Bellona Island Beliefs and Rituals PDF Download

Author: Torben Monberg
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824811471
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
"Monberg's account of the Bellonese religion is descriptive ethnography at its best. It is rich in detail, and the organization of the material gives a coherent view of Bellonese culture and society. While not a comparative study in itself, it provides an abundance of data that will be invaluable for other works that are more comparative in nature." -from the Editor's Note Pacific Islands Monograph Series No.9 Center for Pacific Islands Studies, UH

Author: Matt Tomlinson
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824880978
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Christian theologians in the Pacific Islands see culture as the grounds on which one understands God. In this pathbreaking book, Matt Tomlinson engages in an anthropological conversation with the work of “contextual theologians,” exploring how the combination of Pacific Islands culture and Christianity shapes theological dialogues. Employing both scholarly research and ethnographic fieldwork, the author addresses a range of topics: from radical criticisms of biblical stories as inappropriate for Pacific audiences to celebrations of traditional gods such as Tagaloa as inherently Christian figures. This book presents a symphony of voices—engaged, critical, prophetic—from the contemporary Pacific’s leading religious thinkers and suggests how their work articulates with broad social transformations in the region. Each chapter in this book focuses on a distinct type of culturally driven theological dialogue. One type is between readers and texts, in which biblical scholars suggest new ways of reading, and even rewriting, the Bible so it becomes more meaningful in local terms. A second kind concerns the state of the church and society. For example, feminist theologians and those calling for “prophetic” action on social problems propose new conversations about how people in Oceania should navigate difficult times. A third kind of discussion revolves around identity, emphasizing what makes Oceania unique and culturally coherent. A fourth addresses the problems of climate change and environmental degradation to sacred lands by encouraging “eco-theological” awareness and interconnection. Finally, many contextual theologians engage with the work of other disciplines— prominently, anthropology—as they develop new discourse on God, people, and the future of Oceania. Contextual theology allows people in Oceania to speak with God and fellow humans through the idiom of culture in a distinctly Pacific way. Tomlinson concludes, however, that the most fruitful topic of dialogue might not be culture, but rather the nature of dialogue itself. Written in an accessible, engaging style and presenting innovative findings, this book will interest students and scholars of anthropology, world religion, theology, globalization, and Pacific studies.

Author: Diana Looser
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082484775X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Since the late 1960s, drama by Pacific Island playwrights has flourished throughout Oceania. Although many Pacific Island cultures have a broad range of highly developed indigenous performance forms—including oral narrative, clowning, ritual, dance, and song—scripted drama is a relatively recent phenomenon. Emerging during a period of region-wide decolonization and indigenous self-determination movements, most of these plays reassert Pacific cultural perspectives and performance techniques in ways that employ, adapt, and challenge the conventions and representations of Western theater. Drawing together discussions in theater and performance studies, historiography, Pacific studies, and postcolonial studies, Remaking Pacific Pasts offers the first full-length comparative study of this dynamic and expanding body of work. It introduces readers to the field with an overview of significant works produced throughout the region over the past fifty years, including plays in English and in French, as well as in local vernaculars and lingua francas. The discussion traces the circumstances that have given rise to a particular modern dramatic tradition in each site and also charts routes of theatrical circulation and shared artistic influences that have woven connections beyond national borders. This broad survey contextualizes the more detailed case studies that follow, which focus on how Pacific dramatists, actors, and directors have used theatrical performance to critically engage the Pacific’s colonial and postcolonial histories. Chapters provide close readings of selected plays from Hawai‘i, Aotearoa/New Zealand, New Caledonia/Kanaky, and Fiji that treat events, figures, and legacies of the region’s turbulent past: Captain Cook’s encounters, the New Zealand Wars, missionary contact, the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, and the Fiji coups. The book explores how, in their remembering and retelling of these pasts, theater artists have interrogated and revised repressive and marginalizing models of historical understanding developed through Western colonialism or exclusionary indigenous nationalisms, and have opened up new spaces for alternative historical narratives and ways of knowing. In so doing, these works address key issues of identity, genealogy, representation, political parity, and social unity, encouraging their audiences to consider new possibilities for present and future action. This study emphasizes the contribution of artistic production to social and political life in the contemporary Pacific, demonstrating how local play production has worked to facilitate processes of creative nation building and the construction of modern regional imaginaries. Remaking Pacific Pasts makes valuable contributions to Pacific literature, world theater history, Pacific studies, and postcolonial studies. The book opens up to comparative critical discussion a geopolitical region that has received little attention from theater and performance scholars, extending our understanding of the form and function of theater in different cultural contexts. It enriches existing discussions in postcolonial studies about the decolonizing potential of literary and artistic endeavors, and it suggests how theater might function as a mode of historical enquiry and debate, adding to discussions about ways in which Pacific histories might be developed, challenged, or recalibrated. Consequently, the book stimulates new discussions in Pacific studies where theater has, to date, suffered from a lack of critical exposure. Carefully researched and original in its approach, Remaking Pacific Pasts will appeal to scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduate students in theater and performance studies and Pacific Islands studies; it will also be of interest to cultural historians and to specialists in cultural studies and postcolonial studies.

Author: Richard Moyle
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824864387
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book, based on fieldwork spanning a decade, gives a comprehensive analysis of the musical life of a unique Polynesian community whose geographical isolation, together with a local ban on missionaries and churches, combine to allow its 600 members to maintain a level of traditional cultural practices unique to the region. Takü is arguably the only location where traditional Polynesian religion continues to be practiced. This book explores the many ways in which spirit activities impact on both domestic and ritual life, how group singing and dancing give audible and visible expression to a variety of religious beliefs, and how spirit mediums relay songs and dances from the recent dead. Takü’s community is well able to articulate the significance of their own strong performance tradition, and this book allows expert singers and dancers to speak passionately for themselves on subjects they understand intimately. Musical ethnographies from the Pacific are rare. Like Moyle’s earlier landmark volumes on Samoan and Tongan music, and also his trilogy on Australian Aboriginal music, this work will be of immense value to Pacific studies and will assume a place among the recognized staples of ethnomusicological research.

Author: Anne Perez Hattori
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824828080
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
A variety of cross-cultural collisions and collusions—sometimes amusing, sometimes tragic, but always complex—resulted from the U.S. Navy’s introduction of Western health and sanitation practices to Guam’s native population. In Colonial Dis-Ease, Anne Perez Hattori examines early twentieth-century U.S. military colonialism through the lens of Western medicine and its cultural impact on the Chamorro people. In four case studies, Hattori considers the histories of Chamorro leprosy patients exiled to Culion Leper Colony in the Philippines, hookworm programs for children, the regulation of native midwives and nurses, and the creation and operation of the Susana Hospital for women and children. Changes to Guam’s traditional systems of health and hygiene placed demands not only on Chamorro bodies, but also on their cultural values, social relationships, political controls, and economic expectations. Hattori effectively demonstrates that the new health projects signified more than a benevolent interest in hygiene and the philanthropic sharing of medical knowledge. Rather the navy’s health care regime in Guam was an important vehicle through which U.S. colonial power and moral authority over Chamorros was introduced and entrenched. Medical experts, navy doctors, and health care workers asserted their scientific knowledge as well as their administrative might and in the process became active participants in the colonization of Guam.

Author: David W. Akin
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824838157
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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This book is a political history of the island of Malaita in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate from 1927, when the last violent resistance to colonial rule was crushed, to 1953 and the inauguration of the island’s first representative political body, the Malaita Council. At the book’s heart is a political movement known as Maasina Rule, which dominated political affairs in the southeastern Solomons for many years after World War II. The movement’s ideology, kastom, was grounded in the determination that only Malaitans themselves could properly chart their future through application of Malaitan sensibilities and methods, free from British interference. Kastom promoted a radical transformation of Malaitan lives by sweeping social engineering projects and alternative governing and legal structures. When the government tried to suppress Maasina Rule through force, its followers brought colonial administration on the island to a halt for several years through a labor strike and massive civil resistance actions that overflowed government prison camps. David Akin draws on extensive archival and field research to present a practice-based analysis of colonial officers’ interactions with Malaitans in the years leading up to and during Maasina Rule. A primary focus is the place of knowledge in the colonial administration. Many scholars have explored how various regimes deployed “colonial knowledge” of subject populations in Asia and Africa to reorder and rule them. The British imported to the Solomons models for “native administration” based on such an approach, particularly schemes of indirect rule developed in Africa. The concept of “custom” was basic to these schemes and to European understandings of Melanesians, and it was made the lynchpin of government policies that granted limited political roles to local ideas and practices. Officers knew very little about Malaitan cultures, however, and Malaitans seized the opportunity to transform custom into kastom, as the foundation for a new society. The book’s overarching topic is the dangerous road that colonial ignorance paved for policy makers, from young cadets in the field to high officials in distant Fiji and London. Today kastom remains a powerful concept on Malaita, but continued confusion regarding its origins, history, and meanings hampers understandings of contemporary Malaitan politics and of Malaitan people’s ongoing, problematic relations with the state.

Author: David A. Chappell
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824838203
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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In 1853, France annexed the Melanesian islands of New Caledonia to establish a convict colony and strategic port of call. Unlike other European settler–dominated countries in the Pacific, the territory’s indigenous people remained more numerous than immigrants for over a century. Despite military conquest, land dispossession, and epidemics, its thirty language groups survived on tribal reserves and nurtured customary traditions and identities. In addition, colonial segregation into the racial category of canaques helped them to find new unity. When neighboring anglophone colonies began to decolonize in the 1960s, France retained tight control of New Caledonia for its nickel reserves, reversing earlier policies that had granted greater autonomy for the islands. Anticolonial protest movements culminated in the 1980s Kanak revolt, after which two negotiated peace accords resulted in autonomy in a progressive form and officially recognized Kanak identity for the first time. But the near-parity of settlers and Kanak continues to make nation-building a challenging task, despite a 1998 agreement among Kanak and settlers to seek a “common destiny.” This study examines the rise in New Caledonia of rival identity formations that became increasingly polarized in the 1970s and examines in particular the emergence of activist discourses in favor of Kanak cultural nationalism and land reform, multiracial progressive sovereignty, or a combination of both aspirations. Most studies of modern New Caledonia focus on the violent 1980s uprising, which left deep scars on local memories and identities. Yet the genesis of that rebellion began with a handful of university students who painted graffiti on public buildings in 1969, and such activists discussed many of the same issues that face the country’s leadership today. After examining the historical, cultural, and intellectual background of that movement, this work draws on new research in public and private archives and interviews with participants to trace the rise of a nationalist movement that ultimately restored self-government and legalized indigenous aspirations for sovereignty in a local citizenship with its own symbols. Kanak now govern two out of three provinces and have an important voice in the Congress of New Caledonia, but they are a slight demographic minority. Their quest for nationhood must achieve consensus with the immigrant communities, much as the founders of the independence movement in the 1970s recommended.

Author: Vicente M. Diaz
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824860462
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
In the vein of an emergent Native Pacific brand of cultural studies, Repositioning the Missionary critically examines the cultural and political stakes of the historic and present-day movement to canonize Blessed Diego Luis de San Vitores (1627–1672), the Spanish Jesuit missionary who was martyred by Mata'pang of Guam while establishing the Catholic mission among the Chamorros in the Mariana Islands. The work juxtaposes official, popular, and critical perspectives of the movement to complicate prevailing ideas about colonialism, historiography, and indigenous culture and identity in the Pacific. The book is divided into three sections. The first, "From Above, Working the Native," focuses exclusively on the narratological reconsolidation of official Roman Catholic Church viewpoints as staked in the historic (seventeenth century) and contemporary (twentieth century) movements to canonize San Vitores, including the symbolic costs of these viewpoints for Native Chamorro cultural and political possibilities not in line with Church views. Section two, "From Below: Working the Saint," shifts attention and perspective to local, competing forms of Chamorro piety. In their effort to canonize San Vitores, Natives also rework the saint to negotiate new cultural and social canons for themselves and in ways that produce new meanings for their island. "From Behind: Transgressive Histories" shifts from official and lay Roman and Chamorro Catholic viewpoints to the author’s own critical project of rendering alternative portrayals of San Vitores and Mata'pang. Theoretically innovative and provocative, humorous, and inspired, Repositioning the Missionary melds poststructuralist, feminist, Native studies, and cultural studies analytic and political frameworks with an intensely personal voice to model a new critical interdisciplinary approach to the study of indigenous culture and history.

Author: John Patrick Taylor
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824864905
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The Other Side is the first major ethnographic and historical study of the Sia Raga people of north Pentecost Island, a region that was home to the late Father Walter Lini, Vanuatu’s first prime minister. Exploring Raga social, spatial, and historical consciousness, this richly poetic account provides important theoretical contributions to ongoing debates in Pacific anthropology about the relation between structure and history, and place and time. It reveals important insights into the convergence of indigenous and exogenous cosmologies and hegemonies historically, and shows how these are implicated in contemporary social, ritual, and material cultural expressions. These analyses engage with broader concerns relating to colonial and postcolonial identities, political economy, and globalization in island Melanesia. The Other Side combines original and substantial ethnography with sophisticated theoretical reflection that will appeal broadly across the field of anthropology. It will also be of considerable value to scholars of Pacific and Melanesian history, politics, and society. The clear writing and entertaining narrative combine to create a work that is accessible to a wide audience. The volume’s critical and reflective analysis of anthropological research makes it a valuable teaching aid in courses that focus on ethnographic methods and writing. Students in Pacific anthropology will find it especially useful.37

Author: Siobhan McDonnell
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824897196
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Throughout Oceania, land is central to identity because it is understood to be spiritually nourishing and sustaining. Land is the mother. Land, and the kinship it nurtures, is the basis for sustaining livelihoods and ways of life. Therefore, Indigenous dispossession from the land has deep and far-reaching consequences. My Land, My Life: Dispossession at the Frontier of Desire explores the land rush that took place in Vanuatu from 2001 to 2014 which resulted in over ten percent of all customary land being leased. In this book, Siobhan McDonnell offers new insights into the drivers of capitalist land transformations. Using multi-scalar and multi-sited ethnography, she describes not simply a linear march toward commodification of the landscape by foreign interests, but a complex web replete with the local powerful Indigenous men involved in manipulating power and property. McDonnell meticulously describes land-leasing processes and maps the relationships between investors, middlemen, and local men. She shows how property is a tool with which foreigners reassert capitalism and neocolonial control over Indigenous landscapes. The legal identity of “landowner” contains foundational contradictions between the rights established in Vanuatu’s kastom system and those afforded by property, as individualized rights over land. Property has also created sites for the production of masculine authority and enabled men to manipulate claims to land and entrench their personal power. This book explores how transactions of customary land have created new domains of agency and frontiers of desire: foreign desire to possess land and local desire to lease land for cash. It concludes with a discussion of Vanuatu’s constitutional and land reform package, drafted by the author, which took effect in 2014 and delivered a more empathetic approach to Indigenous land rights and ended the land rush. Informed by decades of study, legal work, and community engagement, My Land, My Life demonstrates an engaged anthropological practice based on reciprocity that responds directly to what Indigenous people have asked for. This book is certain to appeal to a wide range of scholars as well as policy makers.