Fieldwork in Remote Communities: An Ethnographic Case Study of Pitcairn Island (original) (raw)
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Place, Destabilized: Ambivalent Heritage, Community and Colonialism in the Marquesas Islands
Oceania, 2018
Increasingly marked by ethnic resettlement, large-scale development and the destruction of cultural places, today's world challenges the essential bond between indigenous peoples and the land. Popular ideas about the supportive role of long-term, phenomenological links to place and heritage appear to be losing their relevance. Yet, a closer look at the complexity of human connections to place reveals how painful memories and discomfort can also generate strong bonds that affirm community and cultural cohesiveness. Place-making in indigenous heritage landscapes marked by colonialism is often ambivalent, evoking Ruth Benedict's observation that the sacred 'may be a source of peril or it may be a source of blessing' (1934:28). Though the actual meaning of places may be fraught, a shared approach to such heritage can bind communities together, overcoming historic silences and a violent past. With specific reference to ethnographic research in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, I illustrate the contingency of indigenous processes of place-making that are based in personal belief, discomfort and colonialism as much as affirmative interaction with the physical world.
Pitcairn Island: Heritage of Bounty Descendants
2016
This article adopts the method ‘tensed ethnography’ to describe aspects of Pitcairn Island folklife and the symbolic meaning of community. Such meanings emerge in the empirical field whereby ‘community’ is viewed as a cluster of embodied dispositions and practices. Described as one of the most isolated islands in the world and accessible only by sea, Pitcairn is the last remaining British Overseas Territory in the Pacific, notable as the home of Bounty mutineers and Tahitians who settled the island in 1790. It is from this unique heritage and present-day fieldwork that the collective manifestations of social life and folk expression are herewith discussed.
Island Studies Journal, 2008
The pursuit of nissology, or island studies, calls for a re-centering of focus from mainland to island, away from the discourse of conquest of mainlanders, giving voice and platform for the expression of island narratives. Yet, studying islands 'on their own terms', in spite of its predilection for "authenticity", is fraught with epistemological and methodological difficulties. The insider/outsider distinction does not work all that well when it comes to islands, where hybridity is the norm. This paper seeks to extend this debate, grappling especially with the contributions of Grant McCall and Peter Hay to the sparse literature. Five dilemmas related to indigenous island geographies are presented and discussed, in a semi-autobiographical style.
In 1789, Fletcher Christian led 18 sailors in a mutiny on HMAV Bounty. They set Captain William Bligh and his loyal crew adrift, took twelve Tahitian women and six Tahitian men captive, and eventually settled on Pitcairn Island, a remote volcanic isle in the Southern Pacific. Their descendants still live both there and on Norfolk Island, to which many of them migrated in 1856. My dissertation follows the making of these islands into sites for the production of knowledge about race, language, national identity, and colonial governance. Writers and researchers came to construe the islanders as near-perfect research subjects, describing their home islands as “accidental experiments” and “natural laboratories.” However, that metaphor elided the intentional and careful construction of both islands as exemplary, insular, and experimental spaces. During the nineteenth century, moralists, missionaries and evangelical authors made the islands into object lessons in Victorian and Anglican virtue. The migration to Norfolk Island in 1856 was authored by colonial administrators as a morally freighted “experiment” in colonial settlement and racial destiny—an experiment that bureaucrats later termed a dysgenic failure after a series of on-the-ground investigations. Stepping into field spaces engendered by that long history of observation and scrutiny, twentieth-century social scientists measured, interviewed, and recorded Pitcairn Islanders in order to define the boundaries of race and language. The dissertation unpacks their field practices to relocate the making of modern biological anthropology and creole language studies to situated encounters in the southern Pacific.
Mutiny , resilience and reconstitution : a case study of Pitcairn Island
2011
Over the past few decades the Pacific region has undergone much change through decolonisation and postcolonial (re)adjustment. Political change in new and existing Pacific nations is marked by efforts to re-conceptualise identities, histories and futures. Descriptions of islands as fragile, small, peripheral and dependent are often taken for granted; reiterated within a discourse of ‘vulnerability’. Such rhetoric sets up a perception of what constructs ‘islandness’ or island societies. This article uses a case study of Pitcairn Island, the last remaining British Overseas Territory in the Pacific, to argue for a theorisation of social capital as a counter-narrative to such discourse. It contends that an understanding of the historical trajectories of sustainable livelihoods (SL) show that strengths emerge from livelihood strategies specifically adapted to such isolated places. This moves beyond the spatial rhetoric of colonial and postcolonial theory by showing how the materiality of...
Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, 2016
Islands have been described in terms of their 'nervous duality'. This statement aptly describes Pitcairn Island, the last remaining British Overseas Territory and smallest jurisdiction in the Pacific. By its very existence as 'colonial confetti' Pitcairn denotes the concept of cultural realignment as it relates to relationships of power. Geographically isolated, accessible only by sea and with a population of less than fifty, Pitcairn is famous as the refuge of Bounty mutineers and Polynesians who settled the island in 1790. But Pitcairn's more contemporary notoriety stems from 'Operation Unique', the United Kingdom's investigation of sexual abuse against women and subsequent trials held on the island in 2004. The court case became a battle over the island's way of life and a contested case of imperial domination over a tiny, vulnerable community. The trials were a critical point of (dis)juncture that threatened permanence of island place, while global media negatively branded Pitcairn as an island dystopia. The latter has prompted this article's examination of current plans to grow tourism and attract new immigrants to Pitcairn. As a tool of analysis cultural realignment facilitates an understanding of the dynamics leading to community resilience, the restoration and re-imaging of island place/space, and the changing significances of Pitcairn's sociopolitical and cultural landscape.
Island Societies: Protest and Cultural Resistance from Below
Islands are often thought to be ‘romantic’ or ‘idyllic’ places where, for a couple of weeks, we can leave behind our stressful, humdrum lives. However, this book probes the underside of islandness, the everyday life of many islanders. Here are the traces of transported populations, slavery, indenture and colonialism. Island populations were often brought there from far-off places, so new languages and social practices had to be fashioned from diverse elements and half-remembered traditions. This process of diasporic remembrance and creative creolization is reflected in several chapters. The essays and reviews in Island Societies were written over the period 1978–2017, reflecting the principal author’s periods of residence, research and work in Mauritius, the Caribbean and the south Atlantic island of St. Helena. Understanding the heritage of colonial government is a necessarily prelude and accompaniment to the ethnographic analysis in the first half of the book. However, the focus then shifts to patterns of cultural recovery and creativity. Throughout the book runs a common question – how do resistance and protest arise ‘from below’? The full text is available free on this site to read or download. In case you need a hard copy (for convenience or for your library) this will be available from Amazon Europe sites (co.uk, .fr, .es etc.) from December 2017.
Review essay: Divergent pathways in Melanesian ethnography
Focaal, 2007
Is it possible to compare two ethnographies and thereby compare how people in different settings encounter and construe their lived and imagined realities? Although the ethnographies reviewed here both concern small communities in Papua New Guinea--one in the highlands and one on the coast--responding to Western dominance and modernity, the two studies also exemplify the idea that it is impossible to make cross-cultural generalizations. This impossibility lies not in the uniqueness of each setting, but in the fact that doing fieldwork and writing ethnography is grounded in the personality of the researcher, his/her interaction with research subjects, and his/her methodological and theoretical approach. The two books reviewed here exemplify this: they are poles apart in terms of the pathos with which the two researchers/ authors represent the social and cultural dynamics in the Papua New Guinean communities they studied --and, consequently, in terms of the conclusions of their research.