Oceania

This accessible volume provides a brief introduction to the institutions, policy concerns, and international roles of the Pacific islands. Evelyn Colbert expertly paints an overall picture of the region using broad brush strokes, complementing the mostly specialized literature available about the South Pacific.

The Archaeology of Difference presents a new and radically different perspective on the archaeology of cross-cultural contact and engagement. The authors move away from acculturation or domination and resistance and concentrate on interaction and negotiation by using a wide variety of case studies which take a crucially indigenous rather than colonial standpoint.

The legendary Margaret Mead established the importance and relevance of anthropology in the public mind and presented to Americans the view that theirs was among many cultures. She was at once shaped by the influences in the American intellectual community of the 1920s and, in turn, she was later to contribute to the image that the world has of the South Pacific. Moreover, Mead and her followers promoted sensationalized and inaccurate depictions of Pacific peoples as primitives defined primarily by sexuality or cannibalism. This book reveals the consequences of such Western condescension and integrates the views of U.S. and Pacific scholars in a historic critique of the products connected to the ethnographic enterprise in the Pacific. Destined to be highly controversial, this collection of articles provides for the first time a multicultural perspective on Margaret Mead's impact on Western anthropology and her views of colonialism, imperialism, and strategic and business interests in the South Pacific as well as Southeast Asia. The contributors, most of them active supporters of a nuclear-free and independent Pacific, use different styles and discourses to observe that it is only in the anthropological imagination that Pacific cultures are exotic paradises and sites of clan warfare. The authors demonstrate how these societies are still portrayed out of context with certain crucial issues ignored by Western scholars, for example, unemployment, colonialism, nuclear testing, and radiation poisoning. As such, the participants go beyond postmodernism and merely talking about the relationship between who "sees" and what is seen, by affirming the relevance of indigenous Pacific concepts as anew way to link scholarship and accountability. Acknowledging anthropology's contribution to stereotypes of savagery and exoticism, the contributors propose a global anthropology that is non-hierarchical, advocacy based, and

More than a quarter of the world's religions are to be found in the regions of Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, together called Oceania. The Religions of Oceania is the first book to bring together up-to-date information on the great and changing variety of traditional religions in the Pacific zone. The book also deals with indigenous Christianity and its wide influence across the region, and includes new religious movements generated by the responses of indigenous peoples to colonists and missionaries, the best known of these being the 'Cargo Cults' of Melanesia.The authors present a thorough and accessible examination of the fascinating diversity of religious practices in the area, analysing new religious developments, and provideing clear interpretative tools and a mine of information to help the student better understand the world's most complex ethnologic tapestry.

Using primary sources and interviews with surviving veterans, this is an account of the air war as it was fought in the South Pacific. It explores the technology and tactics, the three-dimensional battlefield, and morale of the combatants.

In Bad Colonists Nicholas Thomas & Richard Eves provide a window into the fantasies & realities of colonial life by presenting separate sets of letters by two late-nineteenth-century British colonists of the South Pacific: Vernon Lee Walker & Louis Becke. Thomas & Eves frame the letters-addressed mostly to the colonists' mothers-with commentary that explores colonial degeneration in the South Pacific. Using critical anthropology & theories of history-making to view the letter as artifact & autobiography, they examine the process whereby men & women unraveled in the hot, violent, uncivil colonial milieu. An obscure colonial trader, Walker wrote to his mother in England from Australia, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), & New Caledonia-& also from ships in between those places-during the 1870s & 1880s. Becke was a trader, too, but he was also a successful author of popular fiction that drew on his experiences in the Pacific. Written from Micronesia in the early 1880s, Becke's letters are like Walker's in that they report one setback after another. Both collections vividly evoke the day-to-day experiences of ordinary late-nineteenth-century colonists & open up new questions concerning the making & writing of selves on the colonial periphery. Exposing insecurities in an epoch normally regarded as one of imperial triumph, Bad Colonists will appeal to students & scholars of anthropology, colonial history, cultural studies, & Pacific history & culture.

This volume analyzes basic issues in development economics as they affect a particular type of Third World nation--small island economies. Using practical examples from the Caribbean Basin and the South Pacific, the authors examine in depth structural and employment issues, demographic and socioeconomic issues, and environmental and natural resource issues. Their aim throughout is to identify and assess the particular and unique development problems faced by small island economies so that effective policies can be derived that will more accurately reflect socioeconomic realities in these areas.

This edited collection takes a primary focus on security issues in Oceania, but here the word "security" is expanded to include such topics as domestic Indonesian and Philippine instability, environmental degradation, the work of international crime syndicates, the generic problem of post-colonial state failure, and the always overhanging concern with China--in short all of the significant troubles roiling Island Asia today.

An impartial record of the political events that have helped to shape the development of each country of the region.