Interdisciplinarity and Pacific Studies: Roots and Routes

This paper discusses the approaches generally grouped under the heading of “interdisciplinarity.” There is no intention to arrive at a perfect, authoritative definition of interdisciplinarity, but rather to assess the contribution those approaches might make. The essay begins by briefly covering some generalizations about Pacific knowledges and considers the European academic framework before and during the emergence of disciplines. It then outlines that emergence, reviews a range of ideas about the nature of interdisciplinarity and related methodologies, and examines the relationship between interdisciplinarity and area studies. Finally the paper attempts to establish the specific identity of one Pacific studies program, that of Victoria University of Wellington, considering some possible obstacles and impediments to its development, and presenting some suggestions for possible program orientation and content

Polynesian origins and destinations: reading the Pacific with S Percy Smith

Stephenson Percy Smith, militia member, surveyor, ethnologist and ethnographer, and founder of the Polynesian Society and its Journal, had a major impact on the New Zealand of his day and on a world-wide community of Polynesianist scholars. Whereas a good deal of attention and critique has been given to his work on Māori and the settlement of New Zealand, the purpose of this thesis is to explore those of his writings substantially devoted to the island Pacific outside New Zealand. To that end, I assemble a single Text comprising all of those writings and proceed to read it in terms of itself but also in the light of the period in which it was written and of its intellectual context. My method, largely based on elements of the approach proposed by Roland Barthes in the early 1970s, involves first presenting a representation of that Text and then reading within it a historical figure, the author of its components, as a character in that Text. Before doing so, in a Prologue I set out the broad current understanding of the patterns of settlement of the Pacific and some of the origins of Smith’s racial framing. In order to establish context, the early chapters outline his life and career and the intellectual framework, European and New Zealand, within which he thought and wrote as well as the early history of the Hawaiki that would come to absorb him. The following chapters set out my representation and reading of the Smith Text and open up new perspectives on aspects of Smith’s concepts of race, of relations among those he conceives as races, and of the settlement of the Pacific. My reading reveals Smith’s concern to separate his Polynesians from the other ‘races’ with which they came into contact in order to preserve their integrity and purity. In particular, in exploring the relationship between possible origins and a certain destination, it throws light on the nature of his quest for Hawaiki, the Polynesian homeland, and, in particular, his drive to locate it beyond and prior to Polynesian contact with those other ‘races’. I conclude that, at least in one sense, the real origin of Smith’s Polynesians lies in the racial classification of Oceania that emerged in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and still flourished in the twentieth. I end with a vignette of Smith’s presence in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand

The Great Hip Hop Grant Scandal

The key aspects and features of the Great Hip Hop Grant scandal in New Zealand involving Fuarosa and Saralia Tamati, mother and daughter of Sainoan origin are discussed. The three dominant discourses in the public narrative of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in Aotearoa New Zealand are highlighted

The New Oceania: A Selected Bibliography

This selection of essays, addresses, and related material by Albert Wendt concentrates on the major themes associated with the new Oceania, an enormously influential concept most fully developed in the 1976 essay “Towards a New Oceania” ( hereafter “New Oceania”). Aspects of that essay are further discussed in my article “A Search for the New Oceania” in this issue of The Contemporary Pacific. A full Wendt bibliography to January 2003 by Paul Sharrad and Karen M Peacock, to which I am indebted, appeared in The Contemporary Pacific 15:378–420. A small number of my identifications of editions differ from those of Sharrad and Peacock

μ-Actetato-1:2κ2 O:O′-tribromido-2κ3 Br-(5,5,7,12,12,14-hexa­methyl-1,4,8,11-tetra­aza­cyclo­tetra­deca-1,7-diene-1κ4 N)dizinc(II)

In the title compound, [Zn2Br3(CH3COO)(C16H32N4)], one ZnII atom has a distorted square-planar coordination formed by the four macrocyclic N atoms with an acetate O atom in the apical position and the other ZnII atom has a tetra­hedral coordination environment formed by three Br atoms and one O acetate atom. The two ZnII atoms are linked by an acetate bridge. In the crystal, mol­ecules are linked into centrosymmetric dimers with graph-set motifs R 2 2(16) by an N—H⋯Br inter­action. The mol­ecular configuration is stabilized by an intra­molecular N—H⋯Br hydrogen bond

Bromido(meso-5,5,7,12,12,14-hexa­methyl-1,4,8,11-tetra­aza­cyclo­tetra­deca-1,7-diene)copper(II) bromide dihydrate

There are two formula units (Z′ = 2) in the asymmmetric unit of the title compound, [CuBr(C16H32N4)]Br·2H2O. The title crystal consists of two [Cu(C16H32N4)]2+ cations, two Br− anions and four uncoordinated water mol­ecules. The metal atom is five-coordinate square pyramidal, with a long apical Cu—Br bond [2.9734 (11) and 2.9229 (11) Å in the two cations]. The two cations form a loosely associated dimer through the formation of hydrogen bonds between both N—H and O—H and Br−. In addition, there is a network of N—H⋯Br, O—H⋯Br and N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, leading to the formation of a chain structure

(meso-5,7,7,12,14,14-Hexamethyl-1,4,8,11-tetra­aza­cyclo­tetra­deca-4,11-diene)nickel(II) dibromide dihydrate

The asymmetric unit of the title compound, [Ni(C16H32N4)]Br2·2H2O, consists of one half [Ni(C16H32N4)]2+ cation, one Br− anion and one water mol­ecule of crystallization. The NiII ion lies on an inversion centre in a square-planar environment formed by the four macrocyclic ligand N atoms. In the crystal structure, the cations, anions and water mol­ecules are linked via inter­molecular N—H⋯Br and O—H⋯Br hydrogen bonds, forming discrete chains with set-graph motif D(2)D 2 2(7)D 2 1(3)D 3 2(8). The water mol­ecules and Br− ions are linked with set-graph motif R 4 2(8)

Working in the Space Between: Pacific Artists in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Paper submitted to The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific; based on the indigenous Oceanic concept, va, a space marked by tension and transformation and by confluences and connectionsUsing critiques of essentialism and pluralism as a backdrop, in this essay I survey the works of eleven Pacific Island visual artists, and consider the cultural space they occupy in pursuing their creative practice in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Although a variety of concepts have been deployed by commentators and the artists themselves to describe that space—such as balance, blending, duality, synthesis, fusion, hybridity, liminality, interface, creolization, and vā—I advocate the use of sociologist Fredric Thrasher’s concept of interstitiality to better understand the nature of the cultural and productive space occupied by these artists

Mabo: the inside story. by Kathy Whimp

tag=1 data=Mabo: the inside story. by Kathy Whimp tag=2 data=Whimp, Kathy tag=3 data=Arena, tag=5 data=9 tag=6 data=February/March 1994 tag=7 data=16-20. tag=8 data=MABO%ABORIGINAL LAND RIGHTS tag=9 data=NATIVE TITLE BILL tag=10 data=Traditionally, Aboriginal politics has usually shunned compromise, perhaps because compromise has rarely offered very much. Provided by MICAH, Canberra. tag=11 data=1994/6/4 tag=12 data=94/0244 tag=13 data=CABTraditionally, Aboriginal politics has usually shunned compromise, perhaps because compromise has rarely offered very much. Provided by MICAH, Canberra