Pacific Series. Acton: ANU Press, 2017. 215 pp. (Maps, illustrations.) US$45.00, paper. ISBN 9781760461676.
Beginning with the volume’s title, it is useful to distinguish the semantic difference between the terms mobilities and migration, given that return migration is clearly also the topic of concern in this new important contribution to Pacific scholarship. Migration generally refers to the physical movement of someone moving, generally a long geographic distance and usually for the long term. Mobilities denotes the added meanings of multiple capabilities and modalities (practical, ideological, cultural, and conceptual) by which those movements occur. Mobilities of Return: Pacific Perspectives thus ethnographically illuminates the affective dimensions and sociocultural structures and dynamics of return mobilities in a diverse set of Pacific locations.
As John Taylor states in the introductory chapter, return mobilities (or migration), as a focus of social inquiry has “tended to take a back seat within more recent discussions of mobility, migration and transnationalism” (2). This volume is the first collective effort in Pacific scholarship to forefront return mobility as “a starting point for social enquiry rather than a middle or end point, post script or afterthought” (2). This point makes this expertly conceptualized and edited volume a most excellent and valuable anthropological contribution both to the global literature on return migration (i.e., mobilities of return) and Pacific ethnography.
The ethnographic fieldwork, involving both in-depth case studies and detailed ethnographic participant-observation, that researchers invested on this vital topic across eight different Pacific locations offer narratives of the affective experience of return at individual and sociological levels. This material informs each chapter’s well-developed analysis—and remind us of the pivotal role sociocultural factors play in return mobility—factors lacking in simplistic economic models that have conventionally been applied in analyzing return migration (e.g., viewing return as a consequence of failed migration, or the MIRAB model, which emphasizes the importance of migration and remittances to the functioning of Pacific Island States). Indeed the volume frames its own contribution against these previous models while emphasizing the ideational, historical, and sociocultural frameworks that motivate return mobility as an integral part of general patterns of mobility.
Each of the eight chapters that follow the introductory chapter, which summarizes the volume’s primary themes and ethnographic and theoretical contributions, is based on close-knit original ethnographic research, many focused around in-depth individual case studies within a specific island community or demographic subset. These include: 1) people of Banaba (a small island of Kiribati made uninhabitable by phosphate mining) who had been resettled in Fiji with multiple homes to which they connect in varied ways (Wolfgang Kempf); 2) people of Rotuma (a remote island of Fiji) who have worked out positive intra and international Rotuman strategies to maintain place, identity, and land in their “home” island of Rotuma (Alan Howard and Jan Rensel); 3) overseas-born at-risk Tongan youth whose families have sent them to Tonga for a kind of Tongan rehabilitation, an experience the chapter describes as fraught with multiple challenges and types of results depending on various factors analyzed (Helen Lee); 4) young Palauan-returnees with high educational degrees earned off-island, and altered identities, who return to Palau to make their contribution, only to be frustrated re-adapting to the ageist hierarchal structure of the home community (Rachana Agarwal); 5) diasporic Pacific Islanders in Australia contemplating and explaining the various shifting contexts by which they perceive and experience different places (Samoa, Papua New Guinea, etc.) as home (Kirsten McGavin); 6) mobile HIV-positive women of Tanah Papua, Indonesia who return to their home villages and families to rely on their kin networks as they seek treatment, a process that involves multiple social challenges (Leslie Butt, Jenny Munro, and Gerdha Numbery); 7) people of Mota, a remote island in north Vanuatu, who use strategic and resilient ways to turn their challenges and adversities into matters of cultural pride and identity (Thorgeir Kolshus); and finally, 8) the indigenous Amis people of Taiwan, whose trans-local existence provide community stability and cultural resilience (Shu-Ling Yeh).
There is solid anthropological knowledge of the cultural communities and their social structures, and in-depth ethnographic fieldwork on the topic supports the close-knit ethnographic analysis developed in each chapter. Some chapters rely more on individual case studies, while others rely more on ethnographic analysis based on extensive participant-observation. All chapters rely solely on qualitative data and analysis. One exception is Howard and Rensel’s chapter on Rotuma, which includes broad-based surveys that complement the qualitative discussion with quantitative data about the patterns and trends they describe, and is the chapter that most pointedly references deviancies of economic models to explain return migration. Regardless of the various ethnographic methods applied, all chapters provide valuable perspectives and information grounded in immersive fieldwork in the communities concerned. Each chapter describes return mobility within a particular situation of human and cultural interest and develops analytical frameworks worthy of consideration of application in future return mobility research.
Some examples of concepts or frameworks developed and applied in the volume include “diversification of return,” as found among the Banabans (Kempf); return mobility as “rite of passage” (Lee); how agency and reconstruction of selfhood may play a part of the return experience (Agarwal); the fluidity and context specificity of defining the home to which one returns (McGavin); social stigma associated with mobility in the case of HIV-positive women of Tanah Papua, Indonesia (Butt, Munro, and Numbery); mobility as part of cultural resilience (Kolshus); community projects and events as the positive catalyst for binding and maintaining trans-local community, which necessarily also facilitates return mobilities (Yeh).
In summary, Mobilities of Return is about the multiple reasons, and methods by which people return (for whatever length of time) to their ancestral Pacific homelands, the situational and structural dimensions of their returns, and the effects, including any challenges, these factors have on returnee experiences. The breadth of Pacific places and circumstances covered and the analytical frames developed are diverse and compelling, though certainly not encyclopedic, which means they can be expected to stimulate further scholarship on this important topic.
Micah Van der Ryn
American Samoa Community College, Malaeimi, American Samoa