|
Session 1
Colonial grievances, justice and reconciliation
Toon van Meijl (University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands) and Michael Goldsmith (University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand)
The paradox of the decolonization process in the Pacific is that anti-colonial sentiments seem to have proliferated in the recent past. The question is how to address this contemporary form of counter-hegemonic resistance in the Pacific. The aim of this workshop is, first, to examine the similarities and differences in colonial grievances throughout the Pacific and, second, to discuss the various strategies that may be developed to establish justice and to realise reconciliation.
Colonial grievances are expressed in a variety of different ethno-historical conditions. Indigenous minorities in settler states are demanding the restoration of sovereignty and the return of properties that were dispossessed in the colonial past. Postcolonial nation-states that have obtained independence relatively recently continue to remind their former colonizers of their reponsibility to redress economic difficulties that are blamed on the history of colonization. The ongoing debate about the international exploitation of natural resources in the Pacific is, although not restricted to it, deeply rooted in the history of colonialism. Requests for the repossession, if not repatriation, of cultural heritage emerge from the uneasy relationship between colonizers and colonized. Colonialism has also left a whole range of other legacies that are in need of a permanent solution, for example, the ethnic tension, in somewhat different forms, in Fiji, in the Solomon Islands, in New Zealand, Australia and Hawai’i.
Political discussions in these divergent circumstances generally revolve around the issue of who is responsible for the harm that colonialism inflicted and the related issue of who was harmed. These lead, in turn, to the further questions how the perpetrators of harm are identified, how deserving cases of justice and reconciliation are constructed, and how the relevant discourses of responsibility respond to historical, political and cultural change. Case-studies on these questions are invited from all Pacific societies.
Keywords: colonial grievances, justice, reconciliation, repatriation.
Session 2
Reshaping indigenous worlds. A comparative study of settler societies in theSouth Pacific: Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia.XVIIIth-XXth centuries.
Isabelle Merle (Cnrs-Credo, Marseilles, France), Bain Atwood (Monash University, Australia), Donald Denoon (Australian National University).
This workshop engages in the comparative history of French and British colonial systems. The aim is to commence an historical and methodological reflection on comparative methodologiy, its application to colonies of settlement in the Pacific and the relevance or pertinence of such « transnational » comparaison between French and British Empires. By "Reshaping Indigenous Worlds", we mean the manner in which the British and French reconceptualised and« reformed » Indigenous societies in an attempt to integrate them within newly defined colonial frameworks and categories. This line of enquiry provides the opportunity to reflect upon notions such as "indigenous property", "land rights", native status (vs citizenships), "half-castes" or "métis", "chefferies". It also provides the opportunity to rethink similarities and differences between different colonial contexts in terms of European and Indigenous relations: violence, confrontation, negociation, collaboration. It could help shed light on other aspects such as the role of religious missions and the question of religion in general, the position of indigenous people on the work market, some social aspects such as health, alcoolism, schooling, poverty and so on.
This workshop's objective is to invite a number of specialists to participate in the ESfO Conference and to develop and consolidate a methodological and historiographical comparative framework between these settler societies in collaboration with French partners.
Keywords: comparative history, European and Indigenous relations, colonisation, colonial categories, settler societies, Aborigines, Kanaks, Maoris, Pacific Islanders.
Session 3
Dynamics of Pacific Religiosity: Processes of Christianisation, Changing Forms and New Figures of Spirituality.
Françoise Douaire-Marsaudon (CNRS-Credo, Marseilles, France), Gabriele Weichart (University of Heidelberg, Germany)
The various forms of Christianity in Oceania are the products of continuing processes shaped over time and space. This is not surprising when we consider the great diversity among Pacific societies in socio-cultural, political, economic and ecological terms, as well as in relation to their historical experiences. Furthermore, the emergence of Christian proselytarian movements, their expressions of religiosity and religious productions are interesting contemporary developments. When we look back at 19th century evangelised societies, Christianisation appears as an incomplete process, despite the assumption that Christian values had been accepted as basis of their cultures, and this inachievement is perceptible, for instance, in the indigenous perceptions of the local landscape as a sanctuary of local non-Christian spirits. In the more recent varieties of evangelical Christianity and charismatic movements, institutional legitimacy sometimes gave way to the personal authority of the prophet-priest. Within these new evangelical movements as well as in the more traditional churches, women and youth use to group themselves, expressing collective concerns which extend far beyond usual religious preoccupations. Even when new forms of religious expression proved the intentions of local populations to create and control their own spiritual life, we ought to investigate whether the much-used concept of indigenisation can be applied to each particular case.
In this workshop, we are concerned with Christianisation as a variety of ongoing processes: we will aim at grasping and understanding the different forms of logic behind these processes as well as the new forms of religiosity that have emerged as parallel developments while, at the same time, we should question the validity of certain anthropological concepts (such as indigenisation, syncretism etc.).
Keywords: processes of Christianisation, religiosity, evangelical movements, indigenisation, syncretism.
Session 4
Mapping Oceania Past and Present: Movements, Geographies, Identities
Anne Di Piazza (Cnrs-Credo, Marseilles, France), Erik Pearthree (Cnrs-Credo, Marseilles, France), Wolfgang Kempf (University of Göttingen, Germany)
Oceania has always been home to movements and extensions, to contacts and articulations. Here we see a field for dialogue and exchange between different disciplines and perspectives. This session seeks to bring together contributions on a broad range of themes and models, times and spaces. Thus, our first main topic will be early projects to settle the Pacific, recent computer simulations of migratory routes plus emergent modes of representing maritime space (such as drawings in the sand, maps made from sticks, shells and bits of coral and other spatio-temporal images). A second focus of the session will be the epoch of cultural upheavals and cleavages, displacements and relocalisations, as wrought by imperial leverage and hegemonic penetration. Finally, we will consider contemporary transnational flows of migrants, money, ideas and images, with all the implications these carry for the agency and identity of Pacific Islanders, both at home and abroad. Our session navigating these multivalent space-times of Oceanian networks and interdependencies will seek to combine two different strands: one that of spatial anthropology, which has found new life with the appearance of GIS and development of conceptual, analytical and predictive models; the other that of cultural and historical processes involving indigenous constructions and reconfigurations of social-spatial alignments and attachments. Our aim will be to track down and identify those relational constitutings and entwinings of place, culture and identity that are poised between mobility and abiding.
Keywords: migration, transnationalism, diaspora, mobility, identity, space.
Session 5
Rethinking political conflicts, beyond ethnicity
Viviane Cretton (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Hermann Mueckler (University of Vienna, Austria)
This workshop provides the opportunity to reflect upon the need to rethink political concepts and conflicts within the Pacific. The coups d’Etat in Fiji and in Solomon’s islands in 2000, political instability in Vanuatu, urban conflict in Port-Moresby and ‘Australian’ refugees camp imposed on Nauru in 2001 embody such a necessity. In conflict situations, the researcher deals with empirical and epistemological disruptions that both question his or her practice and entail ethical consequences for the individuals and groups concerned. The notions of ‘race’, ‘half-caste’, ‘indigenous rights’, ‘western democracy’, ‘political insecurity’, ‘governance’ – among others – are not only theoretical tools used by scholars to reflect upon ethnicity. They are also highly charged labels deployed by the social actors themselves as they stake their claims. This session invites papers that offer innovative ways to interconnect conflicts, politics and ethnicities. We strongly encourage reflective performances that rethink political concepts under pressure while understanding present political realities in the Pacific.
Session 6
Festivals and strategies of communication: cultural singularities in a dynamic network
Barbara Glowczewski Barker (Cnrs-Las, Paris, France), Marcia Langton (Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies, University of Melbourne, Ausralia), Rosita Henry (James Cook University, Townsville, Australia).
Festivals, exhibitions and other events using indigenous performances, live or on film, are more and more popular and widespread; including "world music" stages, local association gatherings, Church meetings, and NGO, national and international celebrations. The media demand for a contextualization of this re-presentation of traditional cultures is confronted with many prejudices.The late analysis of the colonial human zoos is now facing this new wave of performances that the audience wants to be "authentic" when they rarely have the means to judge what nowadays "authenticity" is about. Invited Indigenous artists often have social and political priorities that audiences do not necessarily expect or even accept. Nevertheless on both sides there are questions about how to create new interactions, what images and messages to adapt and how to transmit them. What is the result of such procedures: does culture follow the logic of religious syncretism? Music fusion? Is it hybrid? Or is the mixing of content and shape producing a new "metissage", which maintains cultural singularities within a dynamic network?
Session 7
Enchantments of Technology in the Urban (and Not-So Urban) Pacific
Karen Sykes (University of Manchester, England)
As social theorists argue for the global adoption of Euro-American network models to level modern and traditional hierarchies into new egalitarian sociality, anthropologists might reflect: How do technology and technique constitute and concentrate Pacific sociality? What sense should anthropologists make of Pacific network models that define technology within a differential calculus of kin, workmates, friends and citizens? For example, where technology is understood as a joke or a trick played on village kin in town, or on the entire village as when cargo cultists waited for airplanes? Also, consider that various bodily techniques conjoin humans and machines, or compose body decoration and style to differentiate bush, village, settlement or town? Participants will:
Critique technology as a vector of change, and Euro-American technological idioms such as ‘connect’ or ‘download’ to describe sociality globally. For example, how do the habits of ‘taking care of public telephones’ or ‘time thrift’ at work shape sociality.
Demark differential personal and body techniques such as name changing, transmogrification, or transvestism as means to distinguish the milieu of bush, village and town—as when ‘big men’ become ‘big-shots’, school students change names and alter gender, or hunters adopt ‘bush’ names and dress.
Elaborate Pacific techniques as they unfold from each other, leaving behind the trace of a network of transactions or connections that model sociality.
Revise various earlier Euro-American network models that animate technology in sociality—from the Manchester School’s peri-urban, to Latour’s ANT, to Cassells’s network society.
Session 8
Ownership in effect: Property, Rights, Policy and Practice in Oceania
Tony Crook (University of St Andrew, England)
Oceanic practices of making social claims in others, in personal effects and in resources of all kinds have long caught the attention of social scientists interested in political mechanisms in the region. More recently, international legal designs have aspired to achieve both ‘local protection’ and ‘global access’ by standardizing the implementation of compliant property-rights legislation as a condition of membership in bodies such as the World Trade Organization. Consequently, new kinds of ownership-claimsæcaught up in these particular habits of property-thinkingæhave brought forward new bases on which to rest such claims, and perceived new kinds of resources over which to make a claim. In response, Pacific states across the regionæand acting as a regionæhave been reflecting upon, and negotiating the basis for, the combination of these international obligations with both national and customary legal resources. Moreover, putting these measures into practice requires policies that bridge these gapsæmaking them workable for the kinds of possibilities, uses and problems perceived in them. Whereas initial anthropological interest was drawn to comment on the fit between these legal combinations and local conceptions, this workshop aims to move the focus on to the context of implementation: how are people in Oceania bridging these gaps?, and what roles are perceived for the resources of social science?
The workshop will explore the rubric of “ownership in effect” in two ways: 1) how are these new legal resources and policies being put into effect?, and what kinds of uses or problems are being perceived in them? 2) what kinds of social and personal effects or new resources are being claimed?, and what are the emergent bases for ownership-claims?
Session 9
Spiritual material: objects and change in mortuary ritual
Eric Venbrux (University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands) & Pierre Lemonnier (CREDO-CNRS, Marseilles, France)
In this session we explore the link between the spiritual and the material in mortuary ritual in the Pacific region. Inspired by the French anthropologist Robert Hertz, who in his 1907 essay on secondary funerals demonstrated a correspondence between the decay of the corpse and the fate of the soul, we focus on artifacts other than the human body. We return to the basic tenet of his theory that “to make a material object or living being pass from this world to the next, to free or create the soul, it must be destroyed. (...) As the visible object vanishes it is reconstructed in the beyond, transformed to a greater or lesser degree.” There are cases in which the deceased’s intimate possessions are destroyed, but also instances in which objects of the dead are kept as relics or heirlooms. Why? In line with Hertz’ argument we might make a distinction here between flesh-type and bone-type of objects. The latter seem to mediate the relationship between the living and the dead. They remain intact like the corpse’s dry bones. The other objects, being destroyed, resemble the vanishing flesh, seemingly considered one with the imagery of the physical body or inseparable from the deceased in one way or another. The connection between the spiritual and the material will be further examined by looking at change in mortuary ritual: do changes in people’s notions of an other-worldly spiritual existence coincide with changes in the material aspects of mortuary ritual? And finally, why is it that people tend to adhere most strongly to their mortuary rituals, while paradoxically at an early stage introduced goods often become items of mortuary exchange?
Keywords: death rites, material culture, afterlife, change
Session 10
Endangered languages - endangered cultures
Gunter Senft (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen, the Netherlands), Marie Salaün (University of Paris-V, France).
Of the approximately 6,000 languages of the world 4,000 can be considered to be endangered. Both anthropologists and linguists have excellent arguments to argue that there is no plausibility in the view ‘the fewer languages the better’. On the contrary, we all should care if a language dies because – as anthropologists and linguists have clearly pointed out and known for a long time – languages express identity, are repositories of history, and contribute to the sum of human knowledge. Many of these endangered languages are spoken in the Pacific – and most of them have not been documented yet. In this panel we would like to discuss the cultural implications of language change in the Pacific in general and language death and concepts of, and conflicts with, language documentation and revitalization programmes for the various cultures in the Pacific in particular.
Keywords: language change/culture change; language death/loss of culture; language loss as yet another effect of globalization; language documentation and intellectual copyright issues; language revitalization programmes as political (hotly debated and sometimes risky) acts; the role of anthropologists, linguists and the affected speech community/ethnical group in documentation and revitalization programmes.
Session 11
Transculturation: Recontextualisations and (Re)conceptualisations in the Adopting of Cultural Practices
Elfriede Hermann (University of Göttingen, Germany)
This session will explore processes by which cultural elements came to be taken over during intercultural encounters in Oceania. Now that anthropological debate has deconstructed diverse assumptions that would pass off cultures as homogeneous entities, the analytic perspective has, in recent years, picked up on how miscellaneous the cultural elements in "a culture" truly are. Nailing this perspective to our mast, we wish, first of all, to focus on how members of Oceanian societies deal with ideas and practices they have adopted from the cultural repertoires of other societies and then recontextualised in terms of their own social environment. How do these Oceanians conceptualise processes such as cultural borrowing, incorporation and exchange? Also: how do they see it when elements from their own culture are transplanted into other cultures? What role is ascribed to such processes in the genesis and regulation of conflicts? Second, we want to discuss how such complex transfer processes (and their inevitable reciprocities in the cultures involved) are being conceptualised in the analytic terminology of anthropological discourse. Our task will be to scrutinize the concept of "transculturation" and related notions. The array of contexts to be aired in this session will range from regional and national nexi to migrational and transnational ones in Oceania and beyond.
Keywords: intercultural encounter, cultural exchange, articulation, transformation, agency,
cultural identity, cultural politics, social change
Session 12
New Caledonia in Oceania : from settler colony to mining post-colony? Some contemporary social issues
Michel Naepels (CNRS-Genèse et Transformations des Mondes Sociaux, Paris)
Following the Noumea Accord (1998), Kanak people are seeking to replace a colonial situation with a process of autonomous development, through their entry to a globalized economy and alliances with multinational mining companies. At the same time, the rural world is undergoing profound transformations. Questions of gender, environment, sustainable development, land conflict, indigenous rights, new customary institutions, and the construction of a multicultural society through New Caledonian citizenship are some of the main issues that we would like to address in this session, which has as a further goal the reintroduction of New Caledonia to the "sea of islands" through consideration of comparable changes elsewhere in the Pacific.
Guest of Honour:
Maurice Godelier (Director of Studies, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)
Keynote speakers:
Brij Lal (Professor of History, Head of the Center for the Contemporary Pacific)
Marcia Langton (Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies)
Jacob Simet (Executive Director, National Cultural Commission of Papua new Guinea)
|
|
