Pacific Perspectives, v. 2. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. vi, 248 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-78238-350-5.
In focussing on Pacific Futures, the ten authors of this edited volume intend to break with recurrent tropes in the regional scholarship. Their main collective contribution is in convincing the reader of the analytical limits of explanations based on essentialist culture or tradition that tend to locate Pacific peoples in the past, or in teleological discourses of development and modernity, which merely reflect the Euro-American present. For the editor, Rollason, present-day activities must be understood from “a perspective rooted in the aspirations or projects of Pacific people” (1). The essays that follow present a range of possibilities for envisaging the future, methodologically and ethnographically.
The first two chapters offer hope and imagination as alternatives to the explanatory limitations of cultural relativism. Illustrated with narratives collected amongst the Kewa of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), Josephides understands hope as an existential human condition. Her speculative reflections on hope and imagination prove difficult to grasp in the abstract, and her essay is perhaps best read as an exploratory commentary on her ethnography, to challenge interpretations based on cultural continuity, or essentialist Melanesian personhood.
Whilst Josephides imagines hopeful horizons of “pure possibility,” Rollason unearths a sharply contrasting situation of extreme hopelessness. He reopens the case file of a historic incident, an apparent suicide by Buliga, a charismatic seer and leader of a movement reduced to a “savage cargo cult” by colonial observers. Rollason attempts to rethink Buliga’s motives for this drastic act from a postcolonial and postcultural perspective. Whilst it is impossible to know what was in Buliga’s mind when he resolved to kill himself rather than be killed, Rollason succeeds in so far as he demonstrates the limits of culturally essentialist explanations of action.
The remaining contributions present insights into Pacific projects on islanders’ own terms. One promising theme arising from the subsequent two chapters is the possibility of comprehending action as forms of creative play. Lind describes how urban migrants from Paama, Vanuatu, understand kinship as like a “game” (gem), in which inventive strategies, such as adoptions, open up “roads” (rod) for future prospective action (73). The challenges of urban living present new dilemmas and grounds for moral contestation; whilst some seek to contain their economic means through contraception, others accuse them of selfishly denying their obligation to “replace” their antecedents, and disrupting clan reproduction. Pickles shows how people deal with uncertainty in Goroka, in the Highlands of PNG, through betting on cards. For Gorokans, the right transactions made in good faith at the right moment, both within the game and in everyday life, can bring future prosperity. Everyday interactions and transactions understood as constituting “rounds” (raun) are like episodic instances of the tactical possibilities opened up by “roads.”
The two essays that follow present Christian reflections on ancestral pasts, in envisioning a successful and united future. Handman sees the “Lost Tribes” narratives of Christians in Waria Valley, PNG, who claim to originate from ancient Israelites, as aimed not at recovering an authentic past, but at the promise of a unity that can overcome denominational and ethnic conflicts, and a critical alternative to the failings of state nationalism.
Due to their ancestors’ rejection of Christianity, Ambrymese islanders in Vanuatu believe themselves cursed, and Eriksen contrasts their different projects and strategies aimed at a more prosperous future. Whilst one sought to lift the curse through Pentecostal healing and redemption, another hoped to achieve unity through a social movement that aligns ancestral kastom(traditional, or indigenous knowledge) with Christianity, to attract foreign investment in a development project.
In contrast to critiques of national and ethnic identities, Pascht shows how national elites in the Cook Islands renegotiate forms of traditional authority to legitimate political projects. Chiefly title is positively valued, and associated with well-being and the environmental management required for a secure future. Schieder also explores discourses of political elites, but these ones are associated with the endemic conflict and instability of the “coup culture” of Fiji. Schieder argues that powerful Fijians deploy and manipulate colonial categories of intra- and inter-ethnic, as well as class, identities as rhetorical devices in political struggles and rivalries.
Robinson provides the perspective of the Dread, a Rastafari movement within the Ngāti Porou tribe in New Zealand, who, like the “Lost Tribes” of PNG, see religious theologies and indigenous Māori worldviews as compatible, and promising a unified future. The Dread also see no necessary conflict in incorporating Pākehā skills and technologies into their custodianship of their ancestral lands.
In the final chapter, Hereniko brings an insider perspective to the heated anxieties and dilemmas arising with the sea level, and the reality of climate change, in Rotuma and Tuvalu. Hereniko calls on his fellow islanders to rise above their doubts and feelings of helplessness amidst the global scale of the problem, in order to make determined and concerted efforts to secure their future.
This volume will be of interest to anthropologists of the Pacific region, and to those exploring related themes of hope, faith, or desire. In addition to offering enticing ethnographic insights into contemporary concerns in the Pacific region, the major success of this collection is in showing the limitations of dominant explanations of people’s activities as either continuity of culture and tradition, or inevitable submission to homogenizing globalization.
The plural “futures” of the book’s title highlights the value of ethnographic research into the diversity of projects of Oceanic peoples, but also the indeterminacy and weakness of future as a singular or abstract analytical concept. But in their deliberate break from the slippages of dominant temporal tropes consigning people to a traditional past, or to a Western present, the authors of this collection make an important step forward, by allowing Pacific people to articulate their aspirations in their own terms.
Rachel E. Smith
University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
pp. 498-500