Fale Pili: a Tuvaluan perspective on mobility justice

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper suggests that the Indigenous Tuvaluan concept of fale pili, looking after one’s neighbour as if they were family, must be centralised in understandings of mobility justice for Tuvaluan people. While the risks of sea level rise to Tuvalu’s low-lying national territory are well-recognised, the culturally specific ways in which Tuvaluans perceive and experience mobility are not. From a fale pili perspective, mobility is a way of enacting family, fenua (indigenous island within Tuvalu) and responsibilities to the Tuvaluan (political) community. Conceived in this way, Tuvaluan mobility does not primarily see migrant-as-individual; rather the migrant is always a representative of, and contributor towards, collective wellbeing of family, fenua and nation. Our paper is structured as follows. First, we discuss the importance of approaching both mobility and mobility justice as culturally specific concepts that are scripted and experienced by different peoples in different ways. To do so, we read contemporary theorisations of mobility (in)justice, and encourage attention to understanding the cosmological dimensions of contemporary (global) life that a critical civilisational perspective affords. Drawing on two case-studies of fale pili, one involving urban-rural migration in Tuvalu during the COVID-19 pandemic, and one involving Tuvaluan guest workers in Australia, we suggest that fale pili offers an approach to understanding mobility justice as culturally and geographically situated. By way of conclusion, we also consider the ways that fale pili can contribute to wider debates on mobility (in)justice in turbulent times.