous. Although the headman and main religious leaders are men and households are ranked in four ascribed categories, the ethos is egalitarian and women are not subordinated. For example, postmarital residence is normally in the wife’s apartment, women have full rights to children and property after the frequent divorces, and subsistence agriculture is in the main organised by women. This tradition of relatively equal sex roles, along with the Lahanan liking for pork and alcohol, does not accord with the attitudes of the Malaysian state, and compulsary formal edu- cation as well as differential male access to employ- ment is increasing male authority within the Lahanan community.

TOBACCO CULTIVATION AND EXCHANGE

Tobacco, which the Lahanan call loko’, has been cultivated in the Belaga region since at least 1849 when an early Western visitor included it in a list of cultivars [14]. Among the Lahanan and neighbouring

ethnic groups, women are responsible for all the work associated with the cultivation, harvesting and prep- aration of tobacco, and alone decide how to dispose of their crop [7-131. Unlike the staple food crop of hill-rice, where work is approximately equally divided into women’s tasks and men’s tasks and is usually carried out by exchange labour groups, tobacco is cultivated by individual women or a pair of close friends. They select the most fertile areas adjoining the rice fields, using seed saved from the previous harvest. All women grow the same variety (Nicotiuna tabacum) and, again unlike rice, no attention is paid to seed selection. Because tobacco is a demanding crop-a good harvest requires constant watering, weeding and removal of insects-and the market price is a poor return for the labour and risk, it is seldom grown specifically for sale. In 1988 only four of the 44 apartments did not plant tobacco, in each case because they lacked the requisite labour, but in the previous, unusually dry year, 12 households did not have a tobacco harvest. Although there is con- siderable margin for error, the indication that 80% of households usually produce enough tobacco to last until the next harvest, suggests that the annual long- house production is greater than two tonnes. This is sufficient to meet local consumption requirements, so home-grown tobacco is not a particularly scarce resource from the point of view of the community as a whole, although some persons have problems in obtaining enough.

The main crop is harvested between August and October, with some leaves available two months earlier. The leaves are sorted by size, the stems removed and the tightly rolled leaves finely sliced with a bamboo knife. The tobacco is then dried in the open air for two to three days. Precise control of drying is seen as the key to producing the desired aromatic tobacco without too harsh a taste and some women are reputed to excel at this task. In other longhouses a small portion of the crop is allowed to ferment, but most Lahanan find the enhanced flavour too strong. Some of the dried tobacco is given to friends and relatives, the remainder is stored in large containers of woven bamboo and small containers of bronze or plastic, along with the dried leaves of the wild banana which are used for roiling cigars. All adults have a personal tobacco receptacle, often a powdered milk tin, which they are seldom without.

Local tobacco is only used for smoking. For everyday use, tobacco is rolled into a fat triangular cigar up to 8 cm long, 3 cm in diameter at the widest point and containing 2-4 g of tobacco. There are no additives. Men’s cigars tend to be smaller than wornen’s. The lit cigar rests in the corner of the mouth or is clenched between the teeth, with little direct contact with the tobacco. Accumulated juices are spat from the side of the mouth, but the cigar is seldom removed until it can no longer be lit because the banana leaf wrapper is not secured and the cigar falls apart when handled. Smokers inhale infrequently and

Gender differences in tobacco use 605

the cigar often goes out, so a cigar may last for 30min. At work or in casual gatherings, people normally roll their own cigars using their own or others’ tobacco, but women will roll cigars for men whom they know well rather than pass over their tobacco. Men never roll cigars for other men.

Tobacco, along with betel chews and rice wine which are also prepared by women, has a central place in ritual and gift exchanges. Every visitor to the longhouse is provided with a drink and a cigar as soon as they arrive, and men and women will often be given tobacco as a parting gift. Similar gifts accompany most formal inter-longhouse meetings such as weddings or funerals. Prior to and during every ceremony, women roll large numbers of a special type of cigar-much thinner than usual with a tie to keep it intact-which are offered to all male guests; women may smoke them but usually prefer to roll their own. These cigars, which contain about one gram of tobacco, are smoked much more quickly than usual, are frequently removed from the mouth and the smokers inhale more deeply. In earlier times, peace-making meetings were symbolically marked by the sharing of tobacco: “a drop of blood is often mixed with tobacco and smoked in a cigarette, the smoke being inhaled into the lungs in some cases, to show the sincerity of the bond” [15]. Today, a container of tobacco is one of the objects placed in the coffin with the corpse, and tobacco is a com- ponent of many sacrificial offerings.

Because tobacco is often transferred as a gift, as with rice it should not be sold for cash within the longhouse, although it may be bartered for rice. Members of households which have not grown tobacco, or whose supplies have been exhausted prior to harvest, may be given tobacco but frequently obtain it from other longhouses through cash sales or barter. For example, tobacco is bartered for the Venetian and Chinese beads that are the most import- ant heirlooms in this region. Until 5 years ago, men bought considerable quantities of tobacco for the barter trade in jungle products with hunter-gatherer groups living 334 days journey inland. Similarly women with a surplus, or an urgent need for cash, often sell tobacco to other longhouses, to workers in the timber camps, or to Chinese merchants in the downriver town. The prices are low considering the work involved: $Ml-2 for a can containing 150-200 g, $M50 for a 10 kg. sack. This should be compared with wages of $M 15 for a day’s work in the longhouse and $M2-3 for a packet of 20 manufac- tured cigarettes. Although this trade is small, it is important to the women who are generally excluded from the two most important ways of acquiring cash: wage labour in the logging camps and the sale of fish and game. In addition to buying locally grown tobacco (including special varieties grown in upriver longhouses), Lahanan also purchase Javanese fac- tory-produced tobacco, especially for use in betel chews, Javanese clove-flavoured cigarettes and

‘white’ filter cigarettes manufactured by multina- tional companies. Because these commodities are bought into the longhouse in small and irregular amounts by individuals, we were unable to obtain any reliable data on the imports of manufactured tobacco products. The information on tobacco consumption in the next section, however, suggests that imported tobacco products, mainly white cigarettes, amount to less than 5% of the total tobacco consumption.

TOBACCO CONSUMPTION

Many Lahanan are seldom without a smoke in their mouth during both idle moments and heavy work. Tobacco consumption is heaviest, however, among persons harvesting in the scrub covered hill- rice fields when even light smokers use a constantly lit cigar to keep insects away from their face and inhibit hunger and fatigue. In the rice fields the average smoker rolls around 12 cigars a day and consumes more than 30 g of tobacco; they use about as many cigars but only two-thirds of the amount of tobacco on days they remain in the longhouse. Tobacco is regarded as both an appetite suppressant and a stimulant and persons unable or unwilling to prepare a midday meal consciously increase their consumption. Betel chews are used for similar pur- poses, often in combination with cigars.

On the basis of observation and interviews, we estimate that the average adult woman smokes more than 180g of tobacco a week, with some smokers reporting using more than 250 g a week during the 8 weeks of the rice harvest when work is most strenu- ous. Some men smoke as much as any woman, but the average consumption of locally produced tobacco is lower: 140 g per week. One reason why men smoke less than women is that they do not usually reap rice and therefore do not work in insect-infested fields. Some tasks typically performed by males are not conducive to smoking, including hunting, rapid walk- ing through the forest with heavy loads and long canoe journeys. A further reason is that men depend on their wives and sisters for supplies.

Tobacco consumption is much lower among the men and women who smoke mainly, or exclusively, manufactured cigarettes. Most men reported smoking 5-10 cigarettes a day; women 2-3 per day. This is plausible in terms of the cost involved and compatible with our observations during periods when the river- boat is operating. But for at least 4 months of the year when the river is low, cigarettes are often unavailable in the longhouse, so that cigarette smokers must cut down or switch to cigars. The four men who reported a reasonably high consumption of cigarettes, 15-30 a day, are employed fulltime in a timber camp.

GENDER PAITERNS OF TOBACCO USE

The pattern of tobacco use among the 242 long- house inhabitants who are above the minimum

606 JENNIFER ALEXANDER and PAUL ALEXANDEK

Table I. Prevalence (%) of smoking by age and sex

WONNX Men (n = 123) (n = 119)

lb-20 21-40 41 + 14-20 2140 41 + cn = 33) (n = 54) (n = 36) (II = 29) (n =44) (n = 46)

Non smokers 48% 21% 4% Smokers 52% 100% 100% 19% 100% 96%

Local Cl@-s 36% 96% 100% 64% 96% Cigarettes Both

6% 19% 9% 9% 4% 21% 21%

school leaving age of 14 (Table 1) is a function of age and gender: mature women and men smoke cigars of local tobacco, younger men smoke manufactured cigarettes, and younger women smoke local cigars or do not smoke. These age and gender differences clearly reflect the nature and history of the Lahanan encounter with the outside world.

Although the first primary school in the area was established in 1965, it is only since 1975 that most children have moved on to board at high school, returning to the longhouse 3 or 4 times a year. Smoking is prohibited in all school surroundings and children are taught that smoking is unhealthy. Since 1982 tobacco advertising has been banned from television which along with videos is the main enter- tainment for school children, and cigarettes cannot be legally sold to persons under 18 years of age. These measures explain why a third of young persons between 14 and 20 do not smoke.

But the reason for the gender differences in both the proportion of smokers and in the tobacco prod- ucts they use turns on the symbolic values attached to particular forms of tobacco use. In both the mass media and popular discourse, smoking cigars of local tobacco is directly associated with other ‘backward’ customs such as tattooing or elongated earlobes which set ethnic minorities such as the Lahanan apart from the rest of the Malaysian population. Young Lahanan are not prepared to smoke local cigars when away from the longhouse for the same reasons that they reject indigenous forms of tatooing. Conversely, cigarette smoking, despite heavy taxes, prohibitions on advertising and sale, and educational programs, is promoted by both Western and Hong Kong videos as a symbol of modernity for young men. Cigarettes are also one of the few modern consumer goods directly and indirectly advertised on television which young Lahanan can afford to buy. It is not surprising that most young men in the upriver towns have a famous international brand cigarette pack conspicuously tucked in the sleeve of their tee-shirt, although the packet probably contains a cheaper brand.

While few schoolboys can afford to buy cigarettes regularly, they smoke when they can and are regu- larly admonished for it at meetings of longhouse elders. Although they also disapprove of young per- sons regularly smoking local tobacco, the elders take few steps to stop even very young children experi- menting. They claim that in the past cigar smoking

was an attribute of maturity and youths did not begin until it was appropriate. It is unusual to see men under 20 regularly smoking cigars; many assert that they are unable to roll them. Young women, more tightly regulated by the school authorities and subject to Islamic notions that smoking is particularly inap- propriate for women, do not smoke outside the longhouse community but are as free as young men to smoke within it.

After leaving high school, men alternate work in the timber camps with periods of hunting and fishing in the longhouse, until they marry, have children and begin living permanently in the longhouse. For the reasons discussed above, employed men smoke mainly manufactured cigarettes and spend as much as a quarter of their income buying them. Half the women of a similar age, who are much less likely to obtain wage work and if they do are paid less, do not smoke. Of those who do smoke, the better-educated who are seldom engaged in agriculture smoke ciga- rettes, those working in the rice-fields smoke local cigars like their mothers.

Mature and elderly men and women living in the longhouse have little interest in manufactured ciga- rettes, describing them as an inferior product and far too expensive, although the few clove-flavoured kretek cigarettes which reach the longhouse from Indonesia are welcomed. Several of the younger men were cigarette smokers in their younger days, but have switched to cigars now that they live perma- nently in the longhouse. All the men and women over 40 have been smokers; only two men have stopped for health and religious reasons. Since 1986 half the households have converted to Catholicism with the impetus for the change coming from the headman’s and other elite households and the educated young. ‘Seminars’ conducted by the church encourage absti- nence from both tobacco and alcohol, but few of the young stop for more than a month and the mature men and women see no good reason to try.

There are obvious parallels between changes in the use of tobacco and changes in the consumption of alcohol. Most older men and women, and some younger women, drink only locally produced rice wine and mainly on ritual occasions. Younger, better- educated, women are unlikely to drink alcohol at all except for a token sip during a ritual. Men earning wages, however, spend a considerable proportion of their incomes on beer, stout and ‘brandy’, and

Gender differences in tobacco use 607

drink rice wine as well when they return to the longhouse. It is significant that, unlike tobacco, rice wine is positively valued in Malaysian media portray- als of ethnic minorities as a symbol of longhouse hospitality.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

There are two reasons to infer that the number of non-Western societies without significant gender differences in the use of tobacco is far greater than literature surveys indicate, and therefore, that differ- ential tobacco use should not be attributed to tra- ditional sex roles, at least not in nonindustrialised societies. The first reason is that, in this as in so many other matters, women were often invisible to early Western observers. The eight major nineteenth cen- tury sources on Central Borneo, for example, contain only one reference to women smoking [16], although all describe the ceremonial use of tobacco by men at some length [14-211. Unless the writer was specifically interested in the question-the Borneo example was a military doctor contrasting tobacco and betel use- it would be dangerous to infer an absence of female tobacco use from a lack of references in a text.

Secondly an analysis of gender differences in tobacco use requires a distinction between the con- sumption of locally produced tobacco and the use of imported commodities, especially manufactured ciga- rettes. There is considerable positive evidence that societies which produce their own tobacco are un- likely to restrict female use. For example, an ethno- graphic study of seven African and Oceanic groups, all with easy access to locally grown tobacco, con- cluded that: “all adults smoked as much as possible, unless prohibited by religion” [3]. Similar reports are available for South America and Asia [22-241. In addition to the present study, there is other direct evidence that the replacement of locally grown tobacco with manufactured cigars rtes markedly re- stricts female use. A study of five ethnic groups in Kenya [2], for example, found that while there were no significant gender differences in the use of snuff, chewing tobacco and locally produced tobacco, nearly all smokers of manufactured cigarettes were men. Consequently in the least ‘Westernised’ groups both men and women used tobacco; in the most ‘Westernised’ groups none of the younger women used it. A belief that cigarette smoking was inappro- priate for women, sometimes directly linked to asser- tions that prostitutes smoked, was the main reason women gave for not smoking. Women in Japan and Korea ceased smoking concomitantly with a tran- sition from pipe smoking of local tobacco to ciga- rettes [l], and in Northern Thailand only younger and wealthier men smoked cigarettes [23]. In each case, the gender differences in tobacco use accompanied the cornmodification of tobacco products.

This study suggests that the two main hypotheses proposed to explain gender differences in tobacco use

should be linked and contextualised historically because Westernisation, or more accurately industri- alisation, is simultaneously transforming both indige- nous sex roles and local economies. Models of appropriate behaviour for women, created by the elite of modernising states and drawing on Islamic as well as Christian values, are disseminated through formal education and the media; local subsistence economies decline as villagers absorbed into national labour forces become consumers of industrial prod- ucts. It is as mistaken to see the transformation of sex roles as necessarily promoting greater gender equal- ity, as to see the transformation of economies as necessarily raising living standards.

Acknowledgements-This research was funded by the Aus- tralian Research Council and sponsored by the Sarawak Museum.

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