European Society for Oceanists 2015 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Relating subsistence agriculture with socio-environmental mutations in Oceania

Coordinator(s)

Maëlle Calandra, Sophie Caillon

Session presentation

This session wishes to point out how the study of both cultivated and useful “wild” plants can be a relevant tool for investigating social mutations currently taking place in Oceanian societies. Their insular characteristics - i.e. limited geographical extent - imply rather vulnerable socioecological systems, which partly explains why Oceanian people have continuously been adapting their agricultural techniques to major changes. Depending on the socioecological context, these transformations have implied the use of soon-to-be-transformed ancient knowledge or the creation of a whole new range of tools and techniques. In fact, ever since people travelled from one island to another, useful plants have been introduced and domesticated, and the types of local varieties have hence become more and more diversified.

Pacific Island people had also been exchanging plants and other goods with the American continent far before they started to use European navigation facilities, and before the arrival of Europeans missions and administrations (Lawler 2010; Thorsby 2012; Rouillier and al. 2013; Denham 2013). However, because this allowed for the introduction of new species such as manioc, macabo or papaya, which were all quickly adopted - the arrival or Europeans marked significant changes in the agriculture practices that were prevailing up until then.

In spite of Oceanian horticulturists retaining intimate relationships with their plants (Barrau, 1955; Haudricourt, 1964; Bonnemaison, 1996) and the sheer amount of species being grown, which has never been so great, local species are less and less cultivated (Walter & Lebot, 2003). Additionally, food habits have undergone many changes, and imported foodstuffs, such as rice, are now consumed in great quantities even outside urban areas, again, despite the great agriculture potential. All these elements raise questions regarding subsistence agriculture in Oceania. We therefore invite agronomists, anthropologists, archaeologists, biologists, ethnobiologists, historians, and others specialists of the Pacific, to draw up a general overview of recent studies on how globalization and climate change have been impacting food production and practises, as well as subsistence agriculture since 'first contacts'. It represents a research theme in which ecology, anthropology and economy merge, and one in which environmental features, health aspects and social organisation manifest themselves. Papers which will allow for a discussion between social sciences and life sciences are more than welcome.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Construction of ceremonial spaces by the garden: the case of Banks Islands

Yoko Nojima (International Research Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region (Osaka, Japan))

This paper explores froman archaeological perspective the link between agricultural production and sociopolitical systems in the relatively recent past,taking the case of ceremonial constructions in the Banks Islands in northern Vanuatu. The system of grade-taking(known as suqe in the Banks) characterizes the traditional leadership in northern Vanuatu, and typically associated with ceremonial pig-killings and the creation of ceremonial spaces. In the Banks Islands, such ceremonial complexes are often highlighted by the construction of raised mounds/terraces with ascending steps on faceted face. Geographical mapping of such structures exhibit their inland distribution, and in southwest Vanua Lava, they aresituatedadjacent to predominant taro irrigation systems.In the case of Motalava, equivalent constructions are found only on the eastern part of the island, where major agricultural grounds are available. While pigs and shell moneys are the driving forceof suqe in the Banks Is. displaying the dichotomy between the inland and the coast, it was agricultural production that financed prominent ceremonial constructions. Creation of such monumental landscape then symbolically reinforced the social order based on suqe.

“’What type of Fetishism?’ Long Yams, Land and Commodities in Nyamikum, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea”

Ludovic Coupaye (University College London)

The Abelam speakers of the Maprik area (East Sepik Province of PNG) are famous in the literature for the cultivation and display of long yams. The ethnography reveals two important features. First, that the customary knowledge on cultivars, environment and techniques of cultivation is part of a rich non-verbal wider cosmology, centred on processes and relations happening in the gardens. Second, that the horticultural cycle is intimately geared to long yam ceremonies are part of a wider regional network.

Both the intensification of flows of globalised goods and pressure on land availability has increasing effect on people’s lives and imagination. In particular, craving hopes for “development” and access to financial resources have promoted a renewed interest for the registration of Incorporated Land Groups (ILG) to manage their own customary land, and attract “investors” in the village. This manifests itself in sharp changes in ways of life, but also in the modalities of relations that people have developed with others, including their material world such as plants or land.

Building on changes witnessed during a trip in June-July 2014, after 11 years of absence, this paper is an preliminary attempt to think through these changes, not from the usual angle of the development or environment, but, rather, from the angle of the “subfields” of material culture and “anthropology of techniques” dear to André-George Haudricourt. It explores a set of reflections on the validity and pertinence of some of its classical analytical and conceptual tools, and comment on the ethnographic issues about their use in the field, particularly when conversing with people themselves about their current concerns.

Yams, mobile phones and rice, about the organisation of a funerary feast in the Banks islands, Vanuatu.

Marie Durand (Université de Strasbourg)

Today, on Mere Lava in the Banks islands, Vanuatu, the most valued crop is yam. Its growing traditionally relates to the creation and transformation of people's relationships to both land and each other. Above all, it is the crop that is exchanged and consumed at funerary rituals. Therefore, being able to face one's ritual obligations is a significant motivation for people to grow new yam gardens every year. However, thanks to the increasing possibility for people to communicate with kinsmen and women living in urban centres through mobile phone calls, rice is also more and more sent to the island and frequently consumed during funerary feasts. In spite of being generally considered a "weaker food" than yam, the role played by rice in these rituals nevertheless shows it as well as being positively valued and related to the strengthening of social relationships.

Through the case of one funerary ritual observed on Mere Lava in 2011, this paper aims at examining the comparative values given to yam and rice on this island and thus to address how this could impact on the growing of subsistence gardens in the future.

Cultivators as collectors: the influences of globalization on subsistence agriculture on Tongoa Island (Vanuatu)

Maëlle Calandra (International Research Centre of Disaster Science and Sustainable Development )

On Tongoa Island (Vanuatu), a garden is an enclosed area, protected by human action from the dense and invasive vegetation and where horticulturists maintain close relationships with plants. Maintaining gardens’ diversity is fundamental to secure daily staple food and provide a place for ceremonial purposes. Social life is thus heavily dependent on gardens. In this paper, based on personal ethnographic and ethnobotanic data, I wish to expose and analyse relationships between gardeners and plants in the context of globalization. Since people have explored the oceans, food crops have been exchanged and domesticated, from one island to another. Because root and tuber crops need to be reproduced by vegetative propagation, their natural dispersion throughout the Pacific Islands is not possible. Therefore, the history of these staple plants is closely interwoven with human migrations. Nowadays, gardeners purchase new cultivars at local grocery stores or at specialised stores located in Port-Vila (the capital) or through trade with other people. Specific knowledge about plants is passed on in order to maintain and increase agricultural sustainability. Cultivating many varieties of food crops is a prestigious sign of talent for the gardener, who can keep a neat plot; some consider themselves to be proper “collectors”. Here we argue that the study of cultivated plants through the example of Tongoa subsistence agriculture makes the case that gardens are not isolated places where a local tradition or « kastom » would have been preserved, but are instead the place where contemporary Vanuatu is expressed and illustrated in all its complexity.

Eating Food, Eating Money: Reproduction of Life in a Sepik Society

Tomi Bartole (Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts)

During my fieldwork in the village of Awim, situated in the far south of Papua New Guinea’s East Sepik Province, I regularly heard two related statements: “There is no food in the village”, and, “There is food in the bush camp”. These accounts do not point strictly to the availability of edible items, but rather to the composition of items that makes up ‘food’, (kaikai). In particular, the accounts are referring to the combination of sago pancake, attributed to the village and meat and/or big fish, attributed to the bush camp. This composite plays a particularly key role in the reproduction of strength, which is not limited to physical qualities, but it also entails ideas about efficacy: in hunting, in fishing, in building houses, in growing edibles, in procreating and in relating. Strength appears as the very condition of life’s reproduction; ‘food’ mediates strength, and with it the reproduction of society.
Furthermore, people juxtapose strength to money. In Awim, money is used to procure rice, tinned meat and fish, etc. – what the villagers commonly refer to as ‘Whiteman food’. Money is thought through the effects of edible items, and more importantly, through the digestive process. The paper raises questions related to the knowledge associated with the use of food, strength and money, their relationship of co-existence, their reproducibility and their role in the reproduction of life itself.

The cultural dimensions of land tenure in North Vanuatu: ritual cycles, climate extremes and the dispersal of environmental risk

Carlos Mondragon (El Colegio de México)

This paper discusses how the humanised landscapes of the Torres Islands are a result of the complex interplay between changing horticultural practices and social values. In keeping with the broader themes of this session, the aim of my presentation is to bring out the complexity of these anthropogenic geographies in ways that highlight the key transformative qualities of horticulture at the same time as I seek to unsettle the received idea that small islands make for simple ecosystems. To this end, I concentrate on three aspects of land tenure: first, I explain how, over thousands of years, Torres people have generated a surprising variety of soil types through the maintenance of an equal variety of gardens, each of which is related to different aspects of the Torres Islands' systems of inheritance and ceremonial exchange; second, I explain the kinds of plantings that go into different gardens and the social values that they carry - including key spiritual and historical values by which Torres people define and give form to their territorial identities; and third, I explain how agroforestry and ritual cycles are both related through irregular, long term climate extremes which are generally overlooked by shorter ethnographic time spans. Throughout this paper, I highlight the creative entanglements between empirical and cultural logics in order to argue why they cannot be thought of as separate spheres of existence. Consequently, I end by attempting to outline a frame for the study of agroforestry and socioenvironmental mutations in Pacific Islands' contexts.

On the fonua: agriculture and horticulture in Tonga

Gaia Cottino (Università degli Studi di Genova)

‘Api fa’a toe tu’u ai a’e teve (the teve plant continues in the field) recites a Tongan proverb, referring to the farsightedness of integrating cultivations within the same field, to be used in different moments and for different purposes, and that of not reaching the limits of the productive environment.
On this basis I will open an explorative reflection on the local “agro-forestry system” in a historical perspective, underlying some moments of the Tongan history, in most cases Europe driven, which have contributed to define the current land and agricultural system, distancing it from a more integrated and complex combination of forest and agriculture. Through the anthropological analysis of the historical terminology and its meanings used within the first documents describing the Tongan islands’ landscapes, I will open a critical reflection on the two terms which have, and still are, characterizing the debate, and the practices, on land use: gardening and farming. Given such background, I will finally illustrate recent ethnographic data collected in Tonga on a few pilot “urban gardening” projects, carried out in order to fight obesity and guarantee self-subsistence combining public health and environmental concerns, and reflect upon their impact on the local community.

Trees « of the ancestors », Trees « of the Whites ». Changes in the social value of the coconut palms and their space on Vanua Lava, Vanuatu

Sophie Caillon (CNRS - Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique)

Jean-Pierre Labouisse (CIRAD)

The coconut palm in the village of Vêtuboso (Vanua Lava's island, Vanuatu, South Pacific) should be classified as a socially valued object. Present before the first migrants reached Vanuatu's coasts, this perennial plant is still associated with myths and material or immaterial multi-uses. With the development of copra industry 150 years ago, it became the tree “of the Whites”. Thanks to a cultural geography approach, the authors will try to understand the change of the status of coconut palms in its new space, the coconut plantation, defined as the space “of the Whites” which production practices and biological material has been inherited from. Its new economical function is perceived as an unavoidable constraint since copra is the unique source of income for the people of Vêtuboso. Coconut plantation is also a “greedy” space encroaching on the space of crop gardens and of the forest inhabited by spirits. It also definitely "captures" land among a family during few generations because of coconut palms' longevity and multiplication. Thus, the coconut is perceived as the tree "of the Whites" mainly for its relation to the place, the plantation. To enhance coconut's status, it has to be taken out of its actual space. But if the coconut finds back his traditional space, what kind of social value will Vêtuboso inhabitants give to it?

A "Tropical Starch from Marginal Lands":Palm Sago in the Anthropocene

Patricia K. Townsend (State University of New York at Buffalo)

When writing about palm sago in the 1970s as an anthropologist working with a group of geographers (Ruddle et al. 1978, Palm Sago: A Tropical Starch from Marginal Lands ), it was appropriate to refer to sago as affording potential as a crop in wetlands otherwise unsuitable for agriculture. Today, some of the lands devoted to Metroxylon sagu have been newly marginalized by hazards of the Anthropocene epoch: the riverine disposal of mining wastes and climate change, as seen, for example in the Fly River of Papua New Guinea.

Our 1966-84 fieldwork in the Upper Sepik of Papua New Guinea explored the place of sago in subsistence of people who could most accurately be described as hunter-gatherers. They engaged in these activities on the margin of the lowland rain forest and the swamp forest, a zone modified over centuries by humans through waves of plant domestication and introduction. This paper examines linguistic and ethnographic data on these food plants. We are motivated to revisit our data by the threat posed to the most productive land for sago by the proposed construction of a pipeline and road for the Frieda Mine.

Globalization of the plants, resilience of animals, ontological treatment of others among Kasua of New Guinea

Florence Brunois-Pasina (LAS/College-de-france)

To Kasua of New Guinea, a semi-nomadic society of 500 forest horticulturalists, the wild plants of the forest represented the " first non-human beings " to return officially on the scene of the globalization. On behalf off an industrial undertaking concern of their wood, they were worth being renamed, recategorised and finally relationnated according to technological and legal methods hardly taken away from those practised collectively by this population.
My communication wishes to establish the incidence that this quite particular attention lent to the only wild vegetable practiced on the manners kasua to perceive and to think of their world.