In Honiara, Solomon Islands, middle-class households routinely include young unmarried girls who hail from the villages to work as domestic help haosgel in Solomon Islands Pijin for their kin. Using data gathered in Honiara over the last 15 years, and more recently in , the paper explores what is it to be a young haosgel in Honiara today while focusing on a set of issues that are central to the life of these young women: the power and transformation of kinship; the relationship between urban life and domesticity, and the link between agency, gender and resistance.
Arguing that the presence of house girls contributes to the establishment of the middle-class, I seek to understand how these young women engage a complex situation in which their urban relatives, usually wealthier than their own parents, act out kinship while playing boss. The term first appeared in Pijin, the local lingua franca , in association with colonial days: it referred to Solomon Islands women employed as maids in British or other expatriate households which often also included a cook and a gardener.
Of course, there existed no kinship relationship with their employers. Haosgel are found in many Melanesian middle-class urban households. In most of them, the haosgel is always related through kinship to the head couple of the household. The increasing social and economic pressures found in Honiara have created a demand and a need for paid employment. These are matched by an ever-increasing gap between affluent middle-class and working class people. Because the practice of having house girls exists partly in continuity with the colonial past, it could be argued that many middle class Honiarans have bought into a system of values, particularly with regard to domestic work, that is very much inherited from colonial times and that speaks to the establishment and reinforcement of social differentiation.
And in some ways, that is true. But it could be argued as well that the practice is also in continuity with a tradition of exchange that permeates social relationships in Melanesia: exchange of work and services, exchange of valuables, exchange of persons and, principally, exchange of girls. And that argument would also be true if only in view of the never-severed social tie that links some urbanites to their rural kin.
Still it can be said that power relationships and obligations within families are carried over from the village to town and affect the movement of people between rural and urban areas as well as the exchange of prestations and services. The house girls found in urban Melanesian households are part of that link. Indeed, they epitomize this link.
