Pacific Scholars Research Articles

Navigating “Race” at Tahiti: Polynesian and European Encounters

AbstractIn this article I analyze stories about the negotiation of European racialization ideologies in the Society Islands (Tahiti and its Islands) in the late eighteenth century. My focus is the disjunctures between European understandings of their encounters at Tahiti, and what Pacific scholars have come to understand of Polynesian understandings of themselves and various foreigners in that early period. In doing so, I draw out the ways sexuality and gender mediated, enabled, and were also constituted through such racialization processes in their cultural and historical specificity. A key point of departure for this analysis is that the embodiment of race is a negotiated social process. The comparative historical case study I offer up here follows current scholarly moves in seeking out the insights to be gained by tracking racialization as a contingent process, as open rather than closed, as variegated rather than singular, and as imperfectly and only tenuously wrought through ideologies that may be profoundly unanticipated from the vantage point of modernist logics of essentialism and foundationalism. The resulting analysis aims to create space for critically revisiting the ways in which racial normativities and racialized embodiment operate, and how they work, and fail to work, to promote naturalized racist hierarchies of privilege and subordination.

Understanding Pacific worldviews: principles and connections for research

ABSTRACT In this article, we identify the commonly shared principles that underpin Pacific worldviews. A focused literature review was conducted, concentrated on research by Pacific scholars and experts. The context for the review was to inform and guide a multidisciplinary team, led by the University of Otago, on the nexus between public housing and urban regeneration, and wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand. With Pacific peoples accounting for 26 percent of public housing tenancies in 2022 Kāinga Ora et al. [2023]. Fale mo Aiga Pacific Housing Strategy 2030. file:///C:/Users/thoma81p/Downloads/4208-Fale-mo-Aiga_Placemat-6_0.pd), we considered it imperative that Pacific perspectives be integrated into the methodological approach of the research programme. Five recurring principles were identified from 86 texts, published between 1990 and 2023 in peer reviewed journals and grey literature. They included holistic systems; the collective family; spirituality; Pacific peoples’ connection with the natural world, denoted as guardianship and stewardship; and the theory of space and time and relational relationships, embodied in the Samoan and Tongan concept of Te Vā. These principles sit alongside the Whakawhanaungatanga Māori Wellbeing Model and other frameworks (Te Ao Māori, Māturanga Māori, and Māori Sustainability) developed by the Māori Strand. Notwithstanding the primary purpose of this research, the intention of this article is to share our findings more broadly. Some Pacific Words Aiga, kāinga, vuvale, whāmere (family); fale (Samoan house); lau-kafa (Tokelauan word for sennit); paopao (Tokelauan word for outrigger canoe); pou (Samoan word for posts holding up a building); tapa/ngatu (Tongan and pan-Pacific word for bark cloth); te feke (Tuvaluan word for octopus); te kora (Kiribati word for making string from soft dried coconut fibres called binoka); talanoa (talk or discussion, telling of stories); tivaevae (Cook Island weaving of quilts); ula (Samoan word crafting of garlands and necklaces); Vā, La-Vā, Te Vā, Tauhi Va, Teu le va (theory of space and time and relational relationships).

Culturally relevant social work in Oceania: Reflections and perceptions

INTRODUCTION: This article presents reflections of junior staff and final year students at a regional academic institution based in Oceania. Reflections are based on the theme, “What culturally relevant social work in the Oceania context encompasses.” METHOD: The reflections were gathered as part of a talanoa (discussion) and evaluation focused on the same theme at an international symposium, where students were participants. Even though the talanoa also included social service stakeholders, this article primarily focuses on reflections from students and junior staff at the university. FINDINGS: Reflections add to recommendations for social work education at a regional university. Culturally relevant social work for respondents meant that the curriculum needed to be inclusive of alternative forms of assessments; encouraging the use of Pacific language; advocating for more Pacific scholars in social work education; promoting collaborations with other international organisations and institutions; and, most importantly, making the institution a regional hub for Pacific social work education that is research informed. IMPLICATIONS: These reflections are outlined and explored further in this article and recommendations are offered for the continual development and sustainability of social work education in Oceania.

Collective Indigenous approaches to centring Pacific voices of leadership for our futures

Education systems in western nations are often built on a long history of centralising the western canon of knowledge and colonial norms. These norms are perpetuated and reinforced via western research which amplifies the voices of the dominant, while working to silence the values, practices, and knowledges of minority groups. As a colonial nation, Aotearoa New Zealand continues to be impacted by its colonial histories, where colonial (read white) ways of being, knowing, and understanding dominate initial teacher education, schools, tertiary institutions, research, and our everyday lives. However, within education and research more generally, Indigenous and Pacific researchers and practitioners have been working hard to carve out space in institutions to challenge colonial hierarchies of knowledge and make space for Indigenous ways of being, knowing, seeing, doing, and feeling. This article contributes to the work being done by Indigenous and Pacific scholars in Aotearoa New Zealand by detailing our collective, relational approach to convening the special issue of Shifting the System for the Ethnographic Edge journal. Convening a special issue is not unique and groups of academics do it regularly across a range of academic journals and fields. However, our experiences of convening this special issue were quite different. Here we share the journey and reflect on how our focus on privileging the often-marginalised voices of Pacific school leaders was underpinned by an Indigenous, collective approach embedded in the pedagogical practice of Indigenous Storywork. Employing collaborative critical autoethnography, we articulate the ways in which our engagement with each other and the authors within this special issue disrupted western power relations often present in interactions between ‘researchers’ within the university and ‘practitioners’ at the coalface. Furthermore, we demonstrate how engaging in relational practices builds a space that encourages the principles of respect, responsibility, reverence, reciprocity, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy.

Suʻifefiloi: A Samoan Methodology for Transdisciplinary Theorising in Cosmopolitan Worlds

As universities make moves toward transdisciplinary research, suʻifefiloi, the Samoan practice of sewing different parts together, offers a culturally grounded research methodology for transdisciplinary theorising by Pacific scholars. Pacific transdisciplinary actors working on theory within the cosmopolitan context requires, as Gordon writes, a willingness to go beyond discipline areas to produce knowledge. Theory work, as this paper argues, requires transdisciplinarity and a willingness to go beyond one’s discipline area to extend knowledge. Working with Tuhiwai Smith’s assertion on the importance of theory, this paper discusses the usefulness of suʻifefiloi in recent turns to transdisciplinarity.

Introduction: Charting Provocations and Exploring New Directions for Pacific Research in Aotearoa–New Zealand from Pacific Early Career Academic (PECA) Perspectives

“Uplifting Moana Perspectives: Emerging Pacific Researchers and New Directions in New Zealand-Based Pacific Research” presents a shared vision for the future of Pacific research by Pacific early career academics (PECA) primarily based in Aotearoa–New Zealand. The task of charting new directions in imagining possibilities for Pacific research is a critical one, which speaks to our communities’ long and storied history in Aotearoa: a reality incongruent with the lack of Pacific scholars employed in permanent positions in New Zealand universities.[i] This special issue challenges the idea that there is a dearth of Pacific research, asserting rather that our underrepresentation in academia is a structural issue, not necessarily one of scarcity. As special issue editors, we intentionally draw in a cross-section of emerging Pacific researchers in our country to confidently write with emerging Pacific scholars on the other side of our Moana-Oceania region, writing back to the exclusionary nature of conventional disciplinary norms and divides that we are forced to navigate. In doing so, our contributors challenge and transcend disciplinary boundaries and push against the Eurocentrism of our tertiary education system. This work is crucial, as the ability to build an academy that prioritises and centres our ways of knowing, doing, relating, and being is a key component of addressing cultural safety and inclusiveness in university lecture theatres, curriculums, and epistemological norms for both PECA and Pacific students in Aotearoa–New Zealand.
 

Negotiating the Digital Vā: Emerging Pacific Scholars and Community Building on Twitter

Although the power of social media to bring people together across borders is acknowledged, very little has been written about the potential of social media sites for emerging Pacific scholars living transnationally across our region and beyond. We deploy thematic talanoa to demonstrate how emerging Pacific scholars engage Twitter as a platform where routes and relationships are established and teu/tauhi in the digital vā. Furthermore, we argue that emerging scholars of Pacific heritage are building an augmented reality founded on Pacific-specific ways of relationship building, forming external to, and in response to, marginalising dominant narratives inside and outside Pacific worlds.

Sound Ties, ‘Rising from the Depths of Brine and Regions of Fire Deeper Still’

Pacific Indigenous scholars have long emphasized the role of relationality for Pacific Islanders’ epistemologies. In this article, the author rethinks music in terms of the procedural knowledge inherent in and specific to popular music-making by exploring the latter as knowledge practices in Micronesia. This approach opens new vistas on the relationality at the heart of Western Pacific music-making. The author calls the musical manifestation of that relational capacity sound ties, suggesting that if, following Epeli Hau‘ofa, Oceania is “humanity rising from the depths of brine”, then it is not least the sound ties of knowing in and through music that mould that very humanity of people who are at home with the sea into aquapelagic assemblages that are, after all, so much more than water and land.

Exploring accountability of Australia and New Zealand's temporary labour mobility programmes in Samoa using a talanoa approach

PurposeTemporary labour mobility programmes (TLMPs) are initiated by high-income nations to fill their labour demands by offering temporary work opportunities to migrants from low-income nations. TLMPs also seek to contribute to economic development in workers' home countries. This paper aims to assess the accountability of New Zealand's Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) Scheme and Australia's Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) in reaching their economic development objectives in one sending nation, Samoa.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative study with RSE and SWP workers and key informants (collectively stakeholders) in Samoa was undertaken to assess the contributions of these schemes to economic development. An interdisciplinary research approach was taken using the Pacific methodology of talanoa. Talanoa was used to “operationalise engagement” and empower local stakeholder accounts.FindingsTalanoa supported the elicitation of accounts that contributed nuanced insights into the accountability of TLMPs. Specifically, stakeholder accounts revealed limitations in the ability of the RSE Scheme and SWP to meet their economic development objectives for Samoan communities and workers. Adjustments are necessary to meet Pacific nations' economic development objectives.Practical implicationsThis study responds to calls for on-the-ground accounts of stakeholders involved in TLMPs. It provides insights that may contribute to the development of more effective TLMPs, particularly regarding economic development in workers' home countries.Originality/valueDrawing on dialogic accounting literature, which calls for engagement with the marginalised, a talanoa approach has been engaged to assess TLMPs via on-the-ground participant accounts in a specific context. This paper introduces talanoa to the critical and social accounting literature, to move beyond a typical accounting qualitative interview process and encourage greater engagement and collaboration with Pacific scholars and partners.

Living Kinship in the Pacific ed. by Christina Toren

Reviewed by: Living Kinship in the Pacific ed. by Christina Toren Lorenzo Pule Finau-Cruz Living Kinship in the Pacific, edited by Christina Toren and Simonne Pauwels. Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists 4. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. isbn cloth 978-1-78238-577-6; isbn paper 978-1-78533-520-4; 274 pages, illustrations, bibliography, index. Cloth, us$135.00; paper, us$29.95. Edited by Christina Toren and Simonne Pauwels, the collected works that make up Living Kinship in the Pacific offer case studies that examine kinship practices throughout the Pacific across both space and time. As Toren and Pauwels explain, “The book’s objective is straightforward: to provide case studies of contemporary Pacific kinship, and in so doing arrive at an understanding of what is currently happening to kinship in an area where deep historical links provide for close and useful comparison” (1). More provocatively, the collection [End Page 624] does not merely aspire to compare and document kinship in the region. Rather, there is an expressed intent to situate kinship practices within a larger understanding of history as living and integral to contemporary practices and kinship-related worldviews. In Toren and Pauwel’s estimation, “What is under discussion here is not history as something external to us, confined to the past, nor history as it is known or generally understood, nor history as it is written nor the personal history we can recollect and tell to others, but rather history as it is lived” (3). This volume’s endorsement of history as lived and fundamental to kinship practices of the past and present aligns with wider calls among Pacific scholars to listen to and engage deeply with stories, for it is through the stories of community that history truly comes to life. Living Kinship in the Pacific brings together just a few of the many stories of the Pacific. The eleven chapters, divided into three sections, weave together both academic and practical aspects of research through the experiences of its scholars, clearly illustrating the diversity in kinship practices in the Pacific. They primarily employ ethnographic approaches to kinship and related issues in Fiji, Tonga, Sāmoa, Tokelau, Papua New Guinea, and Taiwan. Anthropologists Unaisi Nabobo-Baba and Jara Hulkenberg do well in exploring communal kinship in their respective contributions, which focus specifically on Fiji and explore kinship through “gifting.” Drawing on the classic anthropological concept of “the gift,” the contributors advocate for understanding and appreciating gifting practices as more than just birthday or Christmas presents that will ultimately go to waste. In the context of Pacific kinship, it encompasses far more. As Nabobo-Baba describes, gifting represents veikauwaitaki (mutual concern and empathy), which is the foundation of Fijian kinship. She recounts the story of the gifting of a tabua (whale tooth) from one chief to another as a means of solidifying veidinadininati vakavanua vakaturaga (his chiefly promise). Though this kind of promise and the gifting associated with it are replete with complex layers of meaning, veikauwaitaki lies at the core. This demonstrates concern for the welfare of kin and others, as well as empathy for others’ troubles (23). Nabobo-Baba thus shows that gifting in the context of kinship is ingrained into societal values that are practiced by the community as a whole. Veikauwaitaki is more than just a word; rather, it guides social actions that are acknowledged by all levels of the community. Hulkenberg’s chapter explores the ways in which practices of exchange extend past the homeland and into foreign lands through the processes of migration. As migration occurs, kinship becomes transnational and transformative in many different ways. Because resources may differin foreign places, so too do the gifts that are presented or exchanged. For example, in looking at Fijians in the United Kingdom, Hulkenberg illustrates that money has become prominent in acts of gifting (76). Though it is important to acknowledge that items frequently gifted in the home-land, such as tabua, are often replaced by items available in foreign lands, [End Page 625] Hulkenberg makes it clear that the obligations and significance of kinship and gifting remain. She argues that people must know themselves through retaining their virtue...

David’s Weapon of Mass Destruction: The Reception of Thor Heyerdahl’s ‘Kon-Tiki Theory’

From the late 1930s to his death in 2002, Norwegian adventurer and amateur ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl struggled to find academic acceptance for his Pacific Islands settlement theory. He even went as far as using the biblical story of David and Goliath as a metaphor for his struggle against academia. However, there are numerous reasons to question the accuracy of Heyerdahl’s description of his relationship to the scientific community. This paper discusses the reception of Heyerdahl’s ‘Kon-Tiki theory’ among Pacific scholars in the late 1940s and early 1950s. By analysing contemporary reviews of Heyerdahl’s 1952 book American Indians in the Pacific and comments on early drafts of the theory, this paper demonstrates that the material substantially differs from Heyerdahl’s own claims. He was not excluded by the Pacific scientific community, but welcomed and encouraged. Above all, reviewers of Heyerdahl’s theory praised the importance of the challenge he had posed to the established research narrative. However, Heyerdahl’s academic amateurism failed to convince the scientific community of the accuracy of his theory.

‘We’re not the hottest ethnicity’: Pacific scholars and the cultural politics of New Zealand universities

ABSTRACTAcademic labour markets around the world are increasingly globalised and tied to transnational circuits of neoliberal capital. Universities in New Zealand are closely aligned with these trends and an academic labour force has developed over time that reflects these economic flows and currents. This labour force is characterised by an exceptionally high number of multinational academic staff, many of whom contribute to research and inquiry aimed at maintaining and broadening the influence of their institutions abroad. Pacific faculty, however, experience the micro-geographies of New Zealand universities in different ways from other migrant scholars, especially those who hail from the global North. They are rarely included in academic ‘prestige economies’ or elite scholarly networks and are often isolated in their academic departments. This paper draws on a study about the experiences of senior Pacific academics in Aotearoa New Zealand and explores how they formulate pan-Pacific solidarities within the neoliberal and settler-colonial milieu of higher education. We focus on the often fraught dynamics of encounters between Pacific scholars, white academic elites and indigenous Māori colleagues as they map academic identities on to institutional space.

Staking Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in Hawai'i by Judy Rohrer

Reviewed by: Staking Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in Hawai'i by Judy Rohrer Hi'ilei Julia Hobart Staking Claim: Settler Colonialism and Racialization in Hawai'i, by Judy Rohrer. Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2016. isbn 978-0-8165-2051-6, 232 pages, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, us $55.00. It is perhaps unusual for an author to appear so visibly in an academic text. However, in Judy Rohrer's Staking Claim, there she is, body slackened and seasick in the waters off O'ahu's western shoreline, contemplating Disney's Aulani Resort in all of its glossy commercialization of Hawaiian culture. In this way, she offers herself up to readers both literally and metaphorically to grapple with the complexity of Hawai'i's settler colonial history and present and in doing so walks a tightrope: writing about whiteness in Hawai'i, as a self-identified haole from Hawai'i, with anecdotal evidence recalled from living in Hawai'i, while working hard to avoid centering haole positionality in an assessment of the meaning of race. This is no small task, and Rohrer respectfully engages with the work of her Kanaka Maoli peers—J Kēhaulani Kauanui, Noenoe Silva, and Hokulani Aikau, among others—in order to show how non-natives "stake claim" or articulate a sense of belonging in Hawai'i. Staking Claim is a sharp evolution of Rohrer's previous works on whiteness, or haole, in Hawai'i going back to her 2005 University of Hawai'i dissertation, "Haole Matters: An Interrogation of Whiteness in Hawai'i," and 2010 book Haoles in Hawai'i. To such past efforts Rohrer adds theoretical weight with the key concept of racialization, a social process by which values are attached to particular communities in order to substantiate ideas of racial difference. Racialization is a useful name to give the phenomenon of native elimination within the Hawaiian context and helps, in Rohrer's words, to reveal how "the dual settler colonial processes of racializing native Hawaiians (erasing their indigeneity) and indigenizing non-Hawaiians enable the staking of non-Hawaiian claims to Hawai'i" (7). This process is, she points out, ancillary to the inherent categorical messiness of how race is constructed. Hawai'i's multiculturalism, sometimes referred to as the "melting pot," often obscures Kanaka Maoli claims to indigeneity at the same time that it articulates the overlapping native/settler/arrivant communities that call it home. An interdisciplinary application of literatures from Hawaiian and Native Pacific cultural studies, indigenous studies, whiteness studies, and Chicano/a studies—through which Rohrer emplaces her own genealogic identity—supports a very strong argument that, in order for race and indigeneity to be useful social analytics, one must move toward a necessary acknowledgment of how racial categories are porous, discursive, and continually made and remade over time. The book's main chapters focus first on theory and then on analysis, which lends to the book's utility. The first two chapters, "Going to the Ocean" and "Weaving Analytics and Disrupting Dyads," treat foundational concepts—first racialization and then settler colonialism—with patience and clarity so that they can underpin [End Page 380] the three chapters that follow. The resulting text is almost a sophisticated primer. For example, the key elements of Patrick Wolfe's seminal formulation of settler colonialism are enumerated and expanded (ie, "1. Structure, Not an Event" [56]) by drawing on important works about Hawai'i and its history. The author's strategy of breaking down complex theory into component parts and then providing concrete applications for each is synthetic, and with good reason: readers will recognize Rohrer's intention to highlight the intellectual contributions of Native Pacific (including Kanaka Maoli) scholars first and foremost so as not to reproduce settler colonial power within the text itself, as well as to map out more generally the existing conversations within indigenous studies that she wishes to build on, drawing heavily on Native American scholars like Audra Simpson, Scott Morgensen, and Jodi Byrd. Even so, the author would have done well to provide a more muscular engagement with the literature on Asian settler colonialism, which has its own distinct contours. This would...

The Influence of Fiction and Cinematic Excess on the Factual

Many popular Hollywood films about Oceania or set in the Pacific have been criticised and dismissed by Pacific scholars and film-makers as grossly misrepresentative of the region. Nevertheless, both critically acclaimed and populist films form an integral part of the mediascape within which more contemporary factual films by and about Pacific communities are situated. In many cases the dialectic between Hollywood and contemporary performance in the Pacific is strategic and self-conscious; however, in documentary formats, this dialectic can be problematic and consequently overlooked or repressed. Drawing upon the operations of irony in contemporary Pacific screen production, Thompson's description of cinematic excess and Nichols's elaboration of documentary excess, this paper examines how the critically acclaimed, anti-colonial, pro-self-determination factual film Act of War: Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation reflects the return of repressed Hollywood imagery in its discursive practices.

"To 'P' or Not to 'P'?": Marking the Territory Between Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies

“To ‘P’ or Not to ‘P’?”:Marking the Territory Between Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies Vicente M. Diaz (bio) I stole this title from a great Pinoy joke told to me by Gus Espiritu. Its humor comes from the particularities of Filipino rearticulation of Shakespeare's famous question (the joke also resonates among Carolinian speakers from Micronesia, and perhaps among many other Austronesian-based Pacific Island language speakers), but I also want to suggest that its stronger force likewise comes from a kind of lightness of being that self-mockery can make of ontological fundamentalism. Self-mockery is a serious weapon of cultural resilience and resistance—and as someone waiting in line, somewhat impatiently, I want to re-aim the line of "P's" trajectory in the direction of another culturally and historically specific mode of becoming. The converted question, "To P or not to P?" becomes, then, my way of marking the present territory, a slippery, even sticky sea of historical, political, and cultural determinations that exists between Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in a more turbulent ocean of United States imperialism and colonialism. Choppy too, of course, is the no less innocent world of institutionalized study of these struggles, no matter how noble the motives may be. In this essay, I want to address the tensions raised by the "P Question" in relation to Asian American Studies from the vantage point of one who has been located in Pacific Studies as viewed from the Islands, particularly from Guam in Micronesia, where I was born and raised, and where I taught in the 1990s. But, I was also trained at the University of [End Page 183] Hawai'i, and though I did my doctorate in California, Hawai'i—through tremors that rocked the field of Pacific Studies as it intersected and was led by scholars housed at the UH Center for Pacific Islands Studies (CPIS), the East West Center, and especially Kanaka Maoli scholars at the Center for Hawaiian Studies—continues to be generative in and of my own intellectual, political, and scholarly development. A robust and busy crossroad as well as homeland, Hawai'i draws up and projects out theoretical, cultural, and political movements from across the Pacific Island region and beyond the seas to make it a particularly fruitful location for intellectual and political production, especially for the kind that pays specific attention to the nuances of travel and mobility in relation to the staunch determinations over land that anchor Indigenous struggles.2 But lest my attempts at nuance fail, let me make one thing absolutely clear: for whatever productive dialogues there may be between Pacific Islander Studies and Asian American Studies, under no circumstance should Pacific Islanders, or Pacific Islands Studies, be subsumed under the institutional framework of Asian American history and experiences. Though I'm sure nobody wishes this to be the case, the question of just how Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies are articulated together will always raise the specter of unequal power relations. At the same time, however, I think it is vital, in order to maintain the integrity of our respective struggles and projects, that our resolve to keep the differences clear and equal not reify in any way any of the categories in question. To avert this unwanted outcome, I want to highlight the various sites or locales from which we practice our respective crafts. These different, differential, and differentiating sites of and for the situatedness of knowledge and politics, I believe, not only make a world of difference in our work, but are also themselves as much constituted by as they help constitute that work. Thus, I want to emphasize at the outset that the critiques of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies look very different from within the shores of the various Pacific Islands. But, I also want to assert that an Asian American inquiry must strive to comprehend the kinds of historical and political struggles that Native Pacific Scholars are trying to articulate, just as Native Pacific Scholars need to understand the specificities of Asian histories as they are bound up with the American [End Page 184] imperial project among and amidst Native Pacific Islanders in...

Have We Been Thinking Upside-Down?: The Contemporary Emergence of Pacific Theoretical Thought

Among the reams of volumes published on the Pacific, mostly by foreigners (but increasingly by Pacific Islanders), only a few have examined Pacific thought and how it relates to contemporary ideas, paradigms, and ways of doing. Existing material in this area has been written mainly by Pacific theologians, educators, and more recently by native and indigenous anthropologists and sociologists. While theological works have remained essentially hidden in library stacks in unpublished theses, articles written by native and indigenous anthropologists and sociologists have been published in recent editions of The Contemporary Pacific. The voice of educators, led particularly by the USP School of Education but present also in other parts of the Pacific, is still somewhat marginal in terms of its impact on mainstream education. Put together, the work of these Pacific scholars represents an important building block for the elaboration of a body of Pacific thought, which, like an open fale, should not shut out the world but invite it in on its own terms. In turn, this body of Pacific thought should contribute to the affirmation of a Pacific philosophy and ethic: a body of applicable concepts and values to guide interaction within the region and beyond.

In colonial New Guinea: anthropological perspectives

Papua New Guinea is a place that captures the imagination. It is linguistically, culturally, and environmentally diverse. Its history is a layered saga of colonialism; the indigenous inhabitants of Papua New Guinea were at different points in time administered by Germany, Britain, and Australia. This collection of anthropological essays attempts to reveal the complexity of Papua New Guinea s colonial experience. In these original essays, ten Pacific scholars look at Papua New Guinea s colonial experience through a diverse array of eyewitnesses, sources, and viewpoints. These narratives provide a rich and nuanced set of testimonies and reflections, enabling a full range of historical personae to speak to the reality of colonial life. Together, their stories form a detailed ethnography of colonists and colonizers, an entirely new, and necessary, contribution toward understanding Papua New Guinea in particular and colonialism in general.

Placing Movers: An Overview of the Asian-Pacific Migration System

Conventional wisdom seems to have it that the world has entered a "new age of migration" in which the international movement of labor is qualitatively and quantitatively distinct from the past. The dominant paradigm links labor movement to economic development, particularly for Asian migration, explaining migration in terms of differentials in labor demand and wages, while Pacific scholars have generally resorted to the particularities of Polynesian, Melanesian, and Micronesian cultures and island societies. This paper rejects these assumptions. We first describe the history of the Asia-Pacific migration system in three phases—the Age of Indenture, the Period of the Guest Worker, and the Era of Contract Labor Migration—establishing the scale and duration of flows and examining some of the mechanisms. We then review competing explanations of international migration, arguing that a key factor that economistic and essentialist explanations overlook is networks and institutions. We show how these are both reproduced and recreated in similar forms, and that transnational communities are almost inevitably the result.

Committee of Concerned Pacific Scholars:

Committee of Concerned Pacific Scholars:

Committee of Concerned Pacific Scholars:

Committee of Concerned Pacific Scholars: