Oceania

NEW BOOK SERIES: Maritime Literature and Culture offers alternative rubrics for literary and cultural studies to those of nation, continent and area, which inter-articulate with current debates on comparative and world literatures, globalization and planetary or Anthropocene thought in illuminating ways. The humanities have paid increasing attention to oceans, islands and shores as sites of cultural production, while the maritime imagination in contemporary literatures and other cultural forms has presented ways of responding to human migration, global neoliberalism and climate change. This series provides a forum for discussion of these and other maritime expressions, including enquiries that engage maritime and coastal zones as spaces that enable reflection on labour and leisure; racial terror and performances of freedom; environmental wonder and degradation; metaphor and materiality; and the various implications of globe, world and planet.

As an incredibly diverse religious system, Buddhism is constantly changing. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism offers a comprehensive collection of work by leading scholars in the field that tracks these changes up to the present day. Taken together, the book provides a blueprint to understanding Buddhism's past and uses it to explore the ways in which Buddhism has transformed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The volume contains 41 essays, divided into two sections. The essays in the first section examine the historical development of Buddhist traditions throughout the world. These chapters cover familiar settings like India, Japan, and Tibet as well as the less well-known countries of Vietnam, Bhutan, and the regions of Latin America, Africa, and Oceania. Focusing on changes within countries and transnationally, this section also contains chapters that focus explicitly on globalization, such as Buddhist international organizations and diasporic communities. The second section tracks the relationship between Buddhist traditions and particular themes. These chapters review Buddhist interactions with contemporary topics such as violence and peacebuilding, and ecology, as well as Buddhist influences in areas such as medicine and science.

Offering coverage that is both expansive and detailed, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism delves into some of the most debated and contested areas within Buddhist Studies today.

Abstract: Oceania is a diverse region encompassing Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, New Zealand, and Polynesia, and it contains six of the world's 39 hotspots of diversity. It has a poor record for extinctions, particularly for birds on islands and mammals. Major causes include habitat loss and degradation, invasive species, and overexploitation. We identified six major threatening processes (habitat loss and degradation, invasive species, climate change, overexploitation, pollution, and disease) based on a comprehensive review of the ...

Zu Tätowierungen hat fast jeder eine Meinung. Dennoch gibt es sehr viele Klischees und Vorurteile. Gleichzeitig sind Tattoos für viele mit Rebellion, Freiheit, Erotik oder einfach Attraktivität verbunden. Kalt lassen sie die wenigsten. Wie auch: Sie verbreiten sich immer mehr. Parallel dazu boomen Schönheits-Operationen, Permanent-Make up etc. Der eigene Körper wird immer wichtiger – und er wird Gestaltungsmasse. Er muss angepasst werden. Das Ziel ist es, immer attraktiv, jung und gesund zu sein. Der Körper und sein Schmuck rücken weiter in den Mittelpunkt. Das eigene Körper-Ich wird zum „Werkzeug“ für die „Optimierung“ des Selbst. Tattoos sind eine Möglichkeit dafür. Und sie unterliegen auch Trends, Entwicklungen und Moden. Sie sind immer Teil von etwas Größerem: einer Kultur, einer Strömung, einer Mode oder einfach einer persönlichen Einstellung. Der vorliegende Band „Pimp My Körper! Arbeiten über Tätowierungen“ soll diesen Themen nachgehen.

Alma Karlin from Celje, Slovenia, travelled the Western Pacific Islands  from 1919 on, as part of her tour roudn the world. In 1924 she spent Christmas in Fiji, continued to New Caledonia, went to the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides (Santa Cruz Islands, Efate, Malaita) and Bougainville, New Britain (Territory of Papua and NEw Guinea) and proceeded to Dutch New Guinea. On her typewriting machine "Erika" she created reports which she sent to Europe for publishing. With the money she earned from his, she could continue her travel. Karlin is one of the early Western single travelling women in the Pacific Islands.

Communication scholars have examined how colonialism is rhetorically maintained, and how discourse excludes Indigenous perspectives. Yet, seldom has the field addressed rhetorical phenomena from Oceanic places experiencing colonization and militarization. This essay calls for prioritizing orientations from the Pacific—an expansive site from which to understand structures and cultures of contemporary colonial power. This Oceanic orientation navigates Oceanic rhetoric, which insists upon the centrality of Indigenous subjects to the ocean and communication phenomena that belong to these places. Applying field methods in the Mariana Islands, I triangulate indigeneity, colonization, and rhetorical phenomena as they operate simultaneously outside and inside an “American” imperial center.

This book is a tribute to the remarkable architectural heritage of present-day New Caledonia. With more than 200 pages and 400 photogaphs, it features the successive architectural styles which have spanned the first century of French colonial rule over the archipelago, through their diversity, mutual influences, aesthetics and design.
Obviously, the study of architecture relies on embracing the artistic and technical context. In New Caledonia, strong similarities exist between local 19th century buildings and their counterparts in the rest of the former French colonial empire. More recently, the international decorative principles of the Art deco aesthetic and those, specifically French, of the regionalist trend, have been applied extensively. Therefore, the aim of this volume was to place these constructions into a both stylistic and historical perspective, and to show what this small country’s heritage can bring to a more globalized knowledge.
Heritage is more and more perceived on universal grounds: this book can thus bring new, localized, elements to the art history of the South Pacific islands, and more broadly to the study of colonial architecture, whose interest is nowadays internationally recognized.

Rjabchikov, Sergei V., 2019. The Rapanui Manuscript E Reveals Secrets: The Real Bilingual Key to the Rongorongo has been Found. The paper. 6 pages.

The original was first delivered by Sergei V. Rjabchikov as the paper “The Rapanui Manuscript E Reveals Secrets: The Real Bilingual Key to the Rongorongo has been Found” on the scientific session of the Sergei Rjabchikov Foundation – Research Centre for Studies of Ancient Civilisations and Cultures in Krasnodar on February 6, 2019.

Keywords: Easter Island, Rapanui, Rapa Nui, Rapanui, Polynesia, rongorongo, script, writing, Manuscript E, hieroglyphic script

Recognizing the tensions between decolonial and postcolonial frameworks, this essay argues that a combined post/decolonial approach can illuminate colonial processes and reassert indigeneity. Writing as a Chamorro and a haole scholar, we weave together examples from Guåhan and Hawai'i to illustrate how a joint mobilization of decolonial and postcolonial approaches expose settler colonial processes and resistances. This essay also considers how combining these frameworks rearticulates and positions identities—in similar and distinct ways—to recenter indigeneity. Our conversation engages intersectional theorizing and resistive practices to perform Pacific moves beyond colonialism.

Introduction to Messianic Judaism provides a description of what the Messianic Jewish community looks like today at its center and on its margins. The first section of the book traces the ecclesial contours of the community, providing a socio-historical and theological snapshot of the community's origins, where it is presently and where it is heading. Alongside these chapters, the book also includes a number of essays on biblical and theological issues central to the identity of Messianic Judaism. The twelve contributors to the first part of the book are recognized leaders in the Messianic Jewish community. They work with various organizations, including the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations, the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America, the International Alliance of Messianic Congregations and Synagogues, the Messianic Jewish Rabbinical Council, Tikkun International, Chosen People Ministries, Messianic Jewish Theological Institute, Israel College of the Bible and the New School for Jewish Studies. Fourteen scholars from a wide spectrum of Christian backgrounds have written essays for the second part of the book. Their participation signals a growing academic and ecclesial interest in Messianic Judaism. Since the 1970s, a sea change has taken place in New Testament studies that has far-reaching implications for how the church evaluates Messianic Judaism. A broad reassessment of the New Testament writers’ view of Judaism has occurred since the publication of E. P. Sanders’s seminal work Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), and this reevaluation continues unabated. The contributors to the second part of Introduction to Messianic Judaism draw from this recent scholarship and demonstrate how post-supersessionist interpretation of the New Testament results in readings of the biblical text that are consistent with Messianic Judaism. The final section of the book is written by Joel Willitts who provides a summary and synthesis of the essays, explaining how they shed light on the ecclesial context and biblical foundations of Messianic Judaism.

Kolonialismen kommer i många olika skepnader och underordning. Militären och missionären möttes i en gemensam självpåtagen roll att sprida civilisation av kristendom och många gånger var de också ömsesidigt beroende av varandra. Denna essä är en närläsning av Svenska missionsförbundets verksamhet i Kongodeltat

В статье освещаются малоизвестные в отечественной науке связи ученых-этнографов, занимавшихся исследованиями Австралии и Океании, с марксистскими идеями и воплощение марксистской методологии в научных трудах. Марсель Мосс писал труд «Очерк о даре» как представление «первобытной» альтернативы западной, капиталистической экономики. Питер Уорсли использовал антиколониальную модель объяснения феномена карго-культов. Морис Годелье отталкиваясь от идеи того, что экономика и торговые отношения не самоценны, ввел понятие «священного», как оси, вокруг которой вращается экономика. Марксистские идеи оказали значительное влияние даже на этнографию Океании, которые считается оплотом «западной» науки. В труде М. Годелье идея «священного как основы экономики» является развитием идей марксизма, хотя в значительной степени противоречит каноническому марксизму.
Abstract: The article highlights the links, little-known in Russian science, of ethnographers who research Australia and Oceania with Marxist ideas and the embodiment of Marxist methodology in scientific works. Marcel Moss wrote his "Essay about the gift" as a representation of the "primitive" alternative to the Western, capitalist economy. Peter Worsley used an anti-colonial model of explaining the phenomenon of cargo cults. Maurice Godelier, starting from the idea that the economy and trade relations are not self-valuable, introduced the concept of the "sacred" as the axis around which the economy revolves. Marxist ideas had a significant impact even on the ethnography of Oceania which is considered a stronghold of "Western" science. In the work of M. Godelier, the idea of "the sacred as the basis of economics" is a development of the ideas of Marxism, although it largely contradicts canonical Marxism.

Drawing on the creative output of Witi Ihimaera, Apirana Taylor and Patricia Grace, this article examines how memories related to Oceania are woven into these authors' prose and verse narratives. After a brief introduction of the concept of memory, as well as the selected literary works, the analysis will be subdivided into three broad strands: firstly, the Māori notion of whakapapa and its potential for Oceanic connectivity; secondly, different mechanisms of memory transmission featured in the literary works; thirdly, the representation of special objects embodying or aiding memories. These analytical strands lead to the conclusion that the authors feature various strategies of promoting Oceanic memories, yet are similar in their display of a strong sense of connection and their inclusion of local specificity. It furthermore becomes evident that indigenous memory networks and continuity are promoted.

An exercise in symptomatic reading, this paper studies Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors (1990) from a postcolonial perspective. It claims that the first part of the novel, culminating with Grace’s suicide, invokes Oceanic memory by revisiting several key stages in Pakeha-Maori relationships. Maori collective memory, in the shape of myths and traditions, also weaves a powerful framework to this first part of the narrative. A close examination of the liminal character of Grace suggests that her pivotal suicide may result from the accretion of these Oceanic memories.  Her suicide may be read as a piece of Maori cosmogony revisited, a modern variation on the founding myth of Hine Titama/Hine Nui te Po’s flight from her incestuous father into the night. Grace’s spirit may be seen to travel from the metaphoricity of an interstitial tree where she hangs on the Tramberts’ estate, through the depths of her drunken parents’ subterranean world, eventually to emerge onto a Pine Block that is partly reclaimed, for a tentative collective reuniting with Maori ancestors. A subject on the rim of two communities, Grace crosses over into the Pakeha owner’s land and creates a terrain of difference where the cultural values of Aotearoa-New Zealand might be negotiated anew. She displays some ‘interstitial intimacy’ where readers get glimpses of an ‘insider’s outsidedness’, to use Homi Bhabha’s phraseology. This paper therefore suggests that a productive and creative memory of the Maori minority as a social agent may be seen at work as early as in the first half of Once Were Warriors.

Postcolonial literatures try to give expression to colonized experiences and change colonial discourses. Accordingly, postcolonial writers rewrite myths of power, race and the imagery of subordination. Although there are many canonical postcolonial writers nowadays, most of them are men because colonized women have been silenced for a very long time. This study focuses on an emerging Samoan female writer called Lani Wendt Young, who published in 2012 a collection of short stories, Afakasi Woman: A Collection of Short Stories from a “Real Samoan Woman”, that revolves around the lives and experiences of Samoan women, more specifically, of afakasi (half Samoan half white) women living in Samoa in the 21st century. Postcolonial Feminism theory and the concept of hybridity introduced by philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin will be used to study several stories from Young’s collection.

This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world. It argues that CPs were a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, and colonial reforms, thereby creating the conditions that made stable democracy more likely. Statistically, the historic prevalence of Protestant missionaries explains about half the variation in democracy in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania and removes the impact of most variables that dominate current statistical research about democracy. The association between Protestant missions and democracy is consistent in different continents and subsamples, and it is robust to more than 50 controls and to instrumental variable analyses.

This is an advance preview of sections of my principal anthropological study/monograph of personhood, environment and climate change in the Torres Islands. This is the extended version in Spanish, of which a more compact version in English is currently in preparation for submission to an academic publisher.

This thesis examines the heritage language of the Kingdom of Tonga and Tonga’s traditional orators, the Punake. The Punake have been identified as a special class of orators and poets whose language practices and language ideologies illuminate the state of traditional and contemporary Tongan. The three chapters of this work explain and clarify who the Punake are, their history, the roles they play within Tongan society, and especially their language practices, and document the self reflections of the Punake, their role in Tongan culture, language, and society, and thereby identify and interpret their language ideologies. With specific attention to borrowing, tauhi vā, and the concepts of tuʻufonua and fakafonua, this thesis argues that punake are carrying the Tongan language forward into the future as they are caring for Tonga and Tongan language through certain language ideologies connected to the land and the speech practices that correspond to that and are motivated by them. In this thesis my goal is to identify, describe, and begin to think with the language ideologies of the punake and suggest the centrality and importance they have played and could continue to play in preserving Tongan language use for future generations. This work contributes to a better understanding of the Punake, Tongan language, Tongan culture, the patters and currents of language change, and the dynamic challenges facing communities across all of Oceania. By highlighting traditional poetics and poetic ideology, this work brings attention to the centrality of Tongan poetics established by ʻOkusitino Māhina, ʻI. Futa Helu, and Queen Sālote. In a real and tangible way, this work explores traditional language use in the context of a changing Tongan language and society.

The 2017 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was negotiated at the UN over the objections of nuclear-armed and -allied states and established a global categorical ban on nuclear weapons framed in terms of humanitarianism, human rights and environmentalism. The TPNW also placed ‘positive obligations’ on states to assist victims of nuclear weapons use and testing and remediate contaminated environments. States and NGOs from the Pacific region advocated for a strong treaty text, particularly its positive obligations. They were influenced by the region’s history as a site of nuclear weapons testing in Marshall Islands, Kiribati and French Polynesia/Te Ao Maohi; the 1985 South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone’s precedent; and earlier diplomatic efforts and activism linking denuclearization with decolonization. In doing so, Pacific and other formerly colonized states flipped the ‘standard of civilization’ script embedded in humanitarian disarmament law and applied it to their former colonizers. The paper demonstrates the agency of small states—the ‘-Pacific’ part of ‘Asia-Pacific’—in multilateral policymaking on peace and security, often overlooked in international relations scholarship. It draws on my participant observation in the Nobel Peace Prize-winning advocacy of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) during the TPNW negotiations.

Artículo en el que se reitera los vínculos entre los mundos novohispanos e islas del poniente y Especierías por medio del galeón de Manila o nao de Acapulco que forjaron una identidad indiana determinante para la identidad mexicana pero que tal parece las autoridades educativas han pretendido erradicar

ISBN Digital: 978-9945-09-859-4,
ISBN Impreso: 978-9945-09-861-7,
págs. 29-38
Comisión de Historia del Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, organismo de la Organización de Estados Americanos (OEA)

This documentary film is a result of multi-sited ethnographic research between 2015-2019, which explores cultural identity, gender, music, and spirituality through contemporary and common kava practices. Drawing from over 17 years of participation in kava communities, this film is grounded in Tongan experiences, while also including a mobile and expanding Moana/Wansolwara/Oceanic perspective with contributions from Fijians, Sāmoans, Māori, and more. The knowledge holders in this film span across four territories, including Te Ika a Māui in Aotearoa, Utah (US) on Turtle Island, The Kingdom of Tonga, and Kamberra, Australia. They share a complex web of experiences, purpose, and tensions within the contemporary practices of common kava gatherings known in Tongan as faikava. Contemporary kava gatherings are spaces to release the pressures of modern life, nurture ancestral and social relationships, reveal truths, build community, produce and transmit knowledge, negotiate identity, heal, and foster positive well-being through comradery and openness. This film cannot cover all of the complexity of kava culture, yet attempts to be a meaningful introduction to the dynamic practices that are alive and expanding throughout the world.

Open access: https://boap.uib.no/index.php/jaf/article/view/2844