La importancia de los estereotipos en la construcción de identidad

Understanding gender relations at the household and community levels necessitates a closer look at local perceptions and attitudes towards what men and women should do in their own societies. In fact, their perceptions and attitudes have changed during the pro- cess of integration of Kala Tongu into the broader socio-economic, cultural and political contexts of Vietnam.

Generally, local people in Kala Tongu do not talk about men or women’s eco- nomic roles in isolation. Their typical response is that in Kala Tongu (and with K’ho people), men and women work together in the field and in the coffee plantations. Alt- hough men are expected to perform heavy tasks related to ploughing or carrying heavy tools, women’s contribution is always acknowledged by both men and women. Some tasks or procedures requiring new technological knowledge rather than traditional knowledge, such as spraying chemicals for coffee or handling rice cutters, are reserved for men. This is the case both in terms of how women and men represent the situation in Kala Tongu, and in local perceptions of femininity and traditional knowledge versus mas- culinity and new technological knowledge. While this division of labour is socially ac- cepted among villagers, there is a discrepancy between the younger and older women about women’s contribution to labour. Younger women, probably due to their exposure to the outside world and education, claim that they are capable of doing as much farm work as men, and that they contribute equal labour to work their household land. As a young woman told me, “Husband and wife work like each other on the coffee plantation. For example, both of us know how to trim the coffee branches” (Interview with ID2, 2015).

In agriculture-related activities alone, local people still follow their gender divi- sion of labour. This is especially so during the peak time, such as rice and coffee harvest, when they have to mobilise all of their available resources. Rice is harvested in July- August and then November; while coffee is picked from early November up to January. During the rice harvest in Kala Tongu, local people also utilise ‘labour exchange’ among their siblings or kin relatives. Although these groups of individual households work to- gether in the rice field, there is a clear-cut division of labour between male and female labourers: women cut the rice, tie the cut rice plants together, pack the rice into packets, and prepare lunch; while men use the rice cutter and rice thresher, load the rice packets onto their motorbikes and take them back to the village.

As local men are more inclined to work with farming machineries, this also changes the patterns of farming activities. In other words, industrialising and mechanising farm work helps to shift the workload towards the men and partially free women from manual labour in the rice fields. In the past, after harvesting, the rice would be brought home and stored in a small shed next to villagers’ stilt houses. To prepare it for cooking, women would grind the rice by hand using a traditional wooden pestle and mortar (made from a piece of raw timber) to separate the rice from its husk. Since the wooden mortar is fairly small, they could only grind enough rice for several days of consumption at a time. Nowadays, women do not grind rice by hand but use rice mill machines at home or in a shop (mostly owned by Kinh people). As a middle-aged woman commented, “now- adays young girls [like her daughter] do not know how to do farming. Even grinding rice [they do not know]” (Interview with ID3, 2015). Although my informant was comparing the working skills obtained by young women in Kala Tongu in the past and present, her comment seemed to imply that the increasing application of machinery in agriculture re- duces women’s workload (and societal expectations about women’s workload).

The gender divisions of labour in the coffee plantations are similar to those in the rice fields. Coffee is said to be an imported plant (not indigenous), unlike wet rice or hill rice. Planting coffee thus requires a different set of techniques that are not easily mastered. Local people told me that they learnt these from their neighbours or Kinh migrants who came here to establish large scale coffee plantations. At first, I assumed that men might be more involved and dominant in coffee plantation than women, as working in the coffee plantations requires both physical strength and technological knowledge. My empirical findings, in fact, show that the gender divisions of labour in coffee plantations are condi- tioned upon the location and the origin of the coffee land. As explained in Chapter 5, there are many sources of coffee land in Kala Tongu, either from home gardens (within

the premises of residential land) or plots previously used for hill rice or forestland con- verted to coffee land. Women tend to spend more time and energy taking care of the nearby coffee gardens because they are more accessible (within walking distance). As most of them have to take care of their children or grandchildren, working in the nearby coffee garden allows them to do household chores or to bring young children with them.

For coffee plantations converted from forest, the gender divisions of labour vary across different age groups and types of household. Older and middle-aged women appear to work less than their husbands in the far-from-home coffee plantations, while younger women take an active role in establishing and maintaining them. This is because for younger and newlywed couples in Kala Tongu, they have to search for new coffee land, and therefore need both the husband and wife’s labour to work these lands. For example, one young woman described the hard work she and her husband put into cutting down the trees, clearing and burning the space, removing the big rocks and digging the holes to plant coffee. She told me that during the last Christmas and New Year, both of them had to be in the coffee plantation to water the coffee. Since there were only two of them in the house, she had to send their children to her sister’s house and assist her husband in most of the main procedures of coffee production (Interview with ID5, 2015). To a certain extent, the younger or newlywed couples in Kala Tongu share the same situation with the migrant couples in the resettlement area in Indonesia’s Lampung province discussed in Elmhist’s (2011) study. In such cases, a clear-cut gender division of labour is not practical as they need to mobilise the available labour forces in the household.