The River, the Water and the Crocodile in Marovo Lagoon

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Climate Change in the Islands and the Highlands: Melanesian Manifestations, Experiences and Actions

Under embargo until: 2020-09-28Pacific Islanders have often been portrayed as ‘helpless victims’ in the popular media because they suffer the consequences of climate changes mainly caused by other, larger nations. In terms of media attention and sheer urgency, however, it is predominantly Oceania’s low-lying atolls that find themselves on the ‘climate change frontline’. Climate change is both a set of environmental phenomena, experienced local reality, and a global political discourse. Anthropologists who work in Melanesia, whether in highlands or islands, find themselves in a situation where direct local experiences of the effects of global climate change are integral to the fieldwork. An account of environmental observations and perceptions of climate change in the Marovo Lagoon of the western Solomon Islands follows, based on several years of fieldwork from 1986. The political background for the rise of Melanesian ambition and influence on the global climate-change scene is firmly connected to various arenas provided by the United Nations.acceptedVersio

Ulla Hasager & Jonathan Friedman (eds.): Hawai'i - Return to Nationhood

Ulla Hasager & Jonathan Friedman (eds.): Hawai'i - Return to Nationhood Anmeldes af Edvard Hvidin

European Union development strategy in the Pacific

Study Report for the European Parliament Development Committee, undertaken by ECOPAS (European Consortium for Pacific Studies).Development in the Pacific region is uneven, multi-layered and challenging. The European Union’s development cooperation with the Pacific is significant; in fact the EU is the second largest donor of development assistance to the region. This study, implemented by the European Consortium for Pacific Studies, analyses the current and future contexts for European Union engagement in development cooperation with the Pacific, and proposes elements of a renewed EU development strategy for the region. From a Pacific perspective, the question of defining a new EU development strategy is as much a matter of defining new and equal partnerships through which Pacific development strategies can be supported. Rising to the challenge of re-imagining EU-Pacific relations will require a good deal of work and reflection. The Pacific clearly constitutes a geopolitical context whose importance is markedly set to grow in significance, and there is a clear rationale for the EU to commit further resources to support its interests and activities in the region. In particular, the EU should enhance and deepen its institutional knowledge and means of drawing upon existing expertise on ‘Pacific Ways’.Publisher PD

Landesque capital as an alternative to food storage in Melanesia: Irrigated taro terraces in New Georgia, Solomon Islands

In the Pacific islands, subsistence diversity made possible continuous production of food while welldeveloped exchange networks redistributed these foodstuffs as well as items within the prestige economy. All these were aspects of the ‘storage structures’ that enabled social and nutritional value to be saved, accumulated and later mobilised. In addition, there were investments in the land, landesque capital, which secured future food surpluses and so provided an alternative to food storage, in a region where the staple foods were mostly perishable, yams excepted, and food preservation was difficult. Landesque capital included such long-term improvements to productivity as terraces, mounds, irrigation channels, drainage ditches, soil structural changes and tree planting. These investments provided an effective alternative to food storage and made possible surplus production for exchange purposes. As an example, in the New Georgia group of the western Solomon Islands irrigated terraces, termed ruta, were constructed for growing the root crop taro (Colocasia esculenta). Surplus taro from ruta enabled inland groups to participate in regional exchange networks and so obtain the shell valuables that were produced by coastal groups. In this paper, we reconstruct how this exchange system worked in New Georgia using ethno-archaeological evidence, we chart its prehistoric rise and post-colonial fall, and we outline the factors that constrained its long-term expansion.Our gratitude for support during earlier fieldwork in the New Georgia group has already been expressed in previous publications. The 2014 project was supported by the Smuts Fund and Foreign Travel Fund, University of Cambridge, and by St John’s College, Cambridge.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Maney at http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1749631414Y.000000004

Between Knowledges: Pacific Studies and Academic Disciplines

In this paper, I critically examine a number of notions about interdisciplinary research approaches to the challenges posed by the world today. I juxtapose this critique with a discussion of interdisciplinary developments in Pacific studies, raising questions as to how deeper dialogues between academic disciplines and the worldviews of Pacific Islanders may be reached. While interdisciplinarity is widely seen as a politically correct agenda for contemporary research on processes of globalization and development, caution is needed against prevailing optimism about the potential for solving multidisciplinary problems through interdisciplinary innovation. Such optimism may overrate the potentials of broad (as opposed to deep) research approaches and may reflect disregard, if not arrogance, toward the complexity of the matters addressed. The drive in some European countries for research on “sustainable development” indicates close ties between interdisciplinary aspirations and the bureaucratic ambitions of research administrators. Under such circumstances interdisciplinarity becomes an object of institutional conflict and internal debate between institutions, as well as between bureaucrats and scientists, more than a question of creative epistemological contact between plural knowledges in and beyond academic disciplines in a search for increased knowledge more generally. The avoidance of such pitfalls in the further development of Pacific studies requires close attention to and appreciation of initiatives from within Oceania, coming from beyond the domains of conventional disciplines. In this paper, such paths toward interdisciplinarity are exemplified in a discussion of epistemological encounters between Oceanic and western knowledges, and with reference to the emerging currents of “Native Pacific Cultural Studies.