Paper short abstract:

In informal settlements in Port Moresby, PNG, small house-road stalls, located at homes, provide similar functions to public markets as spaces to make money. This paper considers these intimate spaces as sites where vendors, usually women, embody and lead contestations between value spheres.

Paper long abstract:

For many women living in urban settlements in Papua New Guinea, childcare, waiting in queues to fetch water, collecting firewood and attending to domestic and community engagements, means that local settlement public market spaces are not a practical avenue for making money. Low incomes and dynamics of crime and violence in cities create local economic conditions that are rather insulated from the broader city economy. In this context small house-road stalls, located at homes or on nearby roads, because of their proliferation and availability to the public, provide a similar function to public market places as spaces to make money.

House-road vending stalls are at the same time public and intimate spaces where the vendor, usually a woman, embodies and leads contestations between spheres of value. In a context of scarcity and inequality, making money, morality and local ascriptions of value involve tension between the public ethos of what custom says about helping others and personal morality in which daily budget dilemmas are reasoned. House-road stalls are sites where the intimate and gendered sphere of household money making, marked by male wage employment and female house-road vending, comes head on with the public ethos of sharing and supporting others during times of scarcity. These interplays between money making spheres, money scarcity and value as they unfold at house-road stalls are the focus of this paper.