Pacific Perspectives. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. ix, 207 pp. (Illustrations.) US$135.00, cloth; US$35.00, ebook. ISBN 9781800736269.
This timely edited collection began with the 2006 observation of Pacific architectural spaces in Germany and other widely dispersed locations around the globe. This led to discussions at the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania meetings and the Auckland University of Technology Vā Moana, Pacific Spaces research cluster that produced this volume. The editors’ introduction describes how reviewers’ comments developed the theme of translation and transmutation across disciplines, and Western and Moana views and activities and how, in this collection, “trans-” indicates overcoming differences in compounding and creating pairs of friends and companions (Māori hoa or Samoan/Tongan soa) in vā “in-between” spaces. The chapters employ vā and the unitary tāvā time-space reality we all inhabit to analyze movement and pairings rather than culture.
Brown begins the collection with a history that traces the shift from the search for singular truths in early ethnology and anthropology to the dynamism and pluralism of professional Māori architectural anthropology—and from traditionalization advocating for Māori sovereign rights and postmodern hybridity to activist collaborations with local tribe and community members—thus from an interpretive to an applied approach using flexible rather than fixed concepts of relativity. Greentree’s second chapter explains the traditional joining of the rounded-ended tala with the gable-like itu section of roofs whose domes trace the outlines of the heavens. Beyond contemporary functional priorities of modern construction techniques and codes, the joint’s construction has its own social history involving negotiation, much like the joint itself. The joining entails traditional specialized knowledge and skill, allowing the structure to be more easily moved, and involves a kind of recognized deceit since there is no actual joint; rather, the meeting is fastened by multiple lashings, which make the joint stronger and more flexible, beautiful, and poetic.
Tuagalu’s third chapter elucidates the concept of vā or relational, creative, between-space as a vā-field of forces. Involving rivalry, vā requires nurture and care. Comprising point-field spatiality rather than absolute space, in diaspora and otherwise, distance makes no difference. Instead generative (mana), restrictive (tapu), and socially binding (alofa) forces create different kinds of vā. Reflected in architectural and chiefly ritual orchestrations of energy flows, the vā-forces of vā-fields meld sacred and social vā in the fabrication of extended communal networks. Allen then considers Samoan vā as dynamic mechanism in relation to village malae open spaces involving public-private dualism. Human ritual and gift-giving activities across malae unite the relative fixed representational mental spaces with socially active and creative spaces in a dynamic process.
Culberson’s following chapter provides a first-hand personal account of a Māori woodcarving workshop in an old shoe factory over a five-year period. Four experienced carvers trained anyone who cared to learn, though most were there to earn money in government work programs making a variety of artefacts for public and private architectural projects. Observing tikanga traditional protocols, the shop had its own life force that brought people together in aroha caring conviviality to learn attention and equanimity—space-making at the intersection of government, economic, tribal, and individual interests. Jenner’s and Refiti’s contribution then elucidates the use of human sacrifice for architectural production in the Pacific and in ancient Greece to re-animate the dead and consecrate spaces to elicit and guide ancestral mana for the benefit of common people. Ka‘ili then provides a deep history of the heiau—a megalithic sacred place of worship—in Maunawila, which was a temple of healing built in the Hawaiian archipelago by famed navigator Pa‘ao, who came from Samoa, Tonga, and likely Tahiti. Ka‘ili recounts studies conducted with his students showing that Maunawila Heiau was also a solar observatory marking solstices and equinoxes, measuring and ensnaring temporal currents. The heiau’s history and contemporary rededication instantiates the healing power of Pacific trans-indigeneity.
Miller then details how Rimajol Marshall Islander families and communities create Aelon Kein Ad (Our Islands) by transmutating indigenous social spaces into the houses and churches they inhabit in northwest Arkansas, where they migrated for the jobs and affordability, demonstrating their expansive and generative transnational resilience and agency. Hoete, chair of Te Maru o Hinemihi, a collaborative expert and guardianship organization working for the Māori whare (carved house) Hinemihi, recounts the organization’s activities in the movement of what was originally created for meetings and performances for Māori and tourists in New Zealand (Te Wairoa) but was then purchased and taken to Clandonal Park, England, where it connected local, national, and transnational Māori and non-Māori alike. A listed building consent led Te Maru to propose a restoration project that would return the original carvings to New Zealand in exchange for new, unprecedented whare-for-export. The collaborative restoration seeks to answer questions about location(s), decor, layout, materials, and genealogy that forgo traditional community authority while maintaining tikanga custom whereby whare are ancestors whose carvings have their unique mauri (life principle), as does Hinemihi. Engels-Schwarzpaul then considers five different Māori and Samoan travelling houses that voyaged to Germany, the UK, and the US whose translations from ambassadors of social connection and movement to isolated, immobilized representational specimens was influenced by the degree to which connections with source communities were maintained. The translations themselves charge the houses with energy that enables them to animate the relations they bring together, facilitating collaborations, re-translations, and returns to vital taonga (treasures).
Refiti’s and Engels-Schwarzpaul’s conclusion points out that this collection seeks to draw together recent threads in discussions of the relation between architecture and anthropology that return to concerns with embodied human experience and how social exchanges are created through architectural spaces. More varied and complex exchanges are produced in viewing cultural encounters rather than cultural differences. The authors show that in Moana languages space and time are inseparable, involve point-field rather than abstract static spatiality, and thus entail creating relational connections that produce mana that shapes and strengthens communities, which this collection advances. This brilliant collection also includes a very useful glossary.
Doug Dalton
Longwood University, Farmville