Review of Identity Work: Constructing Pacific Lives, edited by Pamela J Stewart and Andrew Strathern (original) (raw)
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DUA TANI: (Re)evolving Identities of Pacific Islanders
Te Kaharoa
Colonization, modernity and migration have impacted indigenous peoples globally. Of particular interest, is how identity formation of indigenous peoples are affected through these events. This article explores the life narratives of 20 Pacific Islanders in Brisbane, Australia, and their perceptions of identity. Through talanoa (culturally appropriate conversation) a deeper understanding of how Pacific Island people navigate, use, build and (re)shape their identities was established. The findings showed that although all the participants acknowledged the effects of colonialism, migration and western social expectations, their Pacific culturalism was central to their identity formation. Furthermore, participants expressed that without an understanding of who they were as Pacific Islanders, they would inevitably internalize negative perceptions. Interestingly, all the participants in the study also spoke of the complex intersections and hybrid notions of identity they embodied, as oppo...
Culture and Identity in the South Pacific: A Comparative Analysis
Man, 1993
With the occurrence of an armed secessionist movement on Bougainville, military coups in Fiji, and the growing momentum of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, it is clear that issues of tradition and identity in the Pacific can no longer be treated as the stuff of abstract and disinterested anthropological scholarship. To be sure, each of these events or movements has been about political and economic power, but like conflicts elsewhere in the world (eg, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and the Caucasus) they have also been rooted in contested views of the past and in claims to separate and distinctive identities understood to be derived from the past. In the postmodern world, tradition and identity are supplanting modernist political ideologies in the discourse of conflict (see Kuper 1994; Escobar 1992; Melucci 1980). At roughly the same time as these political struggles have been taking place in the Pacific, anthropology has been going through some upheavals of its own. The very core of the modern discipline-fieldwork and ethnography-has come under a new critical scrutiny (see, eg, Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). These changes in the discipline of anthropology are related to changes that have been taking place among the societies that anthropologists have traditionally studied. Anthropology developed as an attempt to understand human diversity, the dimensions of which became known to the west through its own global expansion. Anthropology matured as a discipline in the context of colonialism, and sometimes its practitioners were more than mere beneficiaries of the colonial order (Asad 1973). In the * * *
Transforming Relations of Gender, Person and Agency in Oceania
Oceania, 2015
This introduction contextualises the nine papers that make up the special issue Gender and Person in Oceania. Gender and personhood represent core orienting concepts within Pacific anthropology, from the pioneering work of Marilyn Strathern's Gender of the Gift to more recent scholarly attention to the impact of Christianity and modernity. The papers in this volume offer a comparative and critical perspective on long-standing ideas of ‘relational’ and ‘individual’ personhood across multiple sites in Oceania, highlighting several key insights, including the importance of situated and relational understandings of agency and the centrality of those ‘things’ typically seen as non-agentive to the formation of personhood. Most importantly, while re-establishing the inseparable articulation of personhood with gendered dynamics, the contributors to this volume also highlight the differential, transforming, and shifting nature of engendered personhood, revealed through close attention to local knowledge, conditions, and practices.
How Do People Belong in the Pacific? Introduction to This Issue
2018
In early 2016, the two editors of this issue met together to discuss our common research interests. At that time, one of us ( Jioji Ravulo) was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University (WSU), and the other of us (Camellia Webb-Gannon) was a Research Fellow in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the same institution. Camellia, whose research focuses on decolonisation in Melanesia, had recently returned from the 2016 Australian Association for Pacific Studies (AAPS) conference in Cairns at which she had hoped she would meet other researchers of the Pacific from WSU; due to the multi-campus structure of WSU, it is often difficult to know if there are others at the university working in similar research areas, and conferences are a chance to find out. But there were no other WSU attendees at AAPS that year. Back at WSU, Camellia sought out Jioji whom, she knew, had established and managed PATHE, the Pasifika Achievemen...
The study of collective or social memory by historians has shown that events and facts are often reconfigured and can be influenced by group rituals and politics, the media and the time over which the memory has accumulated. What an individual remembers can be determined by her or his group relationships (Hamilton and Darian-Smith 1994). In his classic study On Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs distinguishes between ‘history’ and ‘collective memory’, the latter being the active past which through our narratives form our identities (Halbwachs 1992). Australian South Sea Islander (ASSI) narratives have these ‘collective memory’ qualities. This chapter examines how the narratives of ASSI identity has developed. ASSI by-and-large interpret their history through a narrative of kidnapping and slavery which is at odds with Pacific historians who for the last fifty years have stressed Islander agency and voluntary participation in labour migration, albeit with an early phase of illegal and often violent recruitment. This chapter examines Islander origins, the difference of opinion with academic historians, differences in the use of words, identity as both Australian and Pacific peoples, and contemporary political agendas.