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Abstract: On Honolulu's famed Waikīkī Beach, in the busy stretch between the Duke Kahanamoku statue and the police station, stand four basalt boulders atop a stone platform surrounded by a wrought iron fence.1 Known originally in English as "The Wizard Stones Called Ka-Pae-Mahu" (Boyd 1906a) and in Hawaiian as "Ka Pohaku Kahuna Kapaema-hu" (Ka Nupepa Kuokoa 1907), this City and County of Honolulu monument is passed by millions of tourists and locals every year. Yet despite the plaques adjacent to the stones and the descriptions found in guidebooks and online, the history and cultural significance of this wahi pana (sacred or storied place) remains largely unknown to the general public and scholars alike.According to a ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Photo by Luke WalkerYuki Kihara is a globally accomplished, award-winning interdisciplinary Pacific artist, researcher, and curator. She is of Samoan and Japanese heritage and identifies as Fa'afafine, a third gender meaning "in the manner of a woman." Her pathbreaking works exist at the critical intersections of gender, indigeneity, history, diaspora, decolonization, and the environment. Kihara studied fashion design and technology at Wellington Polytechnic (now Massey University) in Aotearoa New Zealand, where she later worked as a costume designer and stylist in fashion magazines, the performing arts, and the film industry before forging a distinct career as a contemporary artist, bringing her industry ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: It was another tough year for Pacific regionalism as Pacific Island leaders sought to advance their Blue Pacific agenda. The ongoing global covid-19 pandemic caused medical, economic, and cultural damage, at a time of sharpened geopolitical tensions between the United States, China, and other major players. These pressures contributed to significant conflicts within key regional institutions, including the Pacific Islands Forum (pif) and the University of the South Pacific (usp).Throughout the year, regional traditions of dialogue and consensus building were sorely tested. The unprecedented plan of five Micronesian nations to leave the Forum highlighted these tensions, as national governments and subregional ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Asia-Pacific Fishing Livelihoods is an exemplary book that cements the critical role of the social sciences in fisheries research, an area that in the past was dominated by the disciplines of economics and marine science (both of which still tend to dominate in fisheries governance). In the last few decades, interest in fisheries, and ocean-related research more broadly, has also proliferated in the humanities and Indigenous studies as the sea has become a transformative medium for environmental imaginings and postcolonial critique. Social scientists have long advocated for the centrality of culture, history, social relations, kinship, property regimes, and the broader political economy in any understanding of ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Pacific Possessions expands the nineteenth-century literary archive of British and American visitors to Oceania beyond the celebrated yet limited canon of Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London. Through recovering lesser-known travel writers who have often been dismissed by literary scholars for their uneven accounts, Chris J Thomas explores how Pacific cultures are imagined, narrated, and possessed by Westerners through cultural exchange and colonial imposition. These conflicting narratives about Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia, Thomas argues, provide valuable insight into how Westerners searched for experiences "uncontaminated by colonial presence" in Tonga, Hawai'i, Fiji, and Kiribati (7). ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Reviews of Timor-Leste and Vanuatu are not included in this issue.In 2021, consultations continued between the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) and the government of Papua New Guinea (GoPNG) on the implementation of the result of the Bougainville independence referendum of December 2019. It became clear that the positions of the two sides are still far apart. While the ABG argues that, based on the 97.7 percent vote for independence in the referendum, the consultations should only be about the road to independence, the GoPNG insists on the nonbinding character of the referendum and sees the consultations as aimed at a "final political settlement" of the Bougainville issue, whatever that may be. The ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: As its title suggests, Reawakened: Traditional Navigators of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa tracks the revitalization of wayfinding across Polynesia through the eyes of ten navigators from Hawai'i, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the Cook Islands. Taking a journalistic approach, Auckland-based author Jeff Evans guides readers through interviews with the navigators, each of whom received the title of Pwo (master navigators "who have undergone a ceremony in which they learn restricted navigational knowledge and chants" from the late Satawalese navigator Mau Piailug [190]). Taken together, these biographies and Evans's narration produce an imagined geography of wayfinding's resurgence as connecting Hawai'i, Rapa Nui, and Aotearoa ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Margaret Mead, by Paul Shankman, is the first volume in a series from Berghahn Books focusing on anthropology's ancestors (the second is on William Robertson Smith, and the third is on Françoise Héritier). The prospect of examining and evaluating Mead's work and influence is necessarily a daunting one, and Shankman is well aware of the challenges involved. Mead herself was a complex person and lived a very active professional life from the early 1930s, when she did fieldwork in Sāmoa, until her death, over forty-five years later, in 1978. Shankman does an admirable job addressing the complexities of Mead's work and the value it had and continues to have for anthropology. Although he clearly admires Mead and her ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: For Pacific people, descendants in the formidable Moana-Oceania genealogy of grand voyaging and wayfinding, journeys into new territories are not new—Pacific worlds have always been mobile.1 According to Vicente Diaz (2011), this voyaging tradition dates back at least four thousand years, to when Austronesian seafarers with deep maritime technologies set out to settle two-thirds of the Pacific Ocean. Through their voyages, they established the Pacific region as an assemblage of interlocking navigations, migrations, and settlements (Matsuda 2011). The advent of colonialism and settler colonialism across the region significantly altered these mobilities (Lopesi 2018), closing established mobility pathways while ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Several recent books designed for nonspecialists offer a broad outline of Pacific voyaging, navigation, and settlement. John Huth's 2015 volume, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way, is an encyclopedic volume on non-instrument navigation. That was followed in 2019 by Christina Thompson's Sea People. Nicholas Thomas's 2021 contribution largely follows Sea People's objectives and strategy of avoiding technical academic debates while providing "an overview of chapters in human history that are unlike humanity's collective experience in any other part of the world" (6). It addresses the questions "Who' From where' [and] How'" with the objective of exploring "What was it, and what is it, to be an Islander'" (6).Thomas is not ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The name Kalaupapa refers to the area established by the Kingdom of Hawai'i on the north coast of Moloka'i in 1866 as a leprosarium to house patients who had contracted Hansen's disease (leprosy), in order to isolate them from the general population and reduce the spread of the disease. Kalaupapa continued to be used as a leprosarium until 1969, when the State of Hawai'i ended its program of forced segregation of patients with Hansen's disease after the development of antibiotics that rendered them noncontagious.John R K Clark's book on Kalaupapa is not what the title would lead you to expect: less than one-third of its pages deal with place-names, and it is not a comprehensive examination of the available ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Once there was a tree called "niu."2 Every part of the tree was useful for sustaining physical and spiritual life: the Islanders used the leaves to weave beautiful baskets, fans, hats, floor coverings, and thatch, and they used the trunks for house posts, drums, and wooden vessels. The Islanders drank the sweet nectar of the tree's coconuts and snacked on the firm flesh all day long; they made cooking sauces from the fermented flesh, wove strong rope from the husks, and made coconut milk to cook all kinds of delicious food dishes, desserts, and more. This was a tree that gave in all kinds of ways; every single part of the tree had a use. It was the most generous of trees, so the people called it "the tree of life." ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Engaged in regular trade with Europeans from the nineteenth century, the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea have an ongoing tradition of intercultural encounters (Connelly 2016, 2018).1 Whalers, explorers, traders, colonial officers, tourists, and missionaries have been weaving relational networks with Trobrianders for well over a hundred years. Early accounts are witness to the Trobrianders' predisposition to exchange things with dimdims, as foreigners are known in Kiriwina, the main Trobriand Island.2 These exchanges, though, are not to be seen as simple transactions in artifacts and commodities. They also involved concepts and schemas attached to the things exchanged, transforming along the way those very ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This article is a structured account of an experiment with online space and meeting spaces that we, as researchers in the Vā Moana–Pacific Spaces cluster at Auckland University of Technology (aut), carried out during and between lockdowns in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland during the covid-19 pandemic in 2020–2021. We reflected together on this experiment in real time (and more explicitly in hindsight) under the impact of successive lockdowns in Auckland and, in 2021, through coauthoring this paper.In 1995, Samoan writer and academic Albert Wendt described how maps and fictions belong to a spiral that encompasses Pacific stories "in the ever-moving present, in the Va, the Space-Between-All-Things which defines us and ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Directed by Ann Marie Kirk, Kai Piha: Nā Loko I'a captures the innate productivity of the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) people through their care for loko i'a (traditional Hawaiian fishponds) and their intimate relationship with 'āina (land, or that which feeds). Like a stream that runs from the uplands to the sea, this film flows through scenes that connect us from the past to the present while highlighting the ebbs and flows to restore these aquaculture systems. It begins with a traditional mo'olelo (story), then discusses the historical changes that occurred, followed by an introduction to the four loko i'a on O'ahu that are featured. Kirk weaves in narrative stories shared by kūpuna (elders, ancestors), people ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Corruption and patron-client politics are symbiotic, especially in postcolonial states like Papua New Guinea (PNG) where clientelist practices, such as gift-giving, cronyism, bribery, nepotism, and pork-barreling are prevalent. According to Derick W Brinkerhoff and Arthur A Goldsmith, pork barrel spending involves "appropriations of public funds for geographically targeted projects that do not serve the interests of any large portion of the country's citizenry [or electoral constituents], and that bypass usual funding procedures" (2002, 40). Such clientelist practices are entrenched within formal systems and tend to mimic formal rules—for instance, existing within an established bureaucracy—and therefore produce ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The year 2020 left Kanaky New Caledonia in a worrying situation, with an economic crisis linked to the pandemic, rising debt, and the country's 2022 budget not being approved and a yes/no referendum that placed two camps in an almost equal face-off. Turnout in the 2020 referendum was overwhelming at 85.69 percent, and out of 180,799 registered voters, 53.26 percent voted no to independence and 46.74 percent voted yes (High Commission of the French Republic in New Caledonia 2020). Adding to these troubles, as 2021 began, the tension around the sale of Vale's Southern nickel processing plant became increasingly violent. However, the country showed resilience. In March, an agreement was reached on the Southern plant ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: It was the most violent year. This phrase would encapsulate the year 2021 in Papua, as various sources documented. The International Coalition for Papua summarized the state of armed violence in Papua by stating that "as of 15 December 2021, the coalition documented 85 armed clashes, causing the deaths of 18 security force members and 23 members of the West Papua National Liberation Army (tpn pb). At least 28 civilians were killed due to armed clashes, while more than 60,000 indigenous Papuans continue to be internally displaced" (icp 2021a). If the number of armed clashes was eighty-five, that means around seven incidents occurred per month, which was higher than in previous years. While the average number of ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Papua New Guinea (PNG) slogged through a year of uncertainty and trials as it faced a triple threat from the combined forces of the covid-19 pandemic, economic stagnation (in no small part connected to covid-19), and a parliamentary power struggle that dispelled challenges against Prime Minister James Marape but will leave his government asking questions as they head into a general election in 2022. These issues, along with general misinformation regarding the corona-virus and accompanying vaccine hesitancy, as well as the deaths of several prominent leaders, made for a year to be forgotten.Last year's review of PNG in this publication noted that the country had mostly been passed over by the negative effects of ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: As in the previous year, Solomon Islands politics in 2021 continued to be fundamentally colored by the People's Republic of China (PRC)'s direct diplomatic presence in the country since September 2019 and the global upheaval caused by the covid-19 pandemic. The PRC is deliberately expanding its reach across the Pacific as it seeks to attain influence over what has long been a region dominated by other global powers. The deleterious effects of the covid-19 pandemic on economies across the globe have also caused some drawing back by countries hitherto deeply involved in the Pacific. These factors have been central to the policy of the ruling Democratic Coalition Government for Advancement (dcga) and the responses of ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The year 2021 saw an extension, if not an escalation, of the main political, economic, and health-related challenges of the previous year, underpinned mostly by the covid-19 pandemic. In addition, it exposed the heavy-handed nature of Fiji's current political landscape.The year began with covid-19 issues at the center of Fiji's focus, primarily the vaccination plans that were to be rolled out for the year. Permanent Secretary for Health Dr James Fong announced that a task force was being set up to administer the vaccine rollout plans (Nacei 2021b). Frontline workers, such as health-care, law enforcement, and airport workers, were the first to be allowed to receive their first dose of the covid-19 vaccine in early ... Read More PubDate: 2023-01-28T00:00:00-05:00
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