European Society for Oceanists 2015 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

“Cultural”, “Creative,” “Traditional” and other economies: opportunities and challenges for the Pacific

Coordinator(s)

Miranda Forsyth, Siobhan McDonnell, Katerina Teaiwa

Session presentation

For too long the discipline of economics, despite widespread criticism, has measured economic growth in terms of material progress as measured by increases in real Gross Domestic Product per capita with the occasional addition in a development context of simplistic and often unreliable measures of ‘wellbeing’. By contrast, the starting point for this panel is that all economies are socially and culturally embedded (see Polanyi 1957). Ideas of the predominance of the formal ‘cash economy’ have been regularly critiqued in a Pacific context. For example, in 2007 the Vanuatu Cultural Centre under the direction of Ralph Regenvanu hosted the year of the Traditional Economy or Kastom Ekonomi in an effort to recognise the primary importance of the traditional economy as the “main economy” in Vanuatu. More people participate in traditional economic activities including the expressive arts and small-scale agricultural production, than in the cash economy (Regenvanu 2007). Access to land and sea are central to the operation of cultural economies.

Development pathways must recognise the foundational role of culture and land to the livelihoods and identities of Pacific Island peoples. The discipline of cultural economics, particularly as outlined by Prof. David Throsby, and linked to cultural policy, cultural industries and the creative economy in Oceania through the work of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, provides a new lens for considering development pathways that sustain, rather than erode, Pacific relations to place and heritage practices. This panel will consider intersections of culture, economics, policy and regulation in discussing approaches that may better facilitate meaningful, sustainable development for Pacific peoples.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Moving Towers: Worlding the Spectacle of Masculinities between South Pentecost and Munich

Margaret Jolly (Australian National University)

The gol, the land dive has long been a spectacular ritual both for the people of the place and foreign tourists in Vanuatu. Annual performance cycles in the south of Pentecost have been relentlessly photographed; cinematic images of young men diving from the body of the tower have toured far beyond the archipelago, in the worlding of this spectacle. Recent scholarly analyses have variously depicted it as a risky game (Lipp), as a practice of visual consumption and embodied performance (Taylor), as a carnival of kastom (Tabani) and, as the avowed origin of bungee jumping, a contested site for claims of intellectual and cultural property (Forsyth). I will explore how its performance evinces changing relational masculinities, embodied between indigenous and foreign men (state officials, anthropologists, filmmakers) and the fraught dynamics of its transplantation to other places,
as in the display of a miniature land diving tower for an exhibition at a museum in Munich in June 2009. How has this worlding locally reconfigured men as gendered persons and transformed hegemonic masculinities?

Regional Labour Circuits: Affective and other Pacific economies

Kalissa Alexeyeff (University of Melbourne)

The ‘economy of affect’ is a concept proposed by Niko Besnier (1995) to describe a process where material goods circulate in conjunction with the expression of key emotions. He notes the inseparability of emotions from material exchange as well as the centrality of this amalgam to the apprehension of Pacific sociality. Throughout the Pacific emotions figure prominently in economic exchange, simultaneously regulating and generating the flow of gifts and commodities across a range of social contexts and relationships. What happens when this ‘local’ economy intersects with global capitalism, an economic form predicated, at least in theory, on disembedded and disembodied transactional exchange? This paper explores how Cook Islanders maneuver between and through these various economies and how they make decisions about how and where to live and labour.

Cultural Economics and Intellectual Property: Opportunities and Challenges for the Region

Miranda Forsyth (Australian National University)

The Pacific islands region is currently experiencing an intensification of interest in culture as an enabler, rather than an inhibitor, of development. The emerging field of cultural economics seeks to chart ways in which culture can lead to both economic development and also to other goals, such as positive social relationships, community cohesion and maintenance and enjoyment of cultural heritage. However, bringing together these different range of goals at times involves tensions, which are often manifested in differences between individual autonomy and family and community obligations, differences in generational focus and clashes of cultural logics. This paper investigates these tensions through the lens of intellectual property as this is an area where competing ideologies and perspectives of entitlement often come head to head, highlighting the dilemmas associated with preserving cultural values and heritage on the one hand and seeking to build commercial opportunities based upon them on the other. It identifies and reflects upon four areas of tension that will have to be navigated as the region experiments with both global models of intellectual property and national and local regulatory mechanisms.

Capital and coconuts: Thinking about Piketty in the Pacific

Kate Stevens (University of Otago)

The Pacific Islands are often notably only their absence from global economic history and theory, most recently in Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century. Similarly, historians of the region have often emphasised entwined economic, political and social histories, at odds with European economic study (though land issues do nevertheless feature prominently). Taking Piketty’s recent bestseller as a starting point, this paper aims to bring global economic history into dialogue with Pacific history. I ask whether Piketty’s central formulation – that higher rates of return on capital vis-à-vis income growth generate increasingly inequality – advances our understanding of Pacific Island societies in the colonial and post-colonial period. Conversely, given the centrality of communally-held land and continuing ‘traditional’ or informal economies in many island groups, does the Pacific challenge or confirm Piketty’s insights? This paper will use coconut plantations and commodities as an example to think through these questions. Both exported and of great use locally, coconuts, copra and coconut oil combine questions over the place of land, labour, capital and trade in Pacific societies. These products thus provide a concrete case study to think through the extent to which contemporary economic thought can aid our understanding of the region’s development.