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...into giving them their earnings. The women's discourse of sexual magic contests, but does not subvert, the male-dominant gender ideology of the lobster-diving economy. Nevertheless, Miskitu women have refashioned their gender identities, and their views of money, into empowering and strategic practices for domestic security. (Gender, magic, money, women's strategies)
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Afro-indigenous Miskitu men along the Honduran Caribbean coast work as deepwater lobster divers and provide the principal means of support to matrilocal households, where Miskitu women utilize sexual magic (plant-based, supernatural potions) in an attempt to control men and their money. Ethnohistorians Conzemius (1932:145) and Helms (1971:86) have reported the historic use of sexual magic among Miskitu women and men to win the affection of someone they desired. This article reports for the first time the Miskitu women's strategic use of sexual magic to gain access to men's wages.
The research draws primarily from a feminist perspective, focusing on Miskitu women's position in society and the strategies they use to garner resources and power (Lamphere, et al. 1997). Field research (1997-98, 2001) in the village of Kuri, in the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve (RPBR), an environmentally protected area that was established UNESCO's Man and Biosphere (MAB) program in 1980, combined participant-observation and household interviews with the collection of supernatural potions.
Men's participation in migrant wage-labor in the lobster diving industry has given them access to cash resources that are not, for the most part, available to women. The fact that men alone earn wages establishes men's power and a male-dominant gender ideology in Miskitu society, and women must use their own resources (particularly with magic potions) to survive in a progressively monetized economy. This analysis asks whether Platano Miskitu women's use of sexual magic is a form of resistance to patriarchal ideologies fostered by the lobster-diving economy. While overstating the trivial as forms of resistance is problematic in anthropology (Brown 1996; Goldstein 2003), viewing sexual magic within this paradigm should not be ignored when resistance appears to be a useful way to understand Miskitu women's voices. Indeed, research on indigenous and Afro-Caribbean religions in Middle America, such as hechiceria (witchcraft) in Latin America (Behar 1987, 1989; Romanucci-Ross 1993; Rosenbaum 1996; Quezada 1984, 1989) and obeah, Santeria, and voodou in the Caribbean (Bush 1990), has viewed magic as resistance to colonial society's racist, class, and sexist structures.
GENDERED AUTHORITY
Male Breadwinners
During the colonial era, Afro-indigenous Miskitu society developed along with foreign economies. For the last two hundred years, Miskitu peoples participated in agricultural and migrant wage-labor economies. International companies have used Miskitu men as wage laborers to extract local resources, including gold, bananas, sea turtles, and most recently, shrimp, conch, and lobsters, in a series of boom and bust economic periods (Helms 1971; Herlihy 2005:36).
Platano Miskitu men have worked for the last 40 years as deep-water lobster divers on boats owned by businessmen from the Honduran Bay Islands (Roattan, Guanaja, and Utila). The lobsters they extract from Caribbean reefs are exported to the United States. Research has documented the health hazards that lobster divers (buzos) experience. Boats lack decompression chambers and safe diving equipment, and divers have poor training and living conditions (Herlihy 2002a, 2005; Dodds 1998; Nietschmann 1997; Meltzoff, et al. 1999). Buzos make their jobs more dangerous by using cocaine and marijuana before dives. Nearly 15 percent of all lobster divers in the RPBR have died or been injured or paralyzed due to decompression sickness--liwa mairin siknis (mermaid sickness)--yet they continue to hunt lobster in order to provide money for their families.
Lobster divers contribute "an estimated U.S. 3.2 million dollars per year into the economies of the Platano reserve's north coast villages" (Herlihy 2005:37). Kuri lobster divers with a few years of experience earn around U.S. $6,500 annually, taking two 12-day trips per month for eight months of the year. Dodds (1998:13) estimates that lobster divers can earn as much money in 12 days as they can in one year of agricultural work. As a result, horticultural practices have declined and locals now purchase their food from stores. Nearly 100 stores and bodegas (small stores) saturate the Platano reserve's three-mile coast between Ibans and Barra Platano, an area that still does not have running water or electricity. (1)
Despite the region's lack of infrastructure and amenities, village economies have become highly monetized. While Miskitu households here continue to rely on some subsistence staples (like yucca, sugar cane, bananas, rice, and beans), most necessities are purchased in stores. Even families that plant rice and beans upriver sell much of what they harvest for cash to boats and merchants from outside the region. They then buy their rice and beans daily at an inflated rate. Store-bought items are generally twice as much as what one pays in Honduran cities. High costs of transporting merchandise to the remote region and price gauging by Ladino merchants are blamed for these elevated prices.
Most Kuri households (averaging around seven people) need about US $150 to survive each month. Women earn small amounts of cash selling produce, fruit, plants, and medicines, and by baking bread, working in the fields or shops, housekeeping, or washing and ironing clothes. What they earn, however, cannot pay for the costs of store-bought foods to feed their families. Their households depend on money and gifts provided by the divers. In general, women with divers in their households, especially as husbands and sons, acquire the most money, while women in households without divers get much less.
The lobster economy has caused many characteristics of capitalist society to arrive along the coast, such as the idea of man the breadwinner (Blackwood 2005; Lamphere 2005). The Honduran state also contributed to the development of male-dominant gender ideologies in the region. The national government's bureaucracy recognized male surnames, men as heads of households, men as property owners, and men as authority figures, disregarding matrilineal practices of inheritance and domestic organization. In 1890, Moravian missionaries introduced various patriarchal norms, encouraging monogamy, nuclear families, male heads of households, and surnames passed down male lines. Both colonial and modern Latin American gender ideologies also revolve around the idea of a patriarchal authority that maintains firm economic and social control over his household, and over his wife's and daughters' sexuality (Gutmann 1996, 2003; Jackson 2001; Johnson and Lipset-Rivera 1998; Twinam 2001). In Platano Miskitu society, however, the Latin American model of the patriarchal male does not completely take hold. While men have power as the main breadwinners, more Caribbean...
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