Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists Series

In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers’ later work in psychiatry and psychology, and Hocart’s work as a comparativist, for which both would largely be remembered despite the novelty of that independent fieldwork on remote Pacific islands in the early years of the 20th Century. Contributors to this volume—who have all carried out fieldwork in those Melanesian locations where Hocart and Rivers worked—give a critical examination of the research that took place in 1908, situating those efforts in the broadest possible contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.

By adopting ideas like “development,” members of a Papua New Guinean community find themselves continuously negotiating what can be expected of a relative or a community member. Nearly half the people born on the remote Mbuke Islands become teachers, businessmen, or bureaucrats in urban centers, while those who stay at home ask migrant relatives “What about me?” This detailed ethnography sheds light on remittance motivations and documents how terms like “community” can be useful in places otherwise permeated by kinship. As the state withdraws, Mbuke people explore what social ends might be reached through involvement with the cash economy.

Throughout the Pacific region, people are faced with dramatic changes, often described as processes of “glocalization”; individuals and groups espouse multilayered forms of identity, in which global modes of thinking and doing are embedded in renewed perceptions of local or regional specificities. Consequently, new forms of resistance and resilience – the processes by which communities attempt to regain their original social, political, and economic status and structure after disruption or displacement – emerge. Through case studies from across the Pacific which transcend the conventional “local-global” dichotomy, this volume aims to explore these complex and interwoven phenomena from a new perspective.

Focusing on the small island of Paama, Vanuatu, and the capital, Port Vila, this book presents a rare and recent study of the ongoing significance of urbanisation and internal migration in the Global South. Based on longitudinal research undertaken in rural ‘home’ places, urban suburbs and informal settlements over thirty years, this book reveals the deep ambivalence of the outcome of migration, and argues that continuity in the fundamental organising principles of cultural life – in this case centred on kinship and an ‘island home’ – is significantly more important for urban and rural lives than the transformative impacts of migration and urbanisation.

Exploring the social complexities of the Frieda River Project in Papua New Guinea, this book tells the story of local stakeholder strategies on the eve of industrial development, largely from the perspective of the Paiyamo – one of the project’s so-called ‘impact communities’. Engaging ideas of knowledge, belief and personhood, it explains how fifty years of encounters with exploration companies shaped the Paiyamo’s aspirations, made them revisit and re-examine their past, and develop new strategies to move towards a better, more prosperous future.

On March 11, 2011, a tsunami warning was issued for Tonga in Polynesia. On the low and small island of Kotu, people were unperturbed in the face of impending catastrophe. The book starts out from the puzzle of peoples’ responses and reactions to this warning as well as their attitudes to a gradual rise of sea level and questions why people seemed so unconcerned about this and the accompanying loss of land. The book is an ethnography of the relationship between people and their environment based on fieldwork over three decades.

Delving into Pacific spaces from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and interpretations, this book looks at how the anthropological and architectural can be connected. The contributors to this book – architectural practitioners, architectural and spatial design theorists, anthropologists and historians – show not only how new theoretical perspectives can arise out of comparing aspects specific to one discipline with their equivalents of another, but also demonstrate how a space of emergence is created for something that goes beyond both, enhancing both fields of potentialities.

Citizens of Vanuatu (ni-Vanuatu) perceive stringband music as a marker of national identity, an indicator of their cultural, stylistic, and musical heritage. Through extensive field and ethnographic research, Melanesian Mainstream offers a detailed historical record of the roots, context, evolution, and impact of stringband music. Beyond chronicling the genre’s history and cultural significance, this thorough monograph positions the genre’s musical hybridity, communal lyrics, and unique organizational structures as key factors in the anthropological understanding of ni-Vanuatu socio-cultural history.