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1 Returning to the Pacific
John Connell and Helen Lee
Introduction
Thousands of studies have been conducted by social scientists in the villages and islands, and increasingly in the towns, of the Pacific. Quite remarkably, few of those who have undertaken the studies have ever returned to observe and record whatever changes have subsequently occurred, or even to note what has barely changed at all. Just as few scholars have gone to places previously studied by others, perhaps seeing this as trespassing on someone elseās site or preferring a place of oneās own. Others have perhaps feared too little change and had the sense that it had all been ādoneā already, believing worthwhile scientists need their own, original site, to discover the new. Consequently, there are few longitudinal studies of any great depth and sophistication in the region, and most of these are in Papua New Guinea (PNG) (e.g. Read 1986; Smith 2013). The objective of this book, therefore, is to fill a major gap in academic studies of the Pacific region, by bringing together established scholars who have returned to previous fieldsites and spent time considering both change and continuity. They take various disciplinary approaches and their case studies are from diverse geographical and cultural contexts.
The book traces changes in Pacific island communities in the recent past, through the perceptions of social scientists (mainly anthropologists and geographers) who have visited and revisited particular places. The time period is roughly post-1970s, that is, within 40 years from around the time of independence for many island states: critical periods in island development. While the key themes of the book centre around broad socio-economic-cultural change and continuity, they also include aspects of religion, politics, youth and gender. Some of the authors have returned after many years and some have made repeated visits. In each case they have returned relatively recently, providing for them a valuable long-term perspective with which to reflect on both change and continuity.
Back in place
The virtues of return and longitudinal studies have been elaborated on many times (Foster et al. 1979; Kemper & Royce 2002; Hammersley 2016) and this volume draws on the long-term work of individual researchers and the value of their in-depth knowledge of the places they first studied many years ago. Although their chapters focus on particular places, the authors provide a comparative lens (Brookfield 1962) that only this time depth will allow:
a comparative approach opens a rich vein for analysis, as it highlights the specificity of the cultural, material, ecological, and other elements that are articulated together at a particular conjuncture. It enables us to ask: Why did this happen here not there? Why in this form and not another? Why at this time and not before?
(Li 2014a: 279)
Reflecting on the value of a longitudinal perspective the anthropologist Chananda Mathur observes:
Our disciplineās best hope derives from enduring relationships and temporal depth ā returning to the ethnographic past as a way of unsettling and defrosting the inevitable freeze frame of the ethnographic present.
(2017: 26)
A long-term, comparative perspective contributes a valuable evidence base, both for the depth of historical knowledge it provides and for the possibilities it offers for planning decisions. Understanding past processes of change ā or lack thereof ā can help explain, for example, the local results of regional or national change, especially differential access and response to ādevelopmentā (Li 2014b). Many of the chapters in this collection critically examine the ongoing process of development and its impact on people and places, while others reflect on more dramatic change, such as the nuclear testing that displaced the Enewetak/Ujelang people or the civil war that radically disrupted Siwai lives.
The advantage of researchers returning over the long term to a particular fieldsite also includes the benefits of drawing on new theoretical approaches and developments in their discipline over time. As Raymond Firth put it, after 60 years of encounters with Tikopia: āanthropology has changed, I have changed and the Tikopia have changedā (1990: 241). Sometimes return has acquired more practical overtones. As social science is increasingly linked into practical concerns and required to provide and ensure an adequate evidence base for planning decisions, and so escape from individual perspectives (and even qualitative analysis), the need for increased rigour should demand returns and resurveys (Connell & Lipton 1977). Return and replication can move towards a more rigorous evidence-based social science, but may be doubly useful when they depict the impacts of particular events (such as climatic hazards or dam-building) and how places and people respond to and are affected by these.
Despite the many benefits of longitudinal perspectives, many researchers either do not return to their early fieldsites or move on from their early work to focus on new topics. There are, no doubt, many reasons why returns have not happened ā finance, the exigencies of life (such as employment and family formation), or gender roles through the life course (Wimark et al. 2017). There may even be a distaste for the tribulations and emotional stress of fieldwork in remote places, although technology has made the rigours of isolation less problematic (even for aging limbs). The vagaries of a research career can mean that researchers change their interests or are drawn into new studies through collaborations with colleagues or the demands of consultancy work. They may also seek comparative perspectives by changing fieldsites. Scholarly attrition may be a minor cause but a very valid explanation of absence (Petrou 2017). Perhaps some simply feared proving themselves wrong in their assumptions; a few even became disliked by the people they had worked with, who had access to their work and rejected the conclusions (Crow 2013).
Of the many researchers who have returned, few have explicitly reflected on their returns, perhaps in some cases because of their own negative perceptions of change. For some, the period in which they conducted their initial research becomes a āgolden ageā ā a view often shared by the people who participated in that research ā and they may fear witnessing, and dislike recording, the loss, dilution or āmodernisationā of the culture and livelihoods that were their initial interest. Others may feel the topics they originally investigated have been exhausted or, if there has been little change, they may not stop to reflect on the causes of that continuity. Some return but focus on topics that appear unchanging; thus David Damas (1994) visited the atoll of Pingelap four times between 1975 and 1983 but did so in order to achieve a more definitive understanding of land tenure rather than reflect on change. By contrast, research topics that may have seemed valuable and fascinating at the time of initial fieldwork may be less attractive as researchers seek to move on to new topics and places as academic disciplines shift direction.
Even if we take into account the varied reasons for researchers choosing not to return to the sites of their early work, then surely at least some residual nostalgia remains for places that have often shaped academic careers? It seems curious that relatively few scholars have returned to places that often meant a great deal to them intellectually ā establishing their own subsequent intellectual trajectories and careers ā and to the same people and places sometimes referred to in lectures and texts as āmy peopleā or āmy villageā. After all, who returns from āthe fieldā without at least some unanswered questions (however much their theses and publications might claim otherwise!)? Of course, returns out of simple curiosity may provide thin data, and if return is too brief, only the most dramatic of changes will stand out and be recorded.
There are certainly powerful reasons for returning, such as visiting people, some of whom may have become old friends; tracing the changes that have occurred in intervening years (for good or bad); and considering oneās early research in the new light generated by age and experience. Indeed, those who have gone back have often found a warmer welcome. One has recalled villagers saying with pleasure: āWhen you first came we knew your university had sent you, but now you have come back because you like usā. Such returns, enhanced by retained language skills and general familiarity, and being perhaps wiser and less gullible (Flinn 2004), have usually ensured both greater trust and acceptance and the ability to be more insightful about change and stability and their consequences. There is, of course, always the possibility that the answer you get is not quite what one expects, as occurred in a village in north India, where a village respondent, when asked a question by one more new researcher in a large team project, reputedly replied: ādo you want the shorter version for the MA or the longer one for the PhD?ā Those who have conducted fieldwork for many years will know that local participants are now likely to be familiar with the āresearch processā. Because of this, the experience of fieldwork has also changed over time, including greater emphasis on collaboration with participants so they more overtly influence the research process.
Following others
Opportunities and challenges are associated with re-examining places and contexts described and analysed by others (e.g. Holmes 1958, 1987; Royce & Kemper 2002). These opportunities loosely centre on developing greater analytical depth, expanding the themes of early work and examining the processes and direction of change. The challenges can include negative reception of the early work (Crow 2013), either by the subject of that research or other scholars. Within anthropology, some of the most heated controversies have erupted over restudies that have contested early research, such as Derek Freemanās (1983) attack on the work of Margaret Mead in American Samoa and Patrick Tierneyās (2001) dramatic claims about Napoleon Chagnonās research on the Yanomamo.
Fortunately, such challenges are unusual and a far more common pattern is for new work to be layered onto old, with new researchers drawing on othersā early insights as ābackgroundā to their own investigations. Some have chosen to focus on quite different themes than their predecessors as academic disciplines have evolved, such as the increased focus on gender where men once dominated. Annette Weiner, working in the Trobriand Islands long after Bronislaw Malinowski and a host of others, brought women to the forefront of her research, while also seeking to rebalance Malinowskiās statement: āI was lured by the dramatic, exceptional and sensational ā¦ I have also neglected much of the everyday, inconspicuous, drab and small-scale in my study of Trobriand lifeā (cited in Weiner 1976: xvi).
Often by the time new researchers enter old āterritoryā theory has moved on and new researchers are interested in developing their own ideas but with the benefit of a more structured and informed hindsight. On Wogeo in PNG, Astrid Anderson (2011), living in the same village as Ian Hogbin (1963) had done half a century earlier, both provides a more nuanced version of kinship and elaborates on place and landscape from a phenomenological perspective unavailable to Hogbin. Others went to particular sites where the field notes of predecessors were available, primarily since that would offer a head start compared with alternative locations (e.g. Borofsky 1987). John Connell (Chapter 3, this volume) deliberately chose to go to Siwai (PNG) knowing that there had been a range of significant changes, and was encouraged by the anthropologist, Douglas Oliver, who had preceded him by 35 years, and who saw advantages in a different disciplinary approach. Increasingly, it is almost impossible for any contemporary researcher to go to some ātabula rasaā where no previous work of any kind is influential, although some small islands, like Aniwa (Vanuatu), seem to defy even this possibility (Wilson 2013).
Nonetheless, longitudinal studies are scarce. Some may have feared going to previously studied places either because a predecessor had acquired fame and any challenges to existing knowledge might have been risky (as in the David and Goliath struggle of Everett versus Chomsky, or Lewis versus Redfield, discussed in Hammersley 2016). Perhaps there was a desire to respect their āprivacyā or even their āprivilegedā relationships with local people; or maybe it was simply fear of being accused of lacking originality. Territoriality may have discouraged new researchers, as some initiators of work in an area may resent what they perceive as intrusions and scarcely welcome alternative perspectives. In the case of research students it may be their supervisors who dissuade them from topics that may seem too similar to previous work, in the never-ending search for originality and independence.
Yet some places have acquired a host of visitors, notably the Trobriand Islands, Manus and the Sepik, all in PNG. Many researchers have studied Samoa over the decades since Meadās famous work on Taāu, although in Samoa as in other parts of the Pacific, researchers have often sought to conduct their fieldwork in a different village, on a different island, or to otherwise differentiate their work from that of previous scholars. When Robert Borofsky (1987) stayed in Pukapuka, a coral atoll in the Cook Islands with a population of just 785 people, at the end of the 1970s, he was the fifth professional anthropologist to have worked on the island since the 1930s. Each had his or her own particular orientations and predilections, and each raised issues and questions that challenged those who followed. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that resurveys, quite close together, often focused on livelihoods, with comparability centred on more quantitative factors, as discussed by Michael Sofer (Chapter 11, this volume).
All researchers have their idiosyncrasies and obsessions, and thus frustrations, with whatever work preceded their own. Borofsky gently chides his predecessors for being misled, and for their inaccuracies, errors and oversimplification (and even ā surely inevitable ā the ālapsesā in detailed recording of data related to his own interests). He emphasises the topical interests and academic loyalties of previous scholars, their distinctive fieldwork practices and their relationship to wider currents in academic orientations, concluding that any single study is necessarily partial and one-sided and that, in this case:
a much better sense of the atollās social organization developed from the compilation of our various accounts [and by] adding one perspective on top of another, we perceive social organisation with a greater sense of depth, with a greater appreciation for the processes and ambiguities involved.
(Borofsky 1987: 152)
āProcessesā speak to the currents of history that shape and shake even the most remote places, while āambiguitiesā emphasise that, even over only 40 years and for one small coral atoll, much can remain uncertain and capable of being observed and interpreted in different ways.
To establish oneās own place may lead to a focus on what Joan Larcom (1983: 190) described as the visibly evident but only āsuperficially changing atmosphereā of the fieldsite rather than on continuity. Indeed, āchangesā may be perceived by using a different theoretical perspective. By contrast, although Nancy Lutkehaus (1989) approached Manam Island (PNG) in the half a century wake of Camilla Wedgwood, with a different theoretical perspective, and a different practical concern centred on the changing role of women, she was able to emphasise the persistence of chiefly leadership, albeit with different meanings and responsibilities: an aspect of village social life that Wedgwood had predicted would soon disappear. Larcom (1983: 179), who was āprepared for the pristineā and initially dismayed at not being the first to conduct research in South West Bay, Mala...
