European Society for Oceanists 2022 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Oceania at large: things, narratives, knowledge

Coordinator(s)

Philipp Schorch, Safua Akeli Amaama, Diego Muñoz, Cristián Moreno Pakarati

Session presentation

In the essay ‘Our sea of islands’, Epeli Hauʻofa influentially argued for ‘what may be called ‘world enlargement’ carried out by tens of thousands of ordinary Pacific islanders right across the ocean’. Hauʻofa further stressed that ‘there is a gulf of difference between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands’.’ ‘The second’, he concluded, ‘is a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships’. In this panel, we take up ‘things’ in their material sense, tracing their travels, which have amounted to hundreds of thousands of journeys over centuries, on a global scale beyond the Pacific. We are interested in the ways in which Oceania at large becomes constituted through the mobile relationships between travelling material things (e.g. archival records, carvings, photographs), narratives (e.g. of memory, genealogy, imagination) and human practices of knowledge-making across multiple localities (including their virtual manifestations). For this purpose, we invite perspectives from across the disciplinary spectrum – from archaeology through history and anthropology to the arts and museology – with a dual focus on the methodological approaches required to reactivate the relationships between things, narratives and knowledge, and on the human world-making practices of Oceania at large that these reactivations facilitate.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Introduction

Philipp Schorch (LMU Munich)

Diego Muñoz ( Social and Cultural Anthropology)

Other Gardens; Papua New Guineans ‘at Large’ in Oceania

Karen Sykes (University of Manchester)

A Papua New Guinean woman who is now resident in Australia once said of Papua New Guineans ‘at large’, “Because we know how to make a garden, we can go anywhere.” The claim that knowledge of how to make gardens fortifies people to move throughout Oceania ‘at large’ might seem to concern the speaker only as a practicality, a way of putting down roots literally and metaphorically. But Oceanic peoples have long claimed that gardens do more than feed them and others. Lemonnier (2012) has argued, mundane objects are “wordless expressions of fundamental aspects of a way of living and thinking, as well as sometimes the only means of expressing the inexpressible”. Battaglia (1995) suggests that a garden’s intractability enable urban dwelling islanders to prospect their (Trobriand) culture out of place. In this paper, I suggest the established habit of thinking of gardening as alternative forms of sociality to that lived in the village might illuminate how people take up a kind of meaning-making on the move, when garden becomes a vehicle for reflection and knowledge about how to relate to one another. The significance of the contrasts drawn by Papua New Guinean women in Australia who mark a difference between their gardens and those gardens that they (perhaps did not) see amongst the Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territories is considered for what is shows their understanding of Oceania at large.

Travelling coconuts: Pacific connections on copra production in Ouvéa, Kanaky – New Caledonia

Greta Maria Capece (Università degli studi di Milano Bicocca)

The coconut tree can be described as a great navigator, because of its seeds’ ability to float into the water without getting rotten. This characteristic has made possible their spreading along the shores of Pacific territories, following the sea tides. The coconuts palms and their derived products, especially the copra, have left a mark on the images and narratives of these territories, both as a symbol of paradisiacal lands and as an economic and social resource. By their material and immaterial travelling, the coconuts can build connections and bonds between the islanders. These relationships, in a context of mutual influence, express themselves through the learning and sharing of production techniques and knowledges. In the case of Kanaky – New Caledonia, coconut crops are mostly based on the island of Ouvéa. In the political and economic context of the country, the effort to develop the copra field points to other territories in the Pacific area – e.g. Vanuatu and French Polynesia – as an example and reference. The aim of this paper is to retrace, through the ethnographic instruments, the evocations of nearby countries in Ouvéa, from a “pacific-making” perspective of copra production.

Summit to seafloor: Sediment flows from Mt. Taranaki, Aotearoa New Zealand

Katherine Sammler (Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity)

Settler colonialism is a system that, while often capitalizing on excesses and flows, is also constructed around discrete, bounded objects, enclosing and dividing relational subjects, categorically partitioning the natural from social, physical from biological, land from sea. Meaning-making practices of naming, measuring, and enclosing living landscapes contribute to the defining of discrete parcels that can be allotted by the settler state. The categorical bounding of the Taranaki region in Aotearoa New Zealand–spatially within demarcations of property and territory, but also culturally within a Western conceptualization of disparate landforms and seaforms, enfolded in ideologies of wilderness and national identity–are visibly engraved into this landscape. Demonstrating the socio-political and granular connections between Mt. Taranaki and its downstream seafloor, opens challenges to the political technologies of state territory formation and boundary drawing in this landscape, which have been used to justify ongoing dispossession from Indigenous Māori tribes. This paper analyzes settler colonial logics that have expropriated the living mountain landscape in relation to proposed seabed mining off Taranaki’s shores through new materialism, granular geographies, and anti-colonial literatures.

From Actants to Actors – Re-interpreting Nineteenth Century Narratives on Pitcairn Islanders’ Mobilities

Sebastian Jablonski (University of Potsdam)

19th century Anglophone literature presents Pitcairn Islanders as static actants, their mobility entirely dependent on the British colonizers’ willingness for transport, largely due to the remoteness of the island and the lack of knowledge in shipbuilding. I aim at reversing this notion and showing how the Islanders used the means of European transport for their own purposes, exerting their agency as actors countermanding the unwilling removals.
I will present three instances in which the Islanders proved imposed notion of immobility inaccurate. I will begin with the attempt made by Tahitian women on Pitcairn to escape on a self-made raft in early 1790s, trying to return to their people from whom they were abducted by the Bounty mutineers. Next, I will analyse the resettlement of Pitcairn’s inhabitants to Tahiti by the British in 1831, who after sustaining loses decided to rescue themselves by buying passage back to their island. In the last part I will discuss an outcome of the resettlement of the Islanders to Norfolk Island in 1856 and the creation of a diaspora.
As the analysis of various historical sources proves, Pitcairn Islanders successfully utilized the colonizers’ tools to achieve their aims and overridden not only the acts of forced removal, but also persistent narratives of their immobility. This investigation of their example aims at adding insights into valuable nuances to the simplified master narratives of the British imperial power over Pacific mobility.

Rapanui carvings, narratives of Easter Island. Art, Ethnography and History

Diego Muñoz ( Social and Cultural Anthropology)

Since Europeans registered Easter Island in their navigation charts, it has become a place of scientific investigation, ethnographic collecting, and artistic attraction. Important collections of its carving have circulated around the world and have been become museum objects. In addition, scientists and artists have used these carvings to elaborate different narratives about Easter Island –– about collapsing civilizations and cultural mysteries. In our project Recollecting Rapa Nui we investigate these narratives by examining how they were continued or changed over time, while considering Indigenous perspectives. For this purpose, we are building an online visual gallery of Rapanui carvings which are stored in different institutions around the world. Here, the carvings are presented according to Indigenous categories and in a chronological order, from early to contemporary examples. Furthermore, we add historical information about the items’ circulation, as well as about collectors and Indigenous actors. In this paper, I present the gallery and its principal features. I will focus on one example to show the complex history of the carvings’ mobility and identify different narratives in which they have been embedded by scientists, artists, and Indigenous actors. I suggest these narratives are not mutually exclusive, but rather feed back into each other. The gallery provides a visual overview of the material history which can be contested and/or re-elaborated by Rapanui actors.

Sāmoa at large: (Re)constituting multiple Sāmoan-ness through travelling things

Philipp Schorch (LMU Munich)

Sāmoa has been marked by German rule, as part of the German empire and as a territory alongside others in Africa and the Pacific. It also appears as separated into the independent state of ‘Sāmoa’ and the unincorporated U.S. territory of ‘American Sāmoa’. Yet, both political entities have grown out of and continue to be organized through the relations between multiple islands. Genealogically, Manono, located in ‘Sāmoa’, can be considered as a topographic fragment of Fiji and member of the Sāmoan district ‘āiga i le tai’ (family by the sea). Manuʻa, situated in ‘American Sāmoa’, was governed by the chiefly title of Tui Manuʻa, which can be traced back to Tagaloa, the creator of the universe. In ancient times, this island group was politically independent from Savaiʻi and Upolu (in today’s ‘Sāmoa’) so how does it matter if it is nowadays politically dependent upon the U.S.? Drawing on collection-based research at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Hawaiʻi, this paper points to the ways in which travelling things - objects, photographs, archival records - have underpinned the (re)constitution of multiple Sāmoan-ness across multiple localities. Based on the insights provided, the paper argues that material-museological practices aimed at (re)activating historical knowledge and historical narratives inscribed in material things, nowadays often hibernating in museum collections, themselves intervene in the (re)constitution of Sāmoa at large from the past to the present and future.