Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific

Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific
Author: Martha Macintyre
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2014-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1921902418

Fast money schemes in Papua New Guinea, collectivities in rural Solomon Islands, gambling in the Cook Islands, and the Vanuatu tax haven—all feature in the interface between Pacific and global economies. Since the 1970s, Melanesian countries and their peoples have been beguiled by the prospect of economic development that would enable them to participate in a world market economic system. Access to global markets would provide the means to improve their standard of living, allowing them to take their places as independent nations in a modern world. Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific takes a broad sweep through contemporary topics in Melanesian anthropology and ethnography. With nuanced and rigorous scholarship, it views contemporary debate on modernity in Melanesia within the context of the global economy and cultural capitalism. In particular, contributors assess local ideas about wealth, success, speculation, and development and their connections to participation in institutions and activities generated by them. This innovative and accessible collection offers a new intersection between Western Pacific anthropology and global studies.

Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific

Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific
Author: Martha Macintyre
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2014-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 192190240X

Fast money schemes in Papua New Guinea, collectivities in rural Solomon Islands, gambling in the Cook Islands, and the Vanuatu tax haven—all feature in the interface between Pacific and global economies. Since the 1970s, Melanesian countries and their peoples have been beguiled by the prospect of economic development that would enable them to participate in a world market economic system. Access to global markets would provide the means to improve their standard of living, allowing them to take their places as independent nations in a modern world. Managing Modernity in the Western Pacific takes a broad sweep through contemporary topics in Melanesian anthropology and ethnography. With nuanced and rigorous scholarship, it views contemporary debate on modernity in Melanesia within the context of the global economy and cultural capitalism. In particular, contributors assess local ideas about wealth, success, speculation, and development and their connections to participation in institutions and activities generated by them. This innovative and accessible collection offers a new intersection between Western Pacific anthropology and global studies.

The Melanesian World

The Melanesian World
Author: Eric Hirsch
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 676
Release: 2019-03-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 131552967X

This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The ‘Melanesian world’ assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.

Schooling, Conflict and Peace in the Southwestern Pacific

Schooling, Conflict and Peace in the Southwestern Pacific
Author: David Oakeshott
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2024-11-27
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1529239192

Bringing concepts from critical transitional justice and peacebuilding into dialogue with education, this book examines the challenges youth and their teachers face in the post-conflict settings of Bougainville and Solomon Islands. Youth in these places must reconcile with the violent past of their parents’ generation while also learning how to live with people once on opposing ‘sides'. This book traces how students and their teachers form connections to the past and each other that cut through the forces that might divide them. The findings illustrate novel ways to think about the potential for education to assist post-conflict recovery.

Touring Pacific Cultures

Touring Pacific Cultures
Author: Kalissa Alexeyeff
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2016-12-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1922144266

Tourism is vital to the economies of most Pacific nations and as such is an important site for the meaningful production of shared and disputed cultural values and practices. This is especially the case when tourism intersects with other important arenas for cultural production, both directly and indirectly. Touring Pacific Cultures captures the central importance of tourism to the visual, material and performed cultures of the Pacific region. In this volume, we propose to explore new directions in understanding how culture is defined, produced, experienced and sustained through tourism-related practices across that region. We ask, how is cultural value, ownership, performance and commodification negotiated and experienced in actual lived practice as it moves with people across the Pacific? ‘This collection is a welcome addition to tourism studies, or perhaps we should say post- or para-tourism. The essays bring out many facets and experiences too quickly bundled under a single label and focused exclusively on “destinations” visited by “outsiders”. Tourism, we see here, actively involves many different populations, societies, and economies, a range of local/global/regional engagements that can be both destructive and creative. Western outsiders aren’t the only ones on the move. Unequal power, (neo)colonial exploitation and capitalist commodification are very much part of the picture. But so are desire, adventure, pleasure, cultural reinvention and economic development. The effect, overall, is an attitude of alert, critical ambivalence with respect to a proliferating historical phenomenon. A bumpy and rewarding ride.’ — James Clifford, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz

The Gebusi

The Gebusi
Author: Bruce Knauft
Publisher: Waveland Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2022-01-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478648643

This version of The Gebusi is different enough from previous editions to be not just an updated but a significantly reframed work in relation to front-burner issues in cultural anthropology. These include reflexive awareness in ethnographic writing; gender relations and the subordination of women; postcoloniality; race and ethnicity; and the challenges of government and corruption. Based on fieldwork in 2016 and 2017, this latest edition of The Gebusi blends many new developments with those of the past. Poignant descriptions and reflections by young French cofieldworker Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke complement Knauft’s main account—and provide a rich dialogue across subject position and gender in ethnographic writing. In the mix, this vibrant work powerfully documents and critically analyzes key new developments among Gebusi. As such, The Gebusi, Fifth Edition brings the book’s compelling story forward while enriching the content structure and engaged portrayals of earlier editions. In addition to online field video resources, four instructor presentations, and other study materials and resources, the book itself includes 90 photographs—all in color in the e-book edition—that dramatically convey incidents and people portrayed.

New Oceania

New Oceania
Author: Matthew Hayward
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2019-09-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000576612

For so long figured in European discourses as the antithesis of modernity, the Pacific Islands have remained all but absent from the modernist studies’ critical map. Yet, as the chapters of New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific collectively show, Pacific artists and writers have been as creatively engaged in the construction and representation of modernity as any of their global counterparts. In the second half of the twentieth century, driving a still ongoing process of decolonisation, Pacific Islanders forged an extraordinary cultural and artistic movement. Integrating Indigenous aesthetics, forms, and techniques with a range of other influences — realist novels, avant-garde poetry, anti-colonial discourse, biblical verse, Indian mythology, American television, Bollywood film — Pacific artists developed new creative registers to express the complexity of the region’s transnational modernities. New Oceania presents the first sustained account of the modernist dimensions of this period, while presenting timely reflections on the ideological and methodological limitations of the global modernism rubric. Breaking new critical ground, it brings together scholars from a range of backgrounds to demonstrate the relevance of modernism for Pacific scholars, and the relevance of Pacific literature for modernist scholars.

The Darker Side of Western Modernity

The Darker Side of Western Modernity
Author: Walter Mignolo
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2011-12-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822350785

DIVA new and more concrete understanding of the inseparability of colonialism and modernity that also explores how the rhetoric of modernity disguises the logic of coloniality and how this rhetoric has been instrumental in establishing capitalism as the econ/div