Mobilities of Return: Pacific Perspectives ed. by John Taylor and Helen Lee

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mobilities of Return: Pacific Perspectives ed. by John Taylor and Helen Lee John Connell Mobilities of Return: Pacific Perspectives, edited by John Taylor and Helen Lee. Canberra: ANU Press, 2017. isbn paper: 978-1-76046-167-6, iii + 215 pages. Paper, us $45.00. In this century, migration and mobility in the Pacific region have involved more people and have become ever more complex. As demonstrated in Mobilities of Return, mobility has emerged not just as "a defining paradigm" of the humanities (1), but as a means whereby many Islanders shape and reshape their destinies, some much as they have always done and some in quite new forms. This book focuses on one particular strand: the "return" of people "back" to places that are designated, however ambiguously or ambivalently, as "home." Just as return is eclectic, so too is this book, reflecting the range of possibilities in terms of duration, distance, intentions, and outcomes but centering on the cultural significance of return and what that implies and means for identities. It is then a collection of valuable vignettes—vastly different by age, gender, and place and by authorial intent. With a cast of anthropologists, the perspectives are social and cultural; economics and the world of mirab are dismissed by page three in favor of Epeli Hau'ofa's cultural "sea of islands" (see "Our Sea of Islands" in The Contemporary Pacific 6 [1]: 148–161). Yet although the opening chapter refers to the familiar tropes of roots and routes, none of the chapters reflect on the earlier work of Murray Chapman and Joel Bonnemaison and other pioneers who offered valuable reflections on Indigenous agency and [End Page 608] whose shadows linger over several chapters. The book offers a generous definition of the Pacific and a range of rationales for and destinations of return—a diffuseness that makes for uneasy comparisons. From an Indigenous group in Taiwan and hiv-positive women in West Papua to the much smaller islands of Rotuma and Banaba, diversity reigns. Some are scarcely returning; Tongan youth have been forced to return from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand to home-lands they have never seen, a somewhat painful rite of passage. Many returnees are "next generation," born beyond their ancestral homes. Some return is jubilant, rather more is reluctant, and emotions are ubiquitously challenged. Thorgeir Kolshus focuses on the ambiguities of "urban castaways" from the small northern Vanuatu island of Mota and points to the diversity of experiences of return and thus of what can be regarded as successes and failures by any mode of accounting. Only Kolshus points to the role of material hardship (but alongside fear of sorcery) in alien places and the need to return to the security of home, however fraught with its own divisions, rivalries, and tensions it may be. Unlike almost every other group in the book, Mota islanders have come to "the realisation that the world outside their small island home has little to offer them" (10), and yet, as Kolshus makes clear, they also realize that the maintenance of footholds elsewhere is crucial to face the uncertainties of the future. Even they, who more than most have experienced the frustrations of other places, accept the necessity of maintaining some form of dispersed and diffused livelihoods. At the other end of an arbitrary scale, Kirsten McGavin recounts the almost impossible task of long-term métis Australian residents seeking to connect with homelands they have rarely seen, never quite at home and anguishing over whether identity is about being or doing. Wolfgang Kempf offers a fascinating account of the island of Banaba, whose population was forcibly removed to Fiji seventy years ago to make way for mining. Some of these Banabans and their descendants have moved back to Kiribati, which now includes the culturally and geographically distinct Banaba as an outlier. They are thus spread across Kiribati, Fiji, and beyond, within "a transnational space of multiple belongings" (15), following decades of contemplating and legislating for place and identity. Many now see Rabi (the Fijian island to which they were uprooted and resettled in the 1940s) as home. Few have even seen Banaba. Frustratingly, the few hundred in the...