‘Sharing the white man's burden’ Nazi colonial revisionism and Australia's New‐Guinea mandate

ABSTRACT

The September 2014 general elections in Fiji resulted in a decisive victory for Prime Minister Bainimarama and his FijiFirst Party. It indicated a desire for stability on the part of the electorate as well as the popularity of measures such as ‘free’ education and the removal of affirmative action programmes for Indigenous Fijians. The Social Democratic Liberal Party garnered a significant portion of the Indigenous vote through appeals to ethnic identity, but will need to broaden its base in future to have any chance of forming a government. The high voter enrolment and participation reflects a hope for more accountability as well as transparency, in contrast to the arbitrariness of the previous eight years. New oversight institutions and a more expansive bill of rights in the constitution offer some ground for cautious optimism in the face of cynicism about the gap between the government's rhetoric and its actions.     

黄山园内旅游解说类型与有效性分析

为了调查黄山园内旅游解说系统的类型与有效性现状,笔者以随机抽样的方式对300名黄山的游客进行了问卷调查.通过对调查数据分析与处理,本文从人员解说、解说牌示、游客中心、可携式出版物和综合解说技术5个方面对黄山园内旅游解说的有效性作出评价,认为黄山园内解说在以上几个方面还存在许多不足.建议通过加强受众分析和资源分析,采用多种解说技术来提高黄山园内解说质量.     

我国峡谷生态旅游开发模式与战略初探

峡谷是一种独特的自然旅游资源,我国峡谷资源数量丰、类型多、分布广,生态旅游开发潜力巨大。目前国内峡谷生态旅游正处于起步阶段,相关研究较为欠缺。本文试图以参加规划和研讨的峡谷景区为切入点,初步探讨我国峡谷景区生态旅游的开发模式与开发战略,以推动我国峡谷生态旅游发展。     

Reconciling custom,citizenship and colonial legacies: Ni‐Vanuatu tertiary student attitudes to national identity

Nation‐building remains a key challenge in Vanuatu. From the origins of this new nation in 1980, it was clear that creating a unifying sense of national identity and political community from multiple languages and diverse traditional cultures would be difficult. This paper presents new survey and focus group data on attitudes to national identity among tertiary students in Vanuatu. The survey identifies areas of common attitudes towards nationalism and national identity, shared by both Anglophone and Francophone Ni‐Vanuatu. However, despite the weakening ties between language of education and political affiliation over recent years, the findings suggest that there remain some key areas of strong association between socio‐linguistic background, and attitudes to the nation, and national identity. These findings cast new light on the attitudes of likely future elites towards regional, ethnic, intergenerational and linguistic fault lines in Vanuatu and the challenges of building a cohesive sense of political community and national identity.     

We Branded Ourselves Long Ago: Intangible Cultural Property and Commodification of Fijian Firewalking

ABSTRACT The Fijian firewalking ceremony (vilavilairevo), traditionally performed only by members of the Sawau people on the island of Beqa, is a prime example of a propitiation ritual that has become commodified to suit the requirements of tourism. The Sawau ‘gift’ of walking on white‐hot stones introduces another dimension of the gift practice. Although gifts and commodities are often treated as ideal‐type opposites, and a tradition of Melanesian scholarship has focused attention on the inalienability of gifts, I argue that the self‐consciously traditional firewalking practice of Beqa Island, Fiji, is an inalienable sui generis commodity that becomes effective by ‘branding’ Fijian concepts of different places' distinct custodianships. Over the last two centuries, the gift of firewalking has transmuted itself into a sociocultural tool that has consistently indigenized the power of the foreign. The gift of firewalking has allowed its custodians to locally sustain their community, to gain a reach and respect across the nation and beyond, and to intensify the group's social sentiment and social capital.     

Mitochondrial DNA from 3000-year old chickens at the Teouma site,Vanuatu

Chickens were part of the Lapita cultural complex, transported into and through the Pacific by prehistoric colonists; as such they can be used as a proxy for tracking prehistoric migration and interaction. The Lapita site of Teouma in Vanuatu is well known for the recovery of complete dentate stamped pots and a cemetery containing the largest collection of Lapita period skeletons ever found. Chicken bones recovered from these excavations provide the first ancient DNA sequences from any commensal organism directly associated with a Lapita context. The ancient mtDNA sequences obtained from two Teouma chicken bones are compared with previously published archaeologically derived ancient DNA sequences to extend our understanding of the spread of chickens in Pacific prehistory. The results also show that the haplogroup E signature was present in very early populations of chickens transported into Remote Oceania. This study also adds to the suite of available data relating to isotopic signatures for commensal animals during the early settlement of Vanuatu and may reveal a different diet for Teouma chickens than those from other early prehistoric assemblages in the Pacific.     

Investigating compositional diversity among Fijian ceramics with laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS): implications for interaction studies on geologically similar islands

This paper presents a ceramic provenance analysis of 260 Fijian sherd clays by laser-ablation inductively-coupled-plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). Our analyses define three compositional groups in western Fijian ceramics distributed across the 2700 year ceramic sequence. Frequencies of compositional groups represented in the diachronic assemblages indicate an increasing spatial sphere of interaction until approximately 1500 BP. By 1000 BP interaction had spatially contracted to a significant degree. These findings suggest re-evaluation of current ideas about interaction in the southwest Pacific is necessary.     

Missing or Misdiagnosed? General Paralysis of the Insane,Yaws, and Syphilis in Fiji, 1884–1940

ABSTRACT

General Paralysis of the Insane (GPI) was a deadly disease, once common in Fiji’s lunatic asylum and, by the early 20th century, thought to be caused by syphilis. The conundrum is that the majority of GPI sufferers in the asylum were Indigenous Fijians, considered to have immunity to syphilis. This immunity was probably through the prevalence of yaws amongst Indigenous Fijians. Yaws had symptoms similar to GPI and syphilis with which it was easily confused. Yaws and syphilis also invoked divergent scientific and moral discourses, with implications for how medical and scientific knowledge about the aetiology of GPI and associated moral discourses were transferred to Fiji. This paper discusses European nosology and diagnosis of GPI, yaws and syphilis, asking if GPI was misdiagnosed in Fiji, or if reports of GPI among Fijians and the effects of yaws on the nervous system are missing from tropical medicine orthodoxy.     

The Capture and Curation of the Cannibal ‘Vendovi’: Reality and Representation of a Pacific Frontier

ABSTRACT

The United States Exploring Expedition into the Pacific launched in 1838 was marked, like the continental expansion westward, by violent encounters with Native peoples. By examining the record of the expedition's kidnapping of the Fijian Ro Veidovi, the fate of his body after death, and the ways his story came to be invoked in the official narrative of the expedition, the popular press, the ‘National Gallery’ and, more recently, the Fijian press, this paper demonstrates how violent contacts on the Pacific frontier were remembered, effaced, and reconceived. The changing story of Ro Veidovi permanently bridged distant locales in an emerging ‘Pacific World’, setting in motion transcultural negotiations that continue to this day.     

国内外旅游解说研究进展

旅游解说是旅游景区服务设施的重要组成部分,但相关研究滞后于实践发展。基于国内外关于旅游解说文献资料的整理分析,认为现有的研究集中于概念辨析、解说媒介、案例规划设计、解说系统评估、新兴旅游方式解说、多学科理论引入等方面。同时从研究内容、研究理论、数据来源、分析方法方面对比了国内外旅游解说研究的异同。最后提出国内旅游解说未来重点的研究内容,以及在研究方法上可借鉴国际研究,采用更多定量定性方法结合使研究成果更加丰富。     

Departmental relationships and images within the university

Abstract

It is contended that the foremost condition for the survival and ultimate success of departments is the development of qualitatively superior images and relationships within the university, and that excellence at that level must normally precede or accompany significant recognition at regional, national, and international scales. Aggressive participation by geographers is advocated in matters involving relationships with other disciplines, the university decision‐making process, concerns of students, alumni and developmental activities, and creation of a superior curriculum. A series of operational principles, called ‘bewares’, is suggested to guide the internal management of departments that seek excellence at any level.     

Gifts from the Other Side: Thresholds of Hospitality and Morality in an Eastern Indonesian Town

The town of Labuan Bajo in Western Flores, Eastern Indonesia has experienced rapid changes in the past decade, primarily associated with the development of tourism. This paper engages with the ideas of Jacques Derrida on hospitality and sovereignty, to explore the shifting landscapes of hospitality in this Manggaraian town. His musings on ‘the question of the foreigner’, the ‘conditions’ of hospitality, and the idea of the threshold are used to capture the way that hospitality is experienced as a struggle, as a contradiction, as an ‘aporia’.