European Society for Oceanists 2015 Conference

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‘Foreign flowers’ on local soil? Articulating democracy, human rights and feminisms in the Pacific

Coordinator(s)

Sina Emde

Session presentation

Peter Larmour (2005) investigates the transfer and institutionalisation of so-called ‘foreign flowers’ to Pacific Island Countries. These foreign flowers, argues Larmour, are policies and institutions that were introduced during colonialism and after independence, e.g. customary land registration, constitutions and representative democracy, public sector reform and anti-corruption, by a variety of agents, e.g. colonial officials, missionaries, aid donors and non-governmental organisations. Not all institutional transfers, argues Larmour, were equally successful. The factors that contribute to success or failure are complex. They depend on timing, socio-economic circumstances and the compatibility with and adaptation to local values.

Taking Larmour as a starting point, this panel wants to explore these so called foreign flowers, the agents and contexts that introduce them and their possible abjections, contestations and/or adaptations with a special focus on concepts of democracy, human rights, and/or feminisms. All these are travelling concepts that came to the Pacific from Europe, other countries of the West or, in the case of universal Human Rights, the global field of the United Nations through a variety of agents, e.g. state bureaucracies, aid donors and non-governmental organisations. They all are mostly based on Western concepts of personhood, individualism, liberty, gender and rights that are partly vastly different from their Pacific counterparts. As such, all of these are contested, rejected or adapted by different communities and social agents in Pacific states which may see in them threats to local ways of being or new avenues of desired social change, or something in between. And while some concepts such as Human Rights are highly contested, others like the UN Declaration of Indigenous Rights are embraced favourably. In these processes local actors construe articulations between the global and the local and particularizations of the global arise. This panel invites contributions that examine these processes at work in the past and at present.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Vernacularization in Vanuatu: Engendering Persons and Property in Human Rights Discourse

Margaret Jolly (Australian National University)

Sally Engle Merry’s corpus is consummately situated at a busy intersection in the traffic between anthropology and law. In her transnational appraisal of gender and human rights, she has deployed the influential concept of vernacularization. I n this paper I reflect on debates about gender and the vernacularization of human rights discourse, and the tension between human raets and male raet (authority) as it has been discerned in dialogues in Bislama (Vanuatu’s lingua franca). I consider the different salience of rights discourse in the struggle for Indigenous land and citizenship in the 1970s prior to Independence in 1980 and in the context of debates about gender and violence from the 1990s. I look at Grace Mera Molisa as a leader who in Merry’s terms ‘mapped the middle’. Finally, in the context of a small Pacific nation with 108 persisting vernacular languages, I ask how ‘vernacularization’ might capture both the reciprocal processes inherent in translation and the unequal power of colonial and contemporary political economy.

From “vision” to “technical pursuit”? Feminist activism and the politics of development in the South Pacific

Andreea Raluca Torre (University of the South Pacific)

In one of her last interviews, Amelia Rokotuivuna, early pioneer of the women’s movement and feminist activism in Fiji and in the South Pacific, criticises contemporary NGO advocacy and activism for their inability to produce alternative thinking beyond the development aid jargon and the conditionalities imposed by neo-liberal policies in the Region. Her critique, which extends to the activity of the feminist movement, provides the starting point and primary line of inquiry for this paper.
The paper begins by taking stock of the history of women’s movement in Fiji, and more broadly of the genesis of feminist activism in the South Pacific, from the first feminist fights of indentured Indian women, to the human-rights focus and “state-centric” advocacy of the late 1980s and post-coup Fiji. The review of those processes at work in the past, and of the prevailing political circumstances in which advocacy took place, lays the foundations for examining the contemporary terrain in which the locally bred flowers of gender and feminist activism are being fertilised. Aiming at understanding new narratives and processes at work in the feminist arena, the analysis focuses on the role of emerging Pacific Islands’ regional architectures, democratization processes, the international development agenda, and the re-positioning of the South Pacific movement within the South feminist and global civil society networks. Methodologically the paper carries the legacy of the “‘situated’ history of women’s organising” (George, 2012) which embraces textual analysis of secondary sources and narrative interviews with women activists and feminist analysts in Fiji.

Gender in Electoral Campaigns in Papua New Guinea

Diane Zetlin (University of Queensland)

Mactil Bais

Representative democracy is one of the five examples of the transfer of foreign institutions that Lamour treats as ‘foreign flowers’ perhaps ‘unable to survive in the hostile local soil”. There are many commentators reviewing the history of electoral democracy in Papua New Guinea who might agree.

In this paper, we want to explore some of the ways in which gender is shaped in electoral processes in Papua New Guinea. It is well known that few women have ever survived the electoral challenges in Papua New Guinea to become representatives.

What we find problematic in the idea that foreign flowers cannot survive in the local soil (acknowledging this is not quite Lamour’s position) is that it dichotomizes Western and traditional influences. On the one hand, those advocating for more women in parliaments are seen as unduly influenced by Western ideas while, on the other, justifications for the exclusion of women are often falsely defended on the ground of ‘tradition’.

Our intention in this paper is to demonstrate how some of the more overtly discriminatory electoral practices do not operate within this dichotomised characterisation. For example, ‘campaign houses’ in some Highland areas are notorious for their trade in alcohol and sex. We find no basis for these practices in either tradition or ‘Western’ electoral norms, but we seek to show how distortions of both tradition and ‘Western’ norms feed in perverse ways into such practices through filters of indigeneity, colonial rule and modernisation. It is our contention that removing these dichotomized discourses will help to engage men and women in more constructive conversation about how more women in decision making might benefit everybody.

Democracy in the real world: the Pacific experience and the evolution of a ‘Tongan’ democracy

Malakai Koloamatangi (Massey University, Albany)

I intend, in this paper, to discuss what democratic theory, particularly democratisation theory, has to say about democratic engineering in non-western milieus. Drawing particularly from the discourse on the transferability of democratic thought and government -ranging from the predictability of ‘scientific’ creation of the democratic enterprise to the uncertainty of a market economic conception of it, I frame my argument on a Pacific canvas on which there are a number of concerns including considerations of definition, justification and relevancy. I particularly want to examine orthodox democratic conceptualisations and real-world situations in the West and developing countries. I want to look at the so-called (and conceptually tenuous) prerequisites of successful democratisation and how this might apply to the Pacific and the Kingdom of Tonga as case studies. Despite the hope of early colonial, and local indigenous, administrators, the Pacific has not turned into ‘bastions of empire’ and is not made up of liberal democracies. Some trace the problem to the point of transfer and inception, for example, democratic principles were not entrenched enough in constitutions, while others point to later developments such as the lack of capacity in government administrations after decolonisation. What has led to this state of affairs? What are the national roads to democracy in the Pacific? What form of democracy for Tonga? How can practice refine theory? These are some of the questions I hope to broach.

A foreign flower no more: Tongan diasporic media and the 2014 election

Philip Cass (Unitec)

It has been claimed that democracy and other western institutions are ‘foreign flowers’ in the Pacific, doomed to fail because of their incompatibility with traditional Pacific lifestyles. However, in recent years Pacific Islanders from the diasporic Polynesian communities have used metropolitan centres as points from which they have participated in democratic campaigns that combine traditional social structures and extended family functions, augmented by digital media. The way the democratic process has been conducted reflects a process of adaptation and adoption by communities taking part in their own culturally adapted versions of Parliamentary democracy, often mediated by digital platforms. Auckland-based Tongan media appear to have had an effect on voting patterns and voter behaviour in the 2014 Tongan elections. Tongan politicians conducted part of their recent campaign in New Zealand because even though Tongans living in New Zealand cannot vote in Tonga, they used new media to influence relatives at home, aided and abetted by diasporic media located in New Zealand’s largest city. Using the Kaniva Pacfic news website and the recent elections in Tonga as a case study, the paper sets out to demonstrate that rather than being a ‘foreign flower,’ the democratic process has, like so much, been adapted to fa’a Pasifika.

About the author: Dr Philip Cass, Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland

What impact do development actors have on human rights in Tonga?

Katalin Baranyi (University of Luxembourg)

Short description of the research project
Title: “What impact do development actors have on human rights in Tonga?”
The proliferation of universal human rights conventions raises fascinating and important questions about their impact and legitimacy, such as why states restrict their autonomy by signing on to human rights conventions. We often relate human rights debates regarding to the definition of human rights or mostly to the violations of human rights in every corner of the world. We seldom hear or read about the positive impressions on human rights because the world media predominantly disseminate on the negativity instead of focusing on relevant issue such as how development aid programmes have really helped and promoted human rights in so many less privileged countries. This leads to the core intention of this project; What impact do development aid programmes have in promoting and respecting human rights in developing nations in the South Pacific focusing on Tonga?
Human Rights and Development
Development is essential to realising human rights, and realising human rights is essential to addressing poverty and promoting development. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with a preamble stating, all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, which I choose to believe is one of the main drives that many international organisations and wealthy nations such as the UN, EU, NZ, and Australia etc have linked their development programmes to poverty reduction through sustainable and equitable developments. We often associate poverty with lack of means. It is extremely difficult to satisfy the basic needs if we do not have resources. Poverty does not only apply to lack of income but also relates to lack of physical and social goods such as employment, health, physical integrity, freedom from intimidation and violence, participation in social, political and cultural dynamics and also the ability to live in respect and dignity. It is hard to have dignity to enjoy civil, political, economic and cultural rights without having the minimum amount of material resources and physical and social goods
The UN, EU, NZ, Australia, Japan etc work simultaneously with the recipient nations Tonga in my case to eliminate poverty and remove inequalities directly addressing fundamental rights set out in the UN Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent international human rights instruments. These donor countries and international organisations believe that human rights are universal simply by the virtue of being human, indivisible which acknowledges that all categories of rights such as economic, cultural, civil and political rights must be equally treated and inalienable defines as something that everyone has and no one can take it away.
The project focuses predominantly on the convergence of human rights and development because traditionally these two issues have existed entirely separately, both at the conceptual and at the operational level. Human rights are mainly the subject of binding international legal obligations and their relevance to development can be understood in light of this. Occasionally, the operational human rights community has chosen to focus almost exclusively on civil and political rights and some look at development as social and economic rights which it is still a challenge to integrating human rights into it.
This thesis probes the extent, the significance, the limitations, and the interaction among initiatives such as development donors and the recipient nation Tonga and it also analyses the role of human rights related concerns play in the international development cooperation activities of the international organizations and wealthy nations. Emphasis will be put on the international legal bases underpinning the various dimensions of this policy area. Those dimensions include relevant standard setting efforts and actual measures taken to implement the linkage between human rights and development cooperation, be they positive (supportive) or negative (punitive). This does not only encourage most of the rich countries in the world and multilateral donors to consider human rights more strategically but it gives them desire for improving the ways they deliver and manage aid and the quality of development cooperation more attentively. Both theoretical and practical aspects of the issues at stake will be explored.

Dandelions amid the orchids: gambling comes to Papua New Guinea

Anthony Pickles (University of East Anglia)

Gambling was exogenous to New Guinea, and its Australian administrators thought that ‘childlike’ indigenes would fail to control themselves if caught in its grip. In Larmour’s terms, Australia (as well as missionaries) attempted to protect its fragile nursery of ‘beneficial’ transplants such as anti-corruption, a money economy and entrepreneurial investment from the weed of gambling by preventing its institutionalisation and discouraging it with strict anti-gambling policies. It was a dandelion amid orchids. Anti-gambling policies succeeded only insofar as they drove gambling underground, where it flourished. This disconnected but thriving grassroots gambling scene took a multitude of local forms, and of course fostered locally inflected sets of problems that were by then largely beyond the reach and often the knowledge of government. Subsequent legal reforms sanctioned a small, quasi-elite gambling sector, but perpetuated a very negative public discourse about gambling. Legal slot machines and bookies in a few Provinces, and the National Gambling Control Board that oversees them generate substantial revenues, but are themselves now riddled with issues of corruption and disenfranchisement, and pale compared to the quantities of money that change hands during illegal gambling activities. Illegal gambling forms were prevented from becoming what Larmour’s considers an institution, but they exhibited the most adaptable, plant-like characteristics as they grew. What influence, if any, did the perceived ‘weed-ness’ of gambling have on how it flowered? Did it inadvertently act as a trellis? What comparative conclusions can be drawn from the efflorescence of forms which grow parallel to official influence?

Foreign flowers: look at it from the beginning

Jean Louis Rallu (INED)

Don’t forget colonization; it is exactly the opposite of democracy and Human Rights. Beside blackbirding, often not so far from slavery, colonial administrations mostly supported European colonists and jailed natives for minor offenses or just because they requested more justice. In the 1950s, Raghragh Charley (Vanuatu) showed how the Condominium, following complaints of colonists and missionaries, repeatedly jailed members of a native cooperative that was competing with European plantations; he wrote, summarizing his feelings: ‘Residents and missionaries do not work well and lie’.

Then, independence came. Yes, data clearly show Pacific Islands Countries’ poor records on MDGs attainment, democracy, Human Rights and women empowerment, being at the bottom of World regions for the latter. But, who is mostly opposing these transplantations? Chiefly lines, trained by colonial powers, hold most of parliamentary seats and government positions. Intransigent missions impose new ways of life in the name of God and support men rather than women – women had more autonomy before Christianisation, mostly in Polynesia. Greedy colonists gave the example of fast and easy money and colonial administration was partly corrupt.

How to change this and improve the well-being of islanders? Develop civil society, increase capacity and transparency of government bodies. Statistics Offices should be key partners to base ministries’ budgets on data reflecting real needs: health, education, employment for the youth and women, poverty reduction. Beyond the mixed results of aid projects, UN and national aid agencies use such approach, with some success.