“Re:Learning an Ocean in Motion:

Reflections on Pedagogy and ‘Local’ Knowledges between the Central Carolines and the American Heartland”

 

Vicente M. Diaz

Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies

Program in American Culture

The University of Michigan

 

Presented at the “Learning Oceania” Workshop, Center for Pacific Islands Studies,
University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, November 13–15, 2003.

 

 

Note to the Reader. David said it didn't have to be a publishable paper so I took him up on it. This is a first draft so please pardon any errors in grammar and spelling and the incompleteness of the citations.

 

 

Recycled Parables and Theoretical Throwbacks

Some of you may recall a parable I shared a few years back, during CPIS’s retrospective of a half century of American Anthropology in Micronesia (Kiste and Marshall, 1999). In a paper that tried to reclaim culture and history from a history of culture in the Marianas, I ended with an anecdote taken from a period in Guam's political history under U.S. Naval Rule in which naval officials decided to deport Chamorros with leprosy to the Philippine island of Culion (PSECC; Hattori). In the round-up, a pair of manamko elders—a blind man and a crippled woman—evidently decided they didn't want to leave their beloved island and familia, and in a rather brilliant if short-lived act of Native self-determination, together they fled into the halom tano interior in a particularly memorable fashion: mounted on his back, she provided the sight that his legs would follow towards (momentary) freedom. Though they were eventually found, and tragically were sent on to Culion with the rest, to the great consternation and sadness of their families, it was their temporary escape as an historic act of native resistance, and the form of their escape as a resolution to their dilemma that made me see the story then as also a parable for the ongoing project of developing an historical ethnography or ethno-history in, from, and for the Native Pacific. As a theoretical and political exercise, including self-marking the process of engendering, I named the blind man History, the crippled woman Culture. Historians, I thought, had legs and moved well across time, but also tended to be blind to the cultural specificities of place, including their own locations in the narratives deployed (H. White; but see Dening, Sahlins, Hanlon). Anthropologists, on the other hand, by virtue of grounding themselves locally, possessed the sight, but tended to be crippled to (and in) their locations of culture (Bhabha; Appadurai; in the Pacific, see G. White ;Stade), and in their own political locations in those locations (but see since, White and Tengan 2001). If only Historians could see the persistence of local culture; if only Anthropologists can keep apace with how island cultures moved through time and space, and moved with the help (or hindrance) of anthropological accounts of their accounts. Our Chamorro tandem provided, I thought, a parable for how we might conceptualize cooperation between still entrenched concepts and disciplines of History and Culture, how they should work together, and in that paper, I closed by invoking the similarity between my parable of the blind man and the crippled woman with Nicolas Dirks’ call for the disciplines of history and culture to supplement and complement each other in Derridean terms. Don’t worry, I'm not going back there here.

What's this recycled parable and throwback theory got to do with the institutional and practical concerns of pedagogy and local knowledge in a forum that explores the establishment of a doctoral program in Pacific Studies in Hawai‘i? For me, everything, if CPIS wants to “do it right,” as the late Polowatese Navigator, Sosthenis Emwalu,once said of (and for) the use of electronic tape recorders in the making of authentic traditional navigators.

 

‘Doing it Right’: Here, There and Everywhere

Soste’s reference (Sacred Vessels 1997) was to how he liked to think that it was because he recorded the right “tunes” from his father, Manipy, and more importantly, because he used these electronic recordings to sing them the right way, that the spirits of the sea allowed him to pass on through. From my vantage point of training in Honolulu, Santa Cruz, a decade of teaching in Micronesia, and the start of my third year (!) in Ann Arbor—the last stints which involved heightened attention to questions of pedagogy and alternative forms of knowledges as might be found in “local” traditional seafaring, including their utility in the most unlikely of places, a doctoral program—I want to assert that politicized questions about interdisciplinarity (witness ongoing attempts in Congress to censor area studies that dabble in post-colonial theory) conjoin the intercultural and political realities of the contemporary Pacific (the hybridity of 21^st century traditional seafaring across the Pacific; the urgency of decolonization and self-determination) to serve as vital, urgent demands for state-of-the-art scholarship anywhere. A funny thing happened on my voyage between teaching Pacific History and Micronesian Studies at the University of Guam and teaching in a leading doctoral program in a high-powered research university in the U.S. Midwest, forged deeply by vestiges of graduate and professional training in Honolulu and Santa Cruz in between: the intellectual, cultural, academic activities that centered on learning and teaching and “writing” about non-traditional “subjects” like seafaring in a “local” corner of the western Pacific would turn out to resonate remarkably well with other intellectual, cultural, and academic efforts to reinvigorate if not completely reimagine their own institutional ideas and practices! One important effect, and one that informs my contribution to this forum, is the remapping of 'local' when we refer to “local knowledge” such that now, “local” must involve things like Carolinian Seafaring and/or the demands of Ethnic Studies in the Midwest as engaged in the redefinition of the study of America. And Pedagogy—following the loosening up of the spaces involved—will likewise have to learn to move in new directions and involve the use of whatever its going to take to keep up with Learning an Ocean in Motion.

But let me return to the points of origins between Guam and Ann Arbor. Between these two locations, on the occasion of exploring the great potential for a doctoral program at UH, a place that has always served as an important ground for my own intellectual and political development, I want to use this paper to consider some theoretical, practical and institutional challenges—rigors really—that I think are raised in questions about pedagogy and local knowledges, and I should like to begin by situating these concerns and challenges in my experiences at two sites: Site One, teaching Pacific History and Micronesian Studies through a curriculum of seafaring at the University of Guam, and Site Two, Observations from a newly formed “Asian/Pacific Islander American” Studies program in the University of Michigan’s Program in American Culture. Following the quick jaunts to these two sites, I will close with a discussion of the theoretical concerns and the institutional imperatives and potentials that they provide for the exploration on hand.

 

Site One: Sahyan Tasi Fachemwan: Seafaring at the University of Guam

 

From 1996, after we finished editing Sacred Vessels, to Summer of 2001, I was involved in creating a seafaring program at the University of Guam that included undergraduate and graduate (MA) courses in the fundamentals of Carolinian seafaring, understood within an ongoing history of Carolinian migration to the Marianas. These courses mixed traditional historical scholarship—reading primary and secondary sources—with hands-on, experiential activities taken from a rather systematic traditional seafaring "curriculum” called Merak Heki in Polowat, which translates to “opening up” an assortment of “learning mats” under the tutelage of certified or Pwo navigators. The mats included basic star compass and other uses of the stars (e.g. seasons), building, repairing and sailing voyaging canoes, building and repairing a canoe house. The work also involved use of the UOG Planetarium so that we didn't have to get up so early every morning, and so that we could watch an annual cycle of star risings and settings within the course of a semester. The work was visceral: students had to memorize and learn the meanings of words hard to pronounce, including some chants whose rhythms and cadences were at first awkward to the students, yet whose translated meanings were remarkable for the depth of their cultural and historical knowledge and wisdom, and for their abilities to make even the most enthusiastic student a firm believer in the tradition. For example, the chant “Ufi Mwareta” sang of birds and fishes, landmarks, and sweet smelling flowers, whose “superficial” meanings, according to Sosthe, was nothing less than part of the map of the seaway from the Central Carolines to the Northern Marianas. My students—modern day Chamorros and other non-Chamorro Guamanians (Asians and Statesiders alike)- were stunned when they discovered that this chant was not only a mnemonic map but that navigators, including children in training, from the Central Carolines, possessed intimate knowledge of specific land- and water-marks in Guam and the Northern Marianas. And this, explained Sosthe, was only the “superficial” meaning; depth concerned faith and courage in the knowledge and its application, and in the historical and cultural specificity of Ufi Mwareta, joy, when one finally made landfall: the sweet fragrance of the plant found at Managaha Island in Saipan signified nothing less than the peace and tranquility that these islands to the north meant for warring and at times starving atoll dwellers.

There was also a lot of sweat, some blood and bruises, and upset stomachs both from the fluidity of the ocean and other fluidic matters to be had in the late twentieth century seafaring at UOG. The work involved navigating through intercultural and political challenges that accompanied interest in such a highly prized and cherished marker of Polowat identity. Tension simmered too, for traditional canoe projects like this, as Ben Finney and other Haole participants of the early Polynesian Voyaging Society trials and tribulations have recalled, come with strong sentiments of ownership and pride in heritage by y taotao tano, Guam's tangata whenua, y manChamoru members of the class. For the most part, and always in public, however, all members, Chamorros and non-Chamorros alike, understood that we were all apprentices (more like children who knew nothing) under our teacher, and in relation to other Polowatese and their kin from other islands in the Central Carolines, who were also living in Guam, and who graciously and generously shared their knowledges and technical skills and expertise in all aspects of our program. The deference and respect was important: at every step of the way our activities were closely monitored by said resident Carolinians who dutifully reported back to home island circuits of news and gossip the conduct of our activities and our behavior. Sporadic tension emerged over questions concerning appropriate compensation for materials and/or services, or involvement of appropriate or inappropriate individuals who possessed or lacked standing, or amidst cultural and political affronts in social exchanges which took place in an ever-present context of having to acknowledge who owned these knowledges and traditions (that were also being studied and applied in somebody else's homeland). One measure of success was celebrated (Ilah! Its Finished!) with the formal opening of our canoe house, whose name captured the essential hybridity and complexity of the process: the University of Guam Seafarers' "Sahyan Tasi Fache Mwaan” fused Carolinian and Chamorro terms on Guam soil and labor to signify a new place, a new process, for seafaring called, “A Meeting of Old Spirits; A New Vessel.”

            Another measure of success came in formal academic terms. Fortunately, I encountered no resistance but only support from my departments in History and in the MA program in Micronesian Studies. There were few obstacles to finding an institutional category for allowing a traditional Polowat navigator to teach a college level course, although to be sure, I still had to retain “faculty on record” status. Student motivation and interest was never a problem-the high scores on rote memorization/oral tests were consistent and unmatched in any other class I've taught. Perhaps the most empowering aspect of this curriculum was the ‘snagging’ of students from certain cohorts and demographics whose members would normally drop out of university after their first years. This group included other Micronesian students from neighboring islands in the Central Carolines who grew up organically with canoes but who until now never quite saw the 'culture' as having any academic value, certainly not something for which they could earn college credits. One of the things that I took special delight in was helping correct a dilemma that Satawal Navigator, Mau Pialug, drew attention to in the seminal film The Navigators (1984), which catapulted him to virtual stardom (like a star, someone or something to watch in order to get one's bearings). In the film, Mau laments that the young are all leaving, to Hawaii, to Guam, and are not learning how to navigate. This prompted Mau to finally open up and share his knowledge to the outside world when protocol and tradition still dictated you keep it in the clan. Years later, I took it as something potentially mutually beneficial when in the course of filming Sacred Vessels, Sosthe told me he was interested in coming to Guam to teach navigation to some of the young kids there. I pounced on the opportunity, as you might imagine. In the way that he found no contradiction but only utility in using electronic tape recorders to ensure tonal and lyric accuracy in his learning of traditional seafaring chants which would, he believed, appease spirits of the sea, Sosthe also found no contradiction in traveling to Guam to teach displaced Carolinians and others so interested in the knowledge he possessed. Like Celestino (Sosthe’s brother) says in Sacred Vessels, “the best way to preserve the culture is to share it with others". In the film too, Celestino also said that the older navigators learned and recorded their knowledge through memory, and that the safest “locker” is your brain. This oral wisdom was emphasized even in the presence of the written word, for as Celestino also explained, “the elders said that if you write a knowledge down, it is not safe, it can get stolen from you, or it can get wet when there’s a typhoon.” But Celes and Sosthe were of another generation, in fact the first to learn English and to attend secondary and even tertiary school. “In these modern times, the locker is empty, so it would be good to record them.” Thus did Sosthe and Celestino agree to “open the mats” to our recording cameras. Thus too did Sosthe arrive in Guam, with his own notebooks of knowledge, prepared to teach displaced Polowatese and anybody else on Guam who was interested to learn.

The knowledge extended beyond undergraduate classes. We offered a graduate seminar in seafaring that involved reading primary and secondary literature in the history and anthropology of Micronesian seafaring. Work here included participating in our building activities, but also in-depth interviewing of traditional resources in the community. In this milieu, four of six students produced MA theses that directly related to vestiges of seafaring: a study of traditional fishing and ecology (Maluwalmang 2002); a discursive analyses of the trope of insularity in Guam's historiography (Kushima 2001); a historic preservation plan that strategically used the occasion of the building of canoehouses in Guam and Saipan to argue for the need to redirect the stress on “physical structures” to more intangible “cultural structures” such as the seafaring culture as a whole (cite). In another case, one of our most active and skilled students used seafaring as the content for his Masters Degree in Library Studies here at UH (Duenas website).

            As I've recounted, this seafaring-based “curriculum development” inspired undergraduate and graduate (MA-level, disciplinary and interdisciplinary) work, and involved tasks that required some fair amount of “navigating” the social, cultural, and political relations among multiple and mixed communities in modern Guam, communities whose membership extended across the seas to the Central Carolines, and work which included at times swimming in formidable political waters between traditional canoehouses in Polowat, or that of communities whose politics involved Chamorro and Carolinian affairs in the Northern Marianas Islands. This teaching was also the stuff of my own intellectual and theoretical development, as I slowly began to look to seafaring concepts and practices, like etak/moving islands, and pookof, expanding or contracting islands, to inform and shape my own scholarship. The communities involved, and at stake, as stakeholders, as I was beginning to understand, also extended beyond the seas to Pacific studies forums in Honolulu, and as I would find to my delight, to communities of scholars in revamped U.S. ethnic studies and other interdisciplinary critiques of American Studies.

 

Site Two: American Culture Through the Lens of Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies

 

The renaming of our program, from “Asian American Studies" to “Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies” (A/PIA), was meant to underscore the importance of UM's decision to open lines dedicated specifically to the Pacific Islands (Literature, History, Cultural Studies) in one of the country's older American Studies Programs, and to signal at the outset, to interested stakeholders in the continent, that Pacific Islands Studies at UM was not to be subsumed under the banner of Asian American Studies. The slash, like the slash in New York University's Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program, which hosted the 2001 CPIS Conference (Pacific Islands/Atlantic Worlds), was meant to mark that difference, in the same way that the “PIA” underscored a commitment to "Pacific Islander Americans” in the U.S. Diaspora. But as I would like to point out later, ours is also a commitment to an international and transnational Pacific Studies, given the fact that four of the seven faculty members in our unit hail from the Pacific Islands (Hawaii, Guam and Samoa, via New Zealand) and specialize in the Pacific Islands (Polynesian ethnomusicology, Pacific Literature, Pacific History, and Micronesian Studies).

Our institutional home in the Program in American Studies reflects the Program faculty's and the College's commitment to Ethnic Studies (here, A/PIA joins Latino/a Studies and Native American Studies) in such a way that makes Ethnic Studies the biggest component of a program run by faculty housed mostly in the History and English Departments, but comprised also of faculty in Womens Studies, Film and Visual Studies, and the Center for African and American Studies. One of the things that I found remarkable initially was the support for interdisciplinary scholarship at UM. Over two thirds of the History Department (over 80 members!) hold joint appointments in other Departments and interdisciplinary programs (Area Studies, Womens Studies, Visual Studies, Joint Doctoral Programs like Womens Studies/History; Anthropology/History; Womens Studies/English; and a number of smaller research clusters, the Atlantic Studies Initiative, etc.) And while I was already open to joining an Ethnic Studies program, given its historic roots in community activism, and its housing of Native American Studies, I was delighted to find out that it was a program whose faculty was also engaged in teaching and research that I considered radical and innovative, which included community service learning and teaching, and broader kinds of 'ethnic' studies (global native politics, links between “Asia” and “Asian American"; Latin and Caribbean “American") that challenged the insularities of all of the working subject categories, which began to clarify for me the interest and the value that the older American Culture Program faculty members saw in the “new” Ethnic and Area Studies: new spatializations accompanied by new intellectual practices that could help fortify UM's own prominence and stature in the flux of a field that is called American Studies. (who is not in flux?)

Indeed, one of the most exciting things about being in Ann Arbor is seeing the individual and institutional energy and commitment to building a comparativist framework in Ethnic Studies, in the fields of Latino/a, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Native American Studies, as a way (we like to say the way) to redefine American Studies. This comparativist conversation is taking place in all sorts of ways - brown bags, manuscript workshops, talks and workshops that include big names from across the country, student and faculty mentorships, fellowships, grants - and among all sorts of individuals in many disciplines and fields. Most interestingly, the conversations are taking place among stake holders in various forms of interdisciplinarities such as womens studies, queer studies, visual studies, Atlantic Studies, African and African American Studies, Cultural Studies, many specific Area Studies, so that uppermost on peoples minds are issues such as new forms of interdisciplinarities, new sites of knowledge and learning ("community learning” and even this interesting thing called “student learning”), new forms and standards of ‘rigor,’ as legitimate sites of and for scholarly production.

 

Theoretical/Conceptual Approaches and Axes of Power

A sense of the over- and inter-laps between my work there in Micronesia and my work here in Ann Arbor is also reflected in emergent scholarship and praxis that Houston Wood (2003) identifies as New Pacific Studies, which I think should include consideration of work in newly emerging Pacific Islands Studies in the continental United States, not just in the program that I've described, but in the now countless courses on various aspects of Pacific Islands Studies that are being offered at many universities and colleges across the country (thanks to workshops, symposia, conferences, and especially the EWC-NEH Summer Seminar and Institutes run by Geoff White over the past decade). This emergent work foregrounds—as does the buzz at Ann Arbor—new ways of thinking about interdisciplinarity, including new forms of interdisciplinarities, and their politics, especially in relation to projects of decolonization, Native self-determination, and anti-imperialism. Central to these projects are critical frameworks now couched productively as Native "articulations” (Teaiwa 2001; Clifford 2001), both at home and in the Diaspora (Kauanui 1997; Spickard, Rondilla and Hippolite-Wright 2003), that call attention to the processes by which native subjectivities and their spaces and places are constituted, both politically and in the politics of academic and scholarly production (Diaz and Kauanui 2001). I believe that any consideration of developing a doctoral program in Pacific Studies must also consider developments in the wake of these new, politicized conceptualizations, especially as they occur in new institutional locations of Pacific Studies in the U.S. continent as well as in Oceania in the last several years. My own location at two seemingly incongruent sites of relatively new Pacific Studies over the last decade - in the aforementioned Micronesian Studies and Pacific History at UOG (1992-2001), and in the newly formed A/PIA at UM - only convinces me of the importance and significance of issues involving pedagogy and “local” knowledge(s) in the question under consideration. More than anything, my own work at these two sites has only prompted me to pay more attention to questions of pedagogy and forms of knowledge culled from local communities—and here, “local” knowledge and communities must be understood in an expansive way—than on traditional scholarly grounds as the preferred mode of intellectual and academic production. I like to think of it as construction underway toward the building of a new tradition.

The bid to reconceptualize native subjectivity, by historicizing and politicizing it in relation to terms and politics indigenous to the region, also includes reconceptualizing the space and place of the Pacific, and, as indicated, a reconsideration of the space and the content and the forms of ‘local’ and ‘knowledges. ’ Historicizing and politicizing subjectivity means that subjectivity cannot be taken as a given, that it is political and politicizing, and that it is historically constructed and is site of historical narrativization. References to this sort of mediated Nativeness are often encapsulated in the term “Native” (in caps), or in “Indigeneity” (a term which, I have found, drives many anthropologists crazy). Teresia Teaiwa has been most responsible for articulating Native Pacific Subjectivity in terms of “articulation,” a customization of British Cultural Studies insofar as she once described her work as employing the form of cultural studies to study the content of the Pacific. My own work (forthcoming) reverses Teaiwa’s formulation somewhat, with the same effect (I think, I hope) in that it deploys Pacific content as the form of cultural studies. There I rely on traditional Carolinian seafaring concepts and practices as another way to conceptualize subjectivity in mobile and dynamic terms indigenous to the region. For me Natives and Travel aren’t the mutually exclusive terms they are made to be in colonial discourse (see Chappell), although given the persistence of colonial and imperial orders in places like Hawai‘i, French Polynesia, Guam, it is important to qualify and specify the situations and conditions in which we define Natives as Travelers. The distinction made between those who are migrants versus those who are indigenous to the islands are crucial to native claims to sovereignty—as in Hawaii, where allegations of Asian settler colonialism complicate the conventional story of colonialism by the white man (Trask; Fujikani)—to restricting participation to natives only in processes of self-determination (as in Guam's non-binding political status plebiscite). The same definitional and political antinomies structure postcolonial struggles in Fiji and the Solomon Islands, and do not stop there. Moreover, the increasing numbers of Pacific islanders in the Diaspora in the continental U.S., New Zealand, or even in Hawai‘i, as in the case of Micronesians, raise similar concerns about their status viz a viz other immigrants and those who claim indigenous status to the lands in question. To be sure, critical scholarship that insists on challenging the terms by which Indigeneity is defined, including the heavily politicized processes under which native culture and identity, and now place and space, are so defined must also develop and exercise political savvy and a remarkable form of critical sensitivity, especially given the complicity of academic practice with arrangements and relations of power amidst the ever increasing restrictions, conditions, guidelines, and protocols being placed by (self-appointed?) stewards of native knowledges, customs, and traditions (Spriggs; Guam Department of Chamorro Affairs’ Guidelines...for Authenticating Chamorro Heritage; Guidelines for Producing Films involving Australian Aboriginals). I’m certainly not suggesting (nor simply dismissing the idea) that only a native can legitimately do native studies, but I am marking out the need for elevating questions of stakes and positionality between researcher or scholar or student and subject matter in relation to issues of power pertinent to the situation or material, and am most certainly calling for the need for more politically savvy and critically sensitive modes of research and analyses, including greater accountability to native communities as part of the new academic canons (DuPuis; Wood; Tuhiwai Smith).

In order to ensure that we not lose the ground and the potent groundedness of Indigeneity in its mobilities across time and space, we also need mobile notions of space and place. Hau‘ofa has already been credited by many for rightfully urging us to rethink the space of the Pacific in terms of a fluidic Oceania. Drawing from Hau‘ofa, Rob Wilson has articulated an Oceanic critique in terms of a critical regionalism whose potential is to contest the twin processes of Globalization and Localization in and through which Capital operates, twin processes that have also bequeathed to us orientalist mappings such as the “Asia-Pacific” region (Dirlik). Other potent examples from the region include David Gegeo’s (2001) useful and insightful exegesis on the portability of space and place in Kwara‘ae epistemologies, which I think resonates with the Carolinian seafaring practices of etak (of moving islands) and of pookof (of the use of the travel habits of sea creatures as part of the technique of expanding and contracting the islands), indigenous seafaring concepts, techniques and practices which I’ve tried to use in my own effort to customize both Micronesian and Academic practice.

            At the risk of being redundant, of reducing these important frameworks to formulaic, trite, litanies, I still think it is imperative to mobilize nativity and place in ways that do not sacrifice (but in fact draw from) the social and political and cultural and scholarly struggles for self-determination , and to not lose sight of the very landed and oceanic groundings from and on which Pacific Island cosmologies and genealogies are staked. There truly is a mutually-constitutive relationship between indigenous genealogies and lands/oceans, and I think Pacific Islands scholarship should recognize, respect and help nurture this relationship in its own evolving protocols. I actually think that this is one of the most important things that a Pacific Studies doctorate program can help “articulate.”

 

Critically Sensitive, Comparative, and Relational

My own experiences as a displaced Native whose work engages and even challenges other Native cultural work makes me equate the need for critically-sensitive mobilizations of subject and place with the need for comparative and relational strategies along three axes identified below(the first two of which also happen to be central concerns in our efforts to reimagine American Culture at UM). These might be read as prescriptive, as requirements, although I like to think of them as elements or components that might be added into the discussion or conversation on the New Rigor that a New Pacific Studies Doctoral Program can help articulate:

 

1.     Close Attention to historically- and culturally-specific power relations of gender/sexuality, race, and class (in the curriculum as well as in the research process). For example, at UM, we are exploring the possibility of revising our “race and ethnicity” requirement in the graduate student handbook to include comparative treatment of issues of race/ethnicity and gender, or race/ethnicity and class and gender. The central idea here is to prompt the student to explore the interlinkages between race, ethnicity, gender and class as forces that shape culture and identity, with identity always understood in relational terms that are always marked by race, ethnicity, gender, and class. And nationality, as per below.

 

2.              Simultaneous focus on national, international, and transnational forces and spatialities. How are the subjects of our inquiry constituted in structural relation to nationalist projects and nationalist projects elsewhere? The comparative strategy here isn't simply a compare and contrast mode, but a critique of structural continuities and discontinuities between island and other nations and nationalisms.

 

3.              Comparative Studies. Is it actually possible to continue to treat any aspect of social, cultural, and political life in the Pacific as a stand-alone entity? In the same way that the idea of a “local” knowledge is defined only in relation to another spatiality (“global,” “non-local”), or in the way that we can destabilize “local” as one of many versions, it is also possible if not necessary to require that the rigor involves making and examining analogous cases in an island or region outside the subject area.

 

Towards a New Rigor

These theoretical concerns/challenges are a tall order because they demand simultaneous attention to specificity and overlap, and call for an accounting of these cultural processes in very grounded, material, and political and savvy ways. There is a rigor here not quite collapsible to the traditional rigor demanded in the disciplines, which traditional interdisciplinary programs do not necessarily challenge when interdisciplinarity involves merely drawing on two or more disciplines rather than doing work that pushes the boundaries and also formulates new criteria and standards for critically evaluating and assessing the new work. How do we begin to foreground this and other new forms of rigor demanded by Pacific historical and cultural forms and contents, especially when formal models aren't forthcoming either from traditional academic practices or from the Pacific? How do we begin to formulate the new standards of critique when the grounds of our subjects and the undercurrents of our learning of Oceania seem to be moving so swiftly?