Pacific Futures

Projects, Politics and Interests

Will Rollason

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781782383505
• eBook ISBN: 9781782383512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Pacific region presents a huge diversity of cultural forms, which have fuelled some of the most challenging ethnographic work undertaken in the discipline. But this challenge has come at a cost. Culture, often reconfigured as 'custom', has often served to trap the people of the Pacific in the past of cultural reproduction, where everything is what it has always been, or worse—outdated, outmoded and destined for modernization.

Pacific Futures asks how our understanding of social life in the Pacific would be different if we approached it from the perspective of the futures which Pacific people dream of, predict or struggle to achieve, not the reproduction of cultural tradition. From Christianity to gambling, marriage to cargo cult, military coups to reflections on childhood fishing trips, the contributors to this volume show how Pacific people are actively shaping their lives with the future in mind.

Table of contents

• Pacific Futures
• Pacific Futures - Projects, Politics and Interests - Edited by Will Rollason
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Introduction - Pacific Futures, Methodological Challenges - Will Rollason
• 1 Imagining the Future - An Existential and Practical Activity - Lisette Josephides
• 2 The Hanging of Buliga - A History of the Future in the Louisiade Archipelago, Papua New Guinea - Will Rollason
• 3 Why the Future is Selfish and Could Kill - Contraception and the Future of Paama - Craig Lind
• 4 Gambling Futures - Playing the Imminent in Highland Papua New Guinea - Anthony Pickles
• 5 The Future of Christian Critique - Lost Tribes Discourses in Papua New Guinean Publics - Courtney Handman
• 6 A Cursed Past and a Prosperous Future in Vanuatu - A Comparison of Different Conceptions of Self and Healing - Annelin Eriksen
• 7 Chiefs for the Future? Roles of Traditional Titleholders in the Cook Islands - Arno Pascht
• 8 A Coup-less Future for Fiji? - Between Rhetoric and Political Reality - Dominik Schieder
• 9 The Devouring of the Placenta - The Criss-crossing and Confluence of Cosmological, Geomorphological, Ecological and Economic Cycles of Destruction and Repair in Ruatoria, Aotearoa/New Zealand - Dave Robinson
• 10 The Human Face of Climate Change - Notes from Rotuma and Tuvalu - Vilsoni Hereniko
• Notes on Contributors
• Index