European Society for Oceanists 2022 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Heavy words in the contemporary Pacific

Coordinator(s)

Christine Jourdan, Kathleen Riley

Session presentation

This session will focus on "heavy words for contemporary living", adopting Raymond Williams' approach (1975), but including metaphors (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980) as well as other rich linguistic tokens that take on power in particular contexts of use. Old words transform and new words emerge, crystallizing ways of relating to and understanding cultural phenomena and lending themselves to being deciphered and analyzed in significant and consequential ways. Many such terms traverse complex sociocultural trajectories to arrive in their Oceanic contexts and reveal much about peoples' conceptions of what is happening in their social worlds, sometimes becoming tropes for “living by”. Lindstrom's work (2017) on 'Respect' in Vanuatu is a recent example.

The theme for this session will be "ways of being and ways of relating captured in words, including terms of reference and terms of address". As Williams explained in the introduction of his book: "This is not a neutral review of meaning. It is an exploration of the vocabulary of a crucial area of social and cultural discussion, which has been inherited within precise historical and social conditions and which has to be made at once conscious and critical – subject to change as well as to continuity".

We look forward to receiving propositions that seek to deconstruct the meaning of a word, starting with the sociocultural conditions of its origins when relevant, and analyzing its ongoing cultural transformations and indexical affordances for acting in the world.

- Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live by Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Lindstrom, Lamont. 2017. “Respek et autres mots-clés du Port-Vila urbain.” Journal de la Société des océanistes 144-145 (1): 23–36.
- Williams, Raymond. 1975. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

“Mamafa” (heavy) words: Critiquing AI platforms for endangered Pacific Languages

Pefi Kingi (Victoria University)

Words are mamafa (‘heavy’ as in Vagahau Niue and other Malayo-Polynesian languages), with the power to move mountains and turn hearts, fight climate change and transform peoples. But what happens when mamafa words are exchanged on artificial intelligent (AI) supported social media? Currently, Facebook (FB) is the most popular medium for 2.3 million Pacific peoples spread across 15% of the world’s surface, encompassing hundreds of islands and 60 million square miles of ocean. Of the world’s 7,117 languages, 21 percent are indigenous to the #BluePacific, and most are endangered. Mamafa traffic on FB indicates that high volumes of Pacific peoples participate regularly in virtual assembly, enjoying freedoms of association through societal interactions and familial exchanges. But are FB virtualities always constructive? Is the platform designed to maintain Pacific peoples’ aloha/fakaalofa for their Mother Languages and nourish their respect for their oceanic homelands? Apparently, FB standards and its 1,500-strong staff cannot be counted on to deter Pacific users from posting mamafa words and imagery that offend community values (e.g., hate speech and tapu material). This paper explores some of the mamafa effects (potential and actual, virtual and real) of AI-mediated social media and offers some suggestions for developing humanly moderated channels of social exchange that will support, not undermine, Pacific languages, their speakers, and their island homes.

‘Fri’ and ‘frigift’: challenging the practice of bridewealth in Honiara, Solomn Islands

Christine Jourdan (Concordia University, Montreal)

In the Solomon Islands, the place of bridewealth in the lives of many contemporary young people, both men and women and the viewpoints of their parents and grand-parents reveal broader changes taking place in the conception of marriage, urban forms of social relations and the transformation of kinship ties. Interviews with men and women of different generations and different marital statuses allow for an exploration of countering visions of these social practices and their future role in their own lives and those of their families. One such vision is that of marrying without bridewealth, captured by the Pijin terms fri and frigift.
This paper explores fri and frigift as contrasting perspectives on the practice of bridewealth and the implications that marrying without bridewealth have on the life of women, their families and the communities they live in. These gendered and intergenerational perspectives are explored in the ethnographic data collected between 2015 and2019 among Malaitan peple in Honiara and on the island of Malaita

Matevui: racialization of character traits in north Vanuatu?

Thorgeir Kolshus (Oslo Metropolitan University)

On the island of Mota in northern Vanuatu, individuality and idiosyncrasies are not only tolerated but seem outright encouraged. Still, when accounting for certain qualities, such as magnanimity or temper, people will attribute these to more deep-seated biological heritage. Since virtually every lineage on Mota has a history that locates its origin either as somewhere else (from another island) or something else (from another being), socio-behavioural mapping on Mota become quite essentialised, summed up by the “heavy word” matevui (lit. ‘origin of the spirit’), which refers to a person’s dispositions and expected responses. As is virtually universally the case, when moving beyond the island the matevui as interpretive grid is scaled up, with increasing lack of refinement and room for individual variation. Drawing on more than 25 years of ethnographic and archival research, I show how centuries of relations with the Polynesian outlier Tikopia, followed by more than 150 years of encounters with British missionaries, Tonkinese plantation workers, French plantation owners, Chinese copra buyers, Australian traders, and even the odd Scandinavian anthropologist, have expanded the acknowledgement of character traits. This makes up a map of national matevui with distinctly racialized undertones.

Race, rice, and language in the Marquesas, French Polynesia

Kathleen Riley (Rutgers University)

Marquesan ideas of "race" (black, white, French, Chinese…) are encoded in the lexicon and performed in daily interaction in ways that exemplify theories of raciolinguistics -- i.e., how race and language ideologies are collocationally indexed and pragmatically powerful. This paper deconstructs “race” and “sex” as intersectionally entangled categories by examining how formulations and enactments of gender and sexuality in the Marquesas are intertwined with racializing ideologies and how together these are indexed and expressed through embodied language and other ritualized modalities. Based on archival research and long-term fieldwork in Nuku Hiva, I review several racialized labels used in everyday interactions to index who is ambivalently included or pointedly excluded from both immediate social settings and/or the general community (kira ‘Chinese’, siki ‘black’, ferani ‘French’…). I then zoom in on unpacking the etymology of one particularly heavy lexeme karaihi, its three referential meanings (rice, uncircumcised penis, and disgusting social invader), and its semiotic impact when embedded in everyday usage. I use these data to trace the globalizing processes by which race and sex have been historically intertwined and pragmatically realized in this still-colonial context, how this is shaping local understandings of social identity and relationship, and how these may influence future articulations of Marquesan sovereignty.

From nature to 'neitsa': The birth of a new word/concept in Awiakay cosmology

Darja Hoenigman (The Australian National University)

After years of waiting for and praying for 'developmen', the Awiakay from East Sepik Province in Papua New Guinea recently discovered gold on their land. Unsurprisingly, this has led to dramatic changes in their everyday lives and modes of sociality. It has also given rise to a new concept, 'neitsa', referring to a class of nature spirit previously unknown in Awiakay cosmology. Thus, 'neitsa' emerged as a kind of ‘heavy word’, suddenly on everyone’s lips during the unsettling times of gold-fever. It was a word that was, indeed, both shaping and being shaped by Awiakay ideas about people’s interactions with spirits.

In this paper I trace the events and cultural conditions that led to the emergence of this new word/concept and explain how it fits within Awiakay cosmology. I follow its usage through a case study involving the death of a young man at a gold-panning camp. I will illustrate 'neitsa' in its everyday context with subtitled video clips of a village meeting that was called to discuss the mysterious death.

‘Cannot compete’: Contradictions of economic commentary in Papua, Indonesia

Jacob Nerenberg (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO))

What does it mean to say that a category of people ‘cannot compete’? In the central highlands of Indonesia’s contested Papua territory (also known as West Papua), programs to foster empowerment of indigenous Dani people are haunted by discourses that describe an indigenous incapacity to compete—as traders, entrepreneurs, or job applicants—with newcomers from distant Indonesian regions. Negative assessments of the possibility to compete ('bersaing' in Indonesian) appear in commentary on local economic problems from various political perspectives, ranging from traditionalist Dani elders who seek to uphold custom, to officials lamenting persistent poverty, or Western Christian lay missionaries describing the challenge of guiding Papuans to embrace ‘entrepreneurial culture’. Assessments of incapacity to compete may function both as disciplinary injunctions that blame the impoverished for their situation, and as cultural or structural explanations for ethnic dimensions of inequality. Such assessments sit in tension with other powerful discourses, such as official anxiety about the zealous occupation of public space by Dani women traders, or criticisms of a seemingly ‘traditional’ politics of competitive representation among indigenous elites vying to redistribute State resources. The manifold implications of ‘to compete’ in this context highlight how a keyword of market society can act as a nexus of meaning, distilling and concealing contradictions that engender marginalization.

The Universal, the particular, and the devastating consequences of Australia’s “Operation Sovereign Border” in Papua New Guinea.

JC Salyer (Barnard College, Columbia University)

Much Euro-American immigration scholarship universalizes concepts and relationships derived from particular histories and experiences into generalized and naturalized categories such as sovereignty, integration, and populations that circulate in scholarly and policy analysis of social, cultural, and political relationships that significantly differ from the contexts from which these concepts and terms arose. The Australia program of detaining and “resettling” refugees who sought asylum in Australia on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea demonstrates how local contexts and global political-economic inequalities demand a reevaluation of supposedly universal application of juridical concepts in asylum and refugee law. Based on fieldwork done in both Manus and Port Moresby, this paper will examine how various actors, including refugees, Papua New Guinean immigration officials, and residents of Papua New Guinea understood the terms of the Australian resettlement program and how it impacted their lived experiences.

Autonomy and sovereignty: Rapanui (Easter Island) experiences

Grant McCall (University of Sydney)

"Autonomy" and "Sovereignty" are common discourse throughout Oceania, often with "local" before them. "Autonomy" is taken usually to mean greater self-determination within a metropolitan state structure, whilst "sovereignty" ignites the passion of freedom from distant domination. Rapanui had its own governance from indigenous founding to 1888, using different organisational systems that related to local needs. After the imposition of a distance governance scheme, the force of Islander management dwindled until today there is little but feathered costumes to identify Rapanui, either as a people or a nation.