Framing the Islands: Pacific Studies PDF

FRAMING THE ISLANDS The region in Pacific studies !is region-building story is not one that has been told in the general histories of the Pacific island region.10 !ese general Pacific histories are interpretations of what happened inside, or across, an assumed geographical#categ...

FRAMING THE ISLANDS The region in Pacific studies !is region-building story is not one that has been told in the general histories of the Pacific island region.10 !ese general Pacific histories are interpretations of what happened inside, or across, an assumed geographical#category called the Pacific, the Pacific island region or the South Pacific. !is study, on the other hand, provides a political history of ‘the idea of the Pacific’ itself. It is concerned with the political significance of the contest over what this idea should stand for and its expression#in forms of regional governing ideas and social institutions that impact on#local societies. Even in !e Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders, in which Donald Denoon and his co-authors recognise the constructed nature of the subcategories of the Pacific island region—Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia—and of the boundaries of states, this re$ection is not applied to the regional category itself except in a brief section on Pacific regional#identity.11 !is study nevertheless engages with the central question animating these general Pacific histories: how to characterise the relationship between ‘the West’ (‘Europeans’ or ‘the global system’) and Pacific island societies since the late-eighteenth century. What agency should be assigned to Pacific peoples in this engagement? Whereas these general works bring together narratives of local engagements to build up a larger picture of regionwide experiences, this study is concerned with the regional site of engagement per se—in knowledge systems, diplomacy and institutions. As indicated above, in examining this regional site of politics, I draw on, and adapt, the approaches developed within the historiographical debate underlying Pacific history (together with key interventions from Pacific anthropology) concerning local engagements between Pacific societies and the European world in the precolonial and colonial periods. 10 Deryck Scarr, !e History of the Pacific Islands: Kingdoms of the Reefs, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1990; Donald Denoon, Malama Meleisea, Stewart Firth, Jocelyn Linnekin, and Karen Nero, !e Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Ian C. Campbell, Worlds Apart: A History of the Pacific Islands, Christchurch, NZ: Canterbury University Press, 2003; Kerry R. Howe, Robert C. Kiste, and Brij V. Lal, eds, Tides of History: !e Pacific Islands in the Twentieth Century, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. 11 Denoon et al., !e Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders. 8  1. INTRODUCTION As will become evident in Chapter 3, where I explore the South Seas in the imperial imagination, the insights of three historians, in particular, provide an important conceptual entry point for this study. Oskar Spate’s magisterial study !e Pacific Since Magellan is built around the idea of the Pacific as a European construction.12 Where Spate’s approach becomes crucial for this study is his consideration of the importance of the various European ideas about Pacific islanders and Pacific island societies in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. !is focus on the European constructions of what Pacific island societies and Pacific islanders were, and could be, and seeing these as a function of particular points in debates about European society, is the beginning of the story I#tell here. Art historian Bernard Smith had already made a similar argument in European Vision and the South Pacific 1768‒1850,13 and Kerry Howe later developed the theme in Nature, Culture, and History.14 While these writers’ insights are invaluable as an intellectual opening, it is important to note how this study develops these ideas in relation to the politics of regionalism. Where the main concern of these authors is to provide an understanding of shifting European ideas and how these construct competing notions of Pacific ‘reality’, I am concerned with the political significance of these imaginings and representations in relation to colonial and postcolonial authority over how Pacific societies should be organised. Furthermore, I am concerned not with how the Pacific shapes key ideas in European theory about how European society should be organised, but with how these changing and contesting European representations have impacted on Pacific societies. Whereas these authors are focused on the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this study focuses mainly on the colonial and postcolonial periods of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Furthermore, by dint of the period with which they are concerned, they are focused only on European representations of the Pacific, whereas this study is also interested in indigenous representations of the region. 12 O.H.K. Spate, !e Pacific Since Magellan. Volume 1: !e Spanish Lake, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979. 13 Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific 1768%1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. 14 Kerry R. Howe, Nature, Culture, and History: !e ‘Knowing’ of Oceania, Honolulu: University of#Hawai`i Press, 2000. 9  FRAMING THE ISLANDS Although they asked di&erent questions from this study, the various accounts of regional institution-building in the Pacific each inform part of the story told here. Again, it is curious that this does not form part of the general histories of the Pacific. Richard Herr’s chapter, ‘Regionalism and Nationalism’, in Howe et al.’s Tides of History is an important exception.15 Ron Crocombe’s in$uential early examination of regional identity and Uentabo Neemia’s critique of the costs and benefits of regional cooperation until 1980 provide key dimensions of the regionalism question.16 Other scholars, such as Sandra Tarte, Yoko Ogashiwa and Jeremy Carew- Reid, have provided important sectoral studies of regional cooperation in fisheries management, nuclear issues and environmental issues, respectively.17 !ere have also been very useful recollections from key players in regional organisations: W.D. Forsyth and T.R. Smith, former secretaries-general of the South Pacific Commission (SPC), focused on the operations of the commission between the 1940s and the 1960s, and Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara’s !e Pacific Way provides invaluable re$ections on his time as a leading participant in the decolonisation of regionalism.18 Hau`ofa’s in$uential essay ‘Our Sea of Islands’19 is the Pacific work that is closest to the concerns of this study, and which has been a major in$uence on the conceptual approach adopted here. Hau`ofa draws our attention to the power associated with unquestioned characterisations of the postcolonial Pacific—and of the typical island society and economy— prevalent in the social sciences. He sees this knowledge re$ecting the 15 Richard A. Herr, ‘Regionalism and Nationalism’ (in Kerry R. Howe, Robert C. Kiste, and Brij V. Lal, eds, Tides of History: !e Pacific Islands in the Twentieth Century, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994, pp. 283%99); this is a persuasive examination of institutional developments until the late 1980s. His unpublished PhD is the definitive work on the political history of the South Pacific Commission from 1947 to 1974. See R.A. Herr, ‘Regionalism in the South Seas: !e Impact of the South Pacific Commission 1947%1974’, PhD dissertation, Duke University, Durham, NC, 1976. 16 Ron Crocombe, !e Pacific Way: An Emerging Identity, Suva: Lotu Pasifika Productions, 1976; Uentabo Fakaofo Neemia, Cooperation and Conflict: Costs, Benefits, and National Interests in Pacific Regional Cooperation, Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 1986. 17 See Sandra Tarte, ‘Negotiating a Tuna Management Regime for the Western and Central Pacific: !e MHLC Process 1994%1999’, Journal of Pacific History, 34(3), 1999: 273%80; Yoko S. Ogashiwa, Microstates and Nuclear Issues: Regional Cooperation in the Pacific, Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 1991; Jeremy Carew-Reid, Environment, Aid and Regionalism in the South Pacific, Pacific Research Monograph No. 22, Canberra: National Centre for Development Studies, !e Australian National University, 1989. 18 W.D. Forsyth, ‘South Pacific: Regional Organisation’, New Guinea and Australia, the Pacific and South-East Asia, 6(3), 1971: 6–23; T. R. Smith, South Pacific Commission: An Analysis after Twenty-Five Years, Wellington: Price Milburn for the New Zealand Institute of International A&airs, 1972; Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, !e Pacific Way: A Memoir, Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1997, Ch. 18. 19 Epeli Hau`ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau`ofa, eds, A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1993. 10  1. INTRODUCTION dominant mindsets outside the Pacific and not depicting the reality of the experience of ordinary Pacific islanders. Furthermore, he sees these authoritative depictions as consistently belittling and continuing a# practice prevalent in the colonial period. In a position reminiscent of Said, he# also sees these depictions as powerful. Taught through authoritative institutions, Pacific islanders take these on as self-images. Hau`ofa is speaking here, he says, as a teacher at the regional university where he had taught these ‘small is powerless’ depictions for many years. !ey are, he argues, as disempowering as when men were called ‘boys’ in colonial Melanesia. !is study expands on these insights in examining policy-related knowledge contests about how the Pacific island region should be depicted over time. Hau`ofa’s work features in this study not only because of his in$uential ideas concerning the power of these regional characterisations within knowledge systems and the sources of this power in the authority of knowledge; his ideas are also part of the political contest over legitimate political community conducted at the regional level on which this study is focused. Hau`ofa is joined by many other indigenous Pacific scholars who have been engaged in the debate about the decolonisation of Pacific knowledge and who, in so doing, have become part of the political contest over region-building examined in the following chapters.20 Other scholars become relevant to the study when they enter a debate about how the idealised ‘Pacific island society’ should be organised. Ideas about how Pacific islanders—thought of collectively—should live have been prominent and powerful throughout the period covered here. Anthropological studies were important in the promotion of native welfare in the Pacific in the 1940s; Pacific geographers were important to the idea of the Pacific island economy, strategic studies analysts to the construction of a Pacific strategic entity and economists to the construction of a neoliberal economic order in the 1990s and 2000s. All of these in$uences will be considered in the chapters that follow. 20 See, for example, Subramani, ‘!e Oceanic Imaginary’, !e Contemporary Pacific, 13(1), 2001: 149%62; Konai Helu !aman, ‘Decolonizing Pacific Studies: Indigenous Perspectives, Knowledge, and Wisdom in Higher Education’, !e Contemporary Pacific, 15(1), 2003: 1%17; Vilsoni Hereniko, ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Academic Imperialism’, in Robert Borofsky, ed., Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History, Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2000, pp. 78–91. 11