Local Oceans: New Perspectives on Colonial Geographies

Abstract

Abstract: Addressing an audience at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo in 1993, the Oceanic anthropologist Epeli Hau‘ofa delivered a blistering rebuke of the “belittling” view of states and territories, one he contended was held not only by the West, but also by the Pacific’s own national and regional governments.1 Such a view, resulting in a posture of economic dependence rather than self-sufficiency, is “traceable to the early years of interactions with Europeans” and emerged intrinsically from globally oriented “macroeconomic” and “macropolitical” perspectives that perceived the islands to be small, distant, and fragmented— predisposed to incorporation into colonial geographies (148–49). Hau‘ofa suggested that in order to revise this perspective it was better to conceive of the region not as “islands in a far sea,” but rather as “a sea of islands” (152–53). Whereas “islands in a far sea” evoked “tiny, isolated dots,” Hau‘ofa called for “a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships” (153). The Oceanic sea of islands had never been far, nor small, nor fragmented; they were not tiny islands to be carved up and colonized, but imbued with locality as with culture.