Muslims in Melanesia: putting security issues in perspective

The hype about the potential for terrorism in Melanesia due to the region's weak and failing states has obscured some of the less newsworthy but equally important developments. One of these is the slow but steady growth in the popularity of Islam in Melanesia. This article reviews the limited literature on terrorism in the Pacific. It provides a brief historical overview of the growth of Islam in Melanesia on a country-by-country basis, and draws on a comparative case study and theories of culture and public goods to explore possible reasons for Islam's appeal. It argues that although Islam is likely to continue to grow, its growth is neither a necessary or sufficient basis for declaring terrorist threats to exist. The article emphasises the need to analyse the broader social factors behind Islam's growth as a basis for understanding the conditions through which potential threats to regional security might develop.     

Securing Modernity: Towards an Ethnography of Power in Contemporary Melanesia

ABSTRACT Contemporary public discourses, which depict Melanesian nation states as weak or as having failed, serve to legitimize the imposition of external, neo‐paternal, regulatory structures on former colonies. Such discourses problematise the numerous local experiments that combine custom, state structures and religion so as to create modern Melanesian ways of governing. Starting with the colonial policy of indirect rule, Melanesia has had a long history of experiments that have sought to tie together different regimes of power in relays, which are meant to remediate, supplement and strengthen state structures. Today, those relays are pathologised as dysfunctional precisely because they can be used to subvert, contest and divert state programs. Current political problems arising from growing ethnic and economic divisions are producing new conflicts, new moral languages for figuring evil, and new tactics and technologies of power. Many of these new experiments seek to reconnect the nation state with the moral authority, pastoral regimes, and individualizing practices of Christianity.     

Transformations of cultural heritage in Melanesia: from kastam to kalsa

In this article, I look at the reverberations of the global discourse about heritage at the margins of the global system in the Pacific. To this end, I analyse the development of indigenous concepts of cultural heritage on Baluan Island, in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea. I discuss how over the past 50?years two different heritage concepts have developed on the island, which have been used to reflect upon and direct cultural and social change. Further I show how the genesis and transformation of this local discourse about heritage is driven by local concerns and politics, as well as national and international developments.     

村落间仪式性馈赠及交往的变迁——以京西黑龙关庙会为例

基于多次对北京房山区河套沟地区的的黑龙关庙会及其村落的田野调查所得,文章着重关注社会变迁对多村落间交往模式的影响。作为地区中心型庙会,黑龙关庙会由多村落联合举办,其在"河套沟"文化空间及景观的仪式建构中具有根本性的意义。文章从横向/纵向情境、竞争性/非竞争性、表达性/工具性三个维度对"走会"与"献会"进行区隔,希冀借此对"河套沟"内部间及外部村落的交往模式和结构进行透析。在此基础上,对"仪式性馈赠"的概念进行界定与分析,探讨作为一种"仪式性馈赠"机制,它们对传统村落生活中社会关系网的凝结以及区域社会中地方认同感的缔结起到了怎样的作用;伴随着社会变迁及现代化的进程,在这样一种结构化的交往模式及交换体系中,是什么使得它在其发生的场域中依然呈现出结构化的功能特征。     

Bridewealth1 and the Autonomy of Women in Melanesia

Considering bridewealth in Melanesia from the angle of women's autonomy, in this introduction we review and analyse the various elements of this marriage practice that reveal its place in the symbolic, social and economic worlds of women. With an accent on social transformation, we discuss women's autonomy and agency in relation to the constraints that bridewealth puts on their lives, and on how they engage with it. Knowing what bridewealth is, and how the rules of reciprocity that it indexes obligate married women, the focus is on women's ability to act within these constraints or to redefine their contours, particularly with regards to economic and reproductive agency. The article, which serves also as the introduction for the special issue on bridewealth in the journal Oceania, discusses themes analysed in the collection, such as the moral prospects of bridewealth today, its relation to ‘capital’ in twenty-first century Oceania, the triad value/valuables/valuers, and the empowerment of women. It concludes with thoughts on gender inequality.     

Strong Words and Forceful Winds: Religious Experience and Political Process in Melanesia

Melanesian religious movements tend to conform to two contrasting types of regime: the one relatively centralized, hierarchical, stable, long-lived, and nationalistic; the other fragmented, egalitarian, unstable, sporadic, and parochial. Existing theories of ‘cargo cults’, including the progressivist hypothesis which views millenarism as the natural precursor of nationalism, have failed to appreciate this fundamental divergence. It is shown that politico-religious regimes are rooted in alternative cognitive processes, a point which is illustrated with reference to the Pomio Kivung movement of New Britain and the Taro cult of Northern Papua. One implication of this argument is that typologies of cults, based on ideological variation, are of limited sociological import, and rather that the structure and scale of cults are artefacts of distinctive styles of cognition, codification, and transmission.     

Local Resource Use in the Pacific War with Japan: Logging in Western Melanesia

Abstract

Americans have traditionally been the most wasteful people in the world. Now, however, we are fighting enemies who beat the world at squeezing what they want out of occupied territory. We must husband what we have, not only by avoiding waste, but also by the maximum utilization of local resources.     

Keeping the Network out of view: Mining,Distinctions and Exclusion in Melanesia

ABSTRACT This paper examines the ‘property effects’ surrounding competition over access to mining benefits in Papua New Guinea. Under conditions of rapid social change engendered by large scale resource extraction, Lihirian islanders have increasingly recalibrated their social networks, manifest through shifting notions of sociality and obligation, and ownership strategies that seek to limit other people's claims to wealth. These local changes are paralleled by larger and more paradoxical processes: although the state uses the mining project to consolidate itself, Lihirians have consistently challenged the state through their attempts to appropriate the mine for their own ends. By keeping the multiple layers of their social networks out of view, Lihirians deny the connections that can provide others with access to benefits. In considering the strategic responses to the inequalities, discontents and inconsistencies of life in modern Papua New Guinea, it becomes apparent that questions of property are simultaneously questions about identity and belonging.     

Tourists,sailors and labourers: A survey of early labour recruiting in Southern Melanesia

Abstract

This essay explores missionary allegations about slave‐dealing in Fiji, and their acceptance by British officials, as cultural responses to sexual relationships between indigenous women and white men. It also examines the imperial implications of ‘the culture of anti‐slavery’, whereby rhetoric about the enslavement of non‐European women became a rationale for attempted legal intervention in the mixed‐race community of Levuka. Finally, it considers how humanitarian rep resentations were contested, then appropriated, by one of the objects of their disapproval: a ‘lawless’ white man from Levuka. William Nimmo's response to the anti‐slavery proclamation gives us valuable information about Levuka's growing self‐definition as a community, and its attempts to control behaviour within its ranks. Using the ‘Christianisation and civilisation’ argument as successfully as the missionaries had, Nimmo and his friends sought recognition and respect from British authorities who seemed biased toward the missionary point of view, while making their own bid for official support in Fiji.     

The Construction of Social Meaning and Material Value: a Note on Trade in Melanesia

Marilyn Strathern has greatly refined the analysis of gift exchange, emphasizing that in gift exchange, units of value understood as metonymic extensions of their donors, are substituted for each other. However, the question still remains of how we should take into account the social meaning and material value of exchange processes usually called barter or trade; especially if we do not want simply to conceive of them as gift exchanges and nothing else. Drawing on fieldwork among the Kobon in the northern fringe of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, this paper proposes to view barter/trade in Melanesia as a strategic and symbolic interaction that combines aspects of gift and commodity exchange.     

Islands,extraction and violence: Mining and the politics of scale in Island Melanesia

Set against the backdrop of past, contemporary and possible future mining-related violence on islands in the western Pacific, this article explores how scholarship on the politics of scale, as well as strands of the burgeoning island studies literature, might sharpen our understanding of the political economic and violent effects of extractive resource enclaves in Island Melanesia. Drawing upon field research in Bougainville and Solomon Islands, I argue that just as Melanesian islands were produced as a scale of struggle in the context of the introduction of capitalist social relations under colonialism, so too have they emerged as a critical, albeit problematic, scale of struggle in contemporary contestations around extractive resource capitalism under the current round of globalisation and accumulation by dispossession. I suggest that this politics of scale lens enriches our understanding of how “islandness” can be an important variable in social and political economic processes. When the politics of scale is imbricated with the well-established idea of the island as the paradigmatic setting for territorialising projects, including the nation-state and sub-national jurisdictions, islandness emerges as a potentially powerful variable in the political economic struggles that attend extractive resource enclaves. I also highlight, in the cases considered here, how islands can become containers for internal socio-spatial contradictions that can be animated by extractive enclaves and can contribute to the island scale becoming violent and “ungovernable”. The article advances recent efforts to bring the island studies literature into closer conversation with political and economic geography.