Hall of mirrors: Ritualized homosexuality in Melanesia

Herdt, Gilbert H. Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. xviii + 409 pp. including maps, bibliography, and index. $24.95 cloth.     

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.     

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.     

Religion and Violence: A Challenge to the Unity of the Churches

Abstract

The article explores the relationship between religion and violence—both in the role religion has played in overcoming violence and in sometimes being at the heart of violence. Recent Indian history of religiously fuelled violence is the case study in this article. Additionally, the history of Christianity is dotted with violence—imperialism and colonialism have been justified by some historians. This should be the basis for a challenge to the imperial and implicitly ‘Christian’ designs that accompany the present war against Iraq.

The Bible and Christian theology contain violent images. There is ambiguity in defining violence, because sometimes it is difficult to name the more subtle forms of violence. The authority of the Church is questioned as it has sometimes been silent about the violence within its own life.

The Churches need to engage in intra-Christian dialogue so as to mutually focus on the ministry of reconciliation and healing. The Churches need also to engage in inter-religious dialogue, recognizing a common spirituality of non-violence present in all religions.     

Reinterpreting a Textile Tradition: David McDiarmid's Ecstatic and Utopian Klub Kwilt

Abstract

Appropriating traditional American quilting patterns, and the homely communal ambience of the quilt, self-proclaimed queer artist David McDiarmid proposes in his work, Klub Kwilt (1979), an inter-racial, queer 'community' with its own uniquely appropriate community artefacts. Klub Kwilt is a shiny, reflective art work made in what was then a new synthetic material — laser-etched Mylar. The artist's intention was to materialize and affirm in this work the utopian and ecstatic impulses of the New York gay male, black and Hispanic, underground dance club, Paradise Garage. The utopian world McDiarmid evokes — in a knowing, camp embrace of the synthetic, the showy and the excessive — is one of sexual and musical ecstasy, inter-racial resonance and visual and aural opulence.     

Surveying Subjective Phenomena: A Review Essay

Abstract

The geographic perspective on human behavior emphasizes the notion of context. Context suggests that human behavior is partly determined by the place in which individuals and groups act, and in turn these actions re-create places. It follows that an element of history is the contextual setting of activity. Spatial statistics are introduced as a tool for modeling context in historical studies. Spatial dependence serves to operationalize the specificity of place and the diffusion of processes between places. Spatial heterogeneity serves to operationalize the idea that behavior is regionally specific rather than uniform across space. Both spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity are included in spatial regression models. A spatial statistical analysis of the Nazi Party vote in Bavaria between 1928 and 1932 is adopted to illustrate the argument.     

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.     

Recent Technology Imports into India: Results of a Survey

This paper analyses the results of a survey of twenty-four recent cases of technology imports into India. Over the last thirty years, large firms in Indian industry have come under increasing competitive pressure from small firms which pay lower wages and which are also favoured by government policy. Most small firms obtain technology through informal channels within the country. But some import technology; and larger firms import it in their defence against competition from small firms. Larger firms, with a history and a reputation, have better access to technology from abroad; smaller firms often go through an extensive search before they find a willing technology supplier. Irrespective of size, firms that import technology within their own specialization are observed to put more effort into technology choice, absorption and adaptation. Indian policies of across-the-board import substitution, by promoting diversification into new products developed abroad, tend to discourage specialization and hence to encourage technology imports and to work against technology absorption and innovation.     

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.     

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.