Our Sea of Islands or Archipelagoes of Autarchy?:
Learning Oceania:
Towards a PhD Program in Pacific Studies
Fall Workshop
Center for Pacific Islands Studies
University of Hawai‘i at Manoa,
13–15 November 2003
Professor Margaret Jolly
Head, Gender Relations Centre
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra
ACT 0200
AUSTRALIA
Tel: 61-2-6125-3150/3146; Fax 61-2-6125-4896
Email margaret.jolly@anu.edu.au
Humble apologies to David and other participants for late availability of this long, inchoate and unreferenced text. I hope to post bibliography and notes on the website later.
I start with an imagined cartography of Oceania - not with an ocean inhabited by monsters lapping at the edge of the world, nor with Tupaya's map nor Cook's charts of the eighteenth century, nor with the contours of rival colonial influences in the nineteenth century, nor American military cartographies of World War Two, nor with a late twentieth century Japanese map, issued by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, securing the certain borders of Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia with color coding. Rather, with both a profound debt and with apologies to Epeli Hauof'a, I counterpose his utopic and generous vision of Oceania as 'Our Sea of Islands' with a dystopic vision, of what I call 'Archipelagoes of Autarchy'.
Imagine that there a number of islands not connected by an abundant ocean in which we can swim, fish or navigate our boats but an ocean which is seen as a barrier which has to be crossed, as a threat to the cosy intimacy of insularity. But these islands are populated by some people who want to learn, by serious seekers after knowledge not just about themselves and where they came from, but about their neighbours whom they can see living on other islands, some quite close, others at the edge of their horizon.
But on these different islands there are very different ideas about how they can learn, how they can come to know their neighbours. On the first island, there are those, who say we can only know them by going there, by observing them, learning their language and engaging in conversation, seeing what they do, trying to do similar things ourselves, eating their food, wearing their clothes, living in their houses, and even working as they do. And so we must take a boat, or a seaplane, or a helicopter, and visit them. Let us hope we can get the right visas in good time for our journey and are welcomed and adopted by our neighbours, 'like family' so we can stay a year or more, and find out what they are really like. We will record what they say and do in the flesh of our memory, in the tapes of our recorders, and in the images of our still and moving cameras. Then, when we come home we can think about these memories of our journey, analyse them, 'write them up', perhaps complement the text with a few select pictures, and teach ourselves and our children about these others.
On a second island in this vast archipelago, there are those who prefer not to go to the next island where they see can see people are living (from the smoke of their fires from cooking and gardening) but to one beyond, now uninhabited. Because all the people living there have moved on, they do not have to rely on difficult visas or the risk of not being welcomed at the end of the journey. When they arrive they find abundant traces of past lives: the foundations of houses, the contours of terraced gardens, the detritus of shell fish meals, fragments of bark and pandanus textiles, and superb rotting sculptures abandoned on the beaches and on cleared grounds in the interior. They find curious wooden structures everywhere - two pieces of wood lashed together at right angles, one longer than the other. To their amazement, they also find vast archives of paper, with writing somewhat like their own, but in a language they do not understand. So they will have to go in search of some living people who can interpret these strange inscriptions. But, alas many of the pages have been damaged by the decay of time, while some seem lost to the sand or the ocean, perhaps by a tsunami or a cyclone. They pack up as many of these objects as they can possibly carry, and fill their boats, so they are dangerously overloaded. On arrival home, they sequester them in a large vault like house, where the air-conditioner is left constantly running to defeat the ruin of time. Here the objects look newly pristine in glass cases: beached canoes, soaring sculptures and vast crosses, textiles scrupulously curated to reveal still vibrant colours, and, in the library, stiff folios covered with the tracery of that strange language. They nestle beside the vast archives of stories recorded by their own ancestors who had earlier ventured abroad. The place for these treasures is remote and quiet and only some can enter the library, if they have the right passes, after they have insinuated their fingers in white gloves available at the door. Many years after scholars leave this house they write very long books, usually bristling with a lower border of much smaller writing, which some say they create with their feet.
The third island is large, high and actively volcanic, only recently emerged from the ocean depths. Here people are living in the great luxury afforded by technological advance. The ocean is large and open at this point, and is not seen as such a barrier. Its inhabitants often travel to proximate and distant islands, for brief, but intense sojourns. They are regularly visited by ocean liners and jumbo jets who bring them desired goodies from their neighbours Strange foods, exotic clothes, beautiful hand-crafted furniture (felled from distant rainforests) are quickly assimilated into their everyday domestic life. The scholars amongst them have also been accumulating vast libraries of books, galleries of art works and archives of films made by their overseas neighbours and have been reading and looking at these voraciously. They communicate with their neighbours regularly through the medium of colossal cables deep under the ocean and satellites amongst the stars: they talk to them on fixed and very mobile phones, they send them text messages and gossip incessantly on the internet. On monstrous screens under the full moon, they watch the intimate lives of their neighbours on reality TV or enjoy the extraordinary fantasies of their cinema lives. They write books, make their own films and create vast websites to tell the world about their neighbours and about themselves. But some think this world is really virtual.
I could go on... because there are quite a lot of islands in this archipelago. But this is enough and my fable is already too long. The only thing left to say is that on all these islands, doctorates are being conferred. Clearly, what I have plotted here are three islands in the archipelago of the academy with which we are all familiar, the first Anthropos inhabited by anthropologists, the second Historia with its smaller offshore island Prehistoria, populated by historians and archaeologists, and the third Cultstudnet, large, and daily expanding with the lava of a very active volcano, but already dramatically overpopulated by the cultural studies mob. These insular scholars are all quite convinced that their ways of learning are best, tend to be highly critical and censorious of their neighbours' ways of knowing and are strangely reluctant to cross the ocean to share their knowledge and learn from each other.
Now you might say that this is a preposterous fable about the contemporary academy, that we live in an epoch where the autarchic islands of disciplines have been breached by the surging sea of transdisciplinarity. You might say that there is happily now a comfy fit between Epeli Hau‘ofa's generous open vision of the place of Oceania as 'our sea of islands' and the expanded horizons of ways of knowing no longer confined by the insularity of disciplines. But, although I am by habit an optimist, I think this may be wishful thinking, at least in certain places. There is no doubt that we are living in a transdisciplinary moment in the global academy, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Interdisciplinarity, or as I prefer, transdisciplinarity, is much trumpeted by university administrators and grant agencies in most locales these days. But in my view this rhetoric of openness often co-exists with a perduring potential for disciplining which becomes especially pronounced when resources are at issue: funds for teaching and research, staff positions and the credentials needed for jobs in the academy.
Perhaps my dystopic vision derives from living too long in landlocked Canberra, and the Coombs which, even natives know, defies navigation. Later, I want to reflect on the palpable tension I experience there between the enormous potential for transdisciplinary collaboration in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, and a learning environment where the claims of competitive disciplinary allegiance and the increasingly onerous demands of a conservative government threaten to vitiate an expansive, transdisciplinary vision of Oceania for scholars and especially for graduate scholars. But, before I talk about Canberra, and then about the greater potential for a doctoral program here at Manoa, I want to talk, not too narcissistically I hope, about my own journey of learning in this vast ocean, and about how I have navigated the reefs of disciplinary containment, over three decades or so. I do this because David Hanlon has invited us to be personal and reflexive in our presentations and because, although I have written more in a more distanced and detached way about disciplinarity and cross-disciplinary borrowings, I feel the need here for confession and perhaps catharsis (a bit dangerous on a website). The three islands I charted above in a way plot my own journey through Oceania, which as Eric Waddell consummately expresses it, is both 'an object of our study and a subject of our desires'. I have lived on all of these islands and have managed to move between them: Anthropos, Historia and Cultstudnet. But that movement has not been without constraint and criticism. I must here acknowledge at the outset that not just the broadening experience of Oceania facilitated this movement but my early exposure to the life-transforming and transdisciplinary promise of feminism. And so, to my three islands: Anthropos, Historia, Cultstudnet.
I was seduced by anthropology at the University of Sydney at the tender age of sixteen. I had taken it as an additional fourth subject in my first year and was intending to do a major in History and English Literature and to become a journalist. Both the exciting reading (yes I confess- Argonauts of the Western Pacific, The Sexual Life of Savages) and performative styles of several lecturers; the late Ian Hogbin and Rhys Jones and Michael Allen and Jeremy Beckett (still both very much alive) diverted my path, and simultaneously arrested my faltering Christian faith. I was equally fascinated by the imagined worlds of island Melanesia and of MesoAmerica. I wrote my honours thesis on peasant communities in Mexico and Guatemala in 1969 and planned to go to the University of Michigan to study with Eric Wolf. But my mother was succumbing to a breast cancer diagnosed a decade before and I wanted to stay closer to home. The award of a Commonwealth graduate scholarship to do anthropological research in the Pacific made that possible. After her death, in 1970, I started to plan field work in the proximate archipelago of the then New Hebrides, still under the colonial influence of Britain and France.
I was not disappointed by that choice, although I can still recall the apprehension which I felt before that journey, not just about what I was going towards but what I was leaving behind: my father and my brother soon after my mother's untimely death, a man who I had just refused to marry, and close friends who were also political partners in the heady early days of the anti-Vietnam and feminist movements. I was also worried whether I was up to the journey I had envisaged - to go to the remotest part of Pentecost Island, to live with people who were trenchantly traditionalist and vehemently anti-colonial, to learn a language which, as we thought then, had neither a dictionary nor a grammar. This was a classic anthropological excursion from the known to the unknown, from familiarity to difference, a journey which I later critiqued, along with that broader tendency to exoticism in anthropology in general, and the ethnography of Melanesia in particular.
But at the time I was utterly enchanted. I found learning another language and way of life exhilarating. Moreover, the joys of a pristine natural environment, of walking in unfelled rainforests and swimming in unpolluted rivers and ocean seemed ample compensation for the rigours of hiking on mountainous, muddy terrain, the threat and reality of malaria, the lack of hot running water, dietary diversity and other cosmopolitan pleasures. My taped music of Bob Dylan and Bach were soon supplanted by the lilting falsettos of local songs, the rhythms of slit gongs and the piercing squeals of pigs being sacrificed. The experience of living with a group of people who were so robustly struggling to perpetuate kastom, the ways of their ancestors; resisting both the appeals of Christianity and the allure of commodities appealed both to my anthropological romance of difference and my political romance about anti-colonial resistance. I was especially touched when women and men in Bunlap village, empathised and cried with me when a close friend, a draft resister against the Vietnam war was gaoled, thrown in the kalaboos (prison), for opposing the government (a fate experienced by many men from Bunlap village in the colonial period). My idealistic evaluation of subsistence economy, emplaced and embodied oral knowledge, ancestral spirituality and indigenous medicine obscured what to other eyes might have appeared as rural poverty, illiteracy, heathenism and poor health provisions. But I was also unsettled by the dynamics of gender in these kastom communities, and by how the indigenous grounds of male domination seemed to have been expanded in the resistant, masculinist discourse of kastom. And so my several papers based on this fieldwork in South Pentecost and the book which emerged from it, Women of the Place, adopted an avowedly feminist approach, even as I struggled to understand the different subject positions of myself and my interlocutors, our different conceptions of person and sociality, and the broader historical context which framed our conversations.
In the early to mid-1970s back at the University of Sydney, I was not an especially dutiful daughter either. Indeed, my experience in Vanuatu seemed to have made me more intolerant of the patriarchy back home in the Department of Anthropology. The women's movement had invaded the University of Sydney, proclaiming a strike in the Philosophy department and agitating for new visions across several disciplines, which would revalue women as both subjects and objects of knowledge. When a feminist course I was hired to teach as a graduate scholar in 1973, was renamed 'The Anthropology of Women' and the nine weeks of lectures and films contracted to six because a senior male scholar insisted on a double bill, I resolved to move on to a tutoring job at Macquarie University. This was partly to follow a charismatic Sri Lankan professor from Sydney who thought that the boundary of anthropology and sociology was a colonial creation and partly because the prospect for the project of academic feminism seemed more open there. But throughout the late 1970s like many, I became preoccupied with the growing cleavage between the political and the scholarly practices of feminism, and indeed uncertain as to how I could possibly reconcile the demands of an academic career in anthropology and my passionate feminist commitments. The increasing legitimacy of feminism and of its transdisciplinary character made that reconciliation gradually easier. Increasingly I found myself drawn to the proximate discipline of history. Again this had roots both in my experience in Vanuatu and in the Australian academy.
My fieldwork in Vanuatu throughout the 1970s had left me with a strong sense of dissatisfaction with conventional anthropological ways of knowing. Increasingly I felt that what was missing was the historical dimension not just of their culture, but of the relation between my ni-Vanuatu family and friends and myself. I may have moved in the words of my watchful and controlling indigenous father, from being an aisalsaliri (a foreigner) to an isin na ut lo (a woman of the place), but I knew the knowledge that I was entrusted with was dramatically moulded by my being a young woman and a white Australian. I started immersing myself in the history not just of the New Hebrides but the long and complicated history of the relation between that archipelago and Australia. I became fascinated in the contested history of the labour trade to Queensland and the way in which Christianity had been embraced by most ni-Vanuatu. After all, I had first found out about these islands and the history of 'blackbirding' and Christian conversion in these islands through watching old flickering films at the Presbyterian church in Drummoyne I had frequented in my youth, where the plate had been passed round, collecting for the mission work in the New Hebrides.
Soon after the independence movement was victorious in Vanuatu in 1980, a moratorium was proclaimed on foreigners doing fieldwork. (This persisted for a decade). Respecting that, and also because a full-time lecturing job and being a mother made fieldwork more difficult, I decided to dive into the archives - the Mitchell Library in Sydney, the well-stocked libraries of Canberra and the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, and then subsequently on study leave in London, Cambridge, Oxford and Aix-en-Provence. This research was enormously facilitated by the excitement of working with other colleagues who in the 1980s were defiantly crossing the borders of anthropology, history and political studies at Macquarie University in Sydney: Caroline Ralston, Bob Norton, Stewart Firth, and Ted Wolfers. We learnt a lot from each other and from our students in courses on colonialism in the Pacific, in an era when budgets were still ample enough to afford two or even three teachers in the seminar room at once.
During the unexpected luxury of a research fellowship at the ANU in 1983 (in a project graced by Marilyn Strathern, Martha Macintyre, Debbie Gewertz, and the late Roger Keesing) my critique of ahistorical anthropology solidified, assisted by scintillating conversations and arguments with Marilyn (who was conceiving The Gender of the Gift). This was the start of a fertile period of writing about women and Christianity, women in the labour trade, and gender and sexuality on early European voyages in the Pacific.
But seemingly again in the midst of this research and writing the terrain shifted, the bastard child of historical anthropology in the Pacific had become newly legitimized by the writing of Marshall Sahlins, Greg Dening and my then partner in intellectual and domestic life, Nicholas Thomas. My year in Cambridge in 1987 was sheer joy, working between the parameters of a comparative anthropology of Melanesia (with Marilyn Strathern and Maurice Godelier) and the new thrills and challenges of historical research pursued in the British archives. I was not averse to the pleasures of working with white gloves and frequently sharpened pencils. I still remember the frisson and the shock of privilege in being able to look at de Quiros' maps of Espiritu Santo from his voyage of 1606, and the extraordinary intensity of several days working through the papers of the Anti-Slavery Society in Oxford, reading vituperative correspondence from missionaries in southern Vanuatu about the dastardly actions of those involved in the labour trade.
I am still committed to a vision of historical anthropology. Like Vince Diaz, I think that history without anthropology is blind, and anthropology without history is crippled. But importantly his Chamorro parable places Islander subjects at the heart of this, whereas in my view even the best practice of historical anthropology in the Pacific still tends to privilege European rather than Islander sources of knowledge, and fails to adequately address the way in which there can be incommensurability and not just additive confluence between different ways of knowing. There is much talk of exchanges on beaches, or as in a recent book on Australia, 'dancing with strangers'. This perduring stress on the foundational binaries of 'first contacts' is perhaps defensible given the continuing consequences of colonialism, especially in settler colonies, but in privileging this cross-cultural encounter the equally important encounters between indigenous peoples, between Islanders are occluded. And alas much fulsome rhetoric about the cross-cultural depth afforded by 'double vision', ultimately amounts to little more than seeing Islander agency reflected back through the optics of a colonial lens. I here implicate some of my own earlier writing in this critique, and thank the talented graduate Islander scholars in my classes in History at UH in 1998, for leading me to that unfortunate conclusion.
Stories about pasts are, as Greg Dening proclaims, also simultaneously stories about the present. Epeli Hau‘ofa's melding of the figures of ancient and contemporary Islanders as world travellers consummately reveals this dialectic. In similar vein historical anthropology needs to be fertilized by a sense of how all this matters in the vibrant contemporary cultural politics of Oceania, in cultures which are moving in space and time, in this, our allegedly novel epoch of globalization. Such questions edge us into the preferred terrain of cultural studies.
CultStudNet
Few of my colleagues in Pacific studies at the ANU seem persuaded that work like this is interesting and important. It is rather scholars of gender and sexuality, historians of Asia a few local filmmakers, and younger doctoral scholars there who evince interest in this line of research. In dramatic contrast, when I was on study leave and then teaching at the University of Santa Cruz in California in 2001-2 I found that the questions I was asking in such projects resonated loudly with both colleagues and students. No doubt this was because of a very different intellectual locale: I was there attached to the Centre for Cultural Studies which is proximate to the transdisciplinary graduate program (History of Consciousness or Histcon) led by scholars like Donna Haraway, James Clifford, Teresa de Lauretis and Angela Davis. I expressly accepted an invitation to go to that institution so I could develop this dimension of my work. The courses which I offered around these projects, also engaged many undergraduate students at UCSC in the winter quarter of 2001-2, not just because of their themes and approaches, but because of the subject matter, their connection to Oceania. When I surveyed students at the start of my undergraduate course, Envisioning Oceania (on visual arts and colonial history), and my senior seminar Looking Back (on photography and cinema of the Pacific) I discovered that many were attracted to the courses by the very power of the representations of Oceania we were analysing, and/or by a sense of connection to Oceania, often deriving from a familial link to Hawai‘i. There were many Californian Hawaiians in those classes.
I now move from these shifting sites (and perhaps fantasy islands) in my own intellectual journey of learning Oceania to the starker realities of the place I call home, the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, at the Australian National University in Canberra. Here I want to focus more closely on the relationship between the potential for transdisciplinary knowledge of Oceania and the politics of funding research in contemporary Australia.
The Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University has seemingly a vast potential for transdisciplinary work on Oceania. The architects' aerial vision of a series of interlinked hexagons and internal courtyards is not only suggestive of a busy bee hive of scholarly activity, but with disorienting angles, intimate mezzanines, linking bridges and a vast communal tea room imagines an abundant and flowing honey pot of mingled knowledge from many sources. In RSPAS at present we have about thirty staff researchers and about fifty graduate scholars working on the Pacific, across the fields of anthropology, human geography, linguistics, archaeology, history, political science, international relations, and economics.
But, since a budget crisis in the late 1990s, we have been organized into four divisions: Economics, History, Politics and International Relations (all discipline-specific) and a large cross-disciplinary division, Society and Environment (which embraces archaeology, anthropology, geography, linguistics, the Contemporary China Centre and the Gender Relations Centre). These divisions and, in DSE, the constituent departments and centres, are the cost entities, which are increasingly jostling within tight budgets. This internecine budgetary competition has been intensified in the last three years since RSPAS, like all the Research Schools of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the ANU, gave up 20% of its recurrent budget to be allowed entry to the large competitive funds of the Australian Research Council and the National Heath and Medical Research Council. That gamble will ultimately pay off, but not nearly so well as for the natural science schools with their huge grants based in large equipment costs and seemingly greater intellectual hubris. Reliance on external grants means that budgets are far more uncertain and fluctuating and that there are winners and losers. The new budgetary regime for our school, imposed by the Department of Education, Science and Technology since 2001, places inordinate stress on success in external grants and in recruiting graduate scholars (especially Australian and New Zealand scholars who alone count in our 'research training' load!). So in one crucial component of our funding (the IGS scheme) external grants are weighted 60%, graduate scholar loads 30%, and publications a mere 10%.
Now it might be argued that creative scholarship and transdisciplinary visions can still be created and sustained in the face of such budgetary pressures. Many of us try. But, in the present funding environment such ventures occasion higher risks and disciplines seem rather to be retreating into tighter definitions of their intellectual projects as the budget tightens. Moreover, even if the grants funded are transdisciplinary in vision (like Oceanic Encounters, a large ARC grant I was recently awarded, which traverses anthropology, history and cultural studies in theorizing gender and sexuality in cross-cultural encounters), they will by strict auditing procedures, be stringently attached to the cost centre which secured them (in this case, the Gender Relations Centre).
Moreover, the vast transdisciplinary potential of RSPAS rarely translates into a learning environment which is fully available to graduate scholars. Unlike Asian Studies, which has a complementary undergraduate teaching program in the Faculty of Asian Studies, there is no comparable Pacific studies program at the ANU. Undergraduate scholarship on the Pacific is dispersed in a few disparate courses in anthropology and, occasionally history and politics , when scholars from RSPAS (like Ron May, Brij Lal or myself) conduct occasional undergraduate courses or deliver guest lectures in courses with another focus. Unlike the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, or universities in Aotearoa New Zealand, there are thus very few students who have been able to immerse themselves in Pacific studies through ANU undergraduate programs. Moreover, other centres for Pacific Studies in Australian universities, Macquarie, La Trobe, Queensland, Newcastle and the University of Sydney, have dramatically contracted in the last fifteen years with scholars either retreating back into disciplines, moving to the ANU or overseas, or retiring. And so the several undergraduate Pacific programs which in the past were sources for postgraduate recruitment in Australia have effectively dried up. Australian doctoral scholars wanting to pursue research in the Pacific today have typically either become fascinated by the region as part of undergraduate and honours work in a discipline (usually anthropolology, history or politics) or have a familial or work association with the Pacific which they want to develop in doctoral research.
There are an increasing number of Masters students, especially in the field of International Relations, burgeoning in Australia since September 11, and in the context of his offerings on the Pacific, Greg Fry regularly invites scholars from other disciplines to join in seminars with these students. Our doctoral scholars in Pacific studies are recruited typically through the large disciplinary programs of the ANU (anthropology, history, politics etc) and some smaller cross-disciplinary programs (like Gender Studies, and the Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Research Program). There are abundant streams of talented scholars coming down these paths, from Australian and from overseas institutions in both Europe and North America (especially Germany and Canada). But scholars from the Pacific are still rare, except those working on projects favoured by AusAID and governments in the region, which are directed to the urgent demands of development policy, dominated by the agendas of economics, demography and political science. Typically, these projects are pursued in shorter courses or Masters coursework programs, rather than in doctorates.
Still, earlier generations of Islander scholars in Pacific history and anthropology in RSPAS (like Sione Latukefu and Epeli Hau‘ofa) have more recently been joined by scholars like Ann Dickson-Waiko, John Ondawame, Alumita Durutalo, Ruth Saovana-Spriggs, Bill Sapir, Ruth Turia, Tarcisius Kabutaulaka and Katerina Teaiwa. There have been informal attempts to sustain contacts and conversations between these Islander scholars, most effectively I think when Tarcisius and Kati were resident in the Coombs. But these tend to be episodic and lack robust formal support. And, as we know, both Kati and Tarcissius found life in the Coombs rather disorienting and moved back to a site which is more Oceanic, in geographical, philosophical and political location, Manoa.
The majority of RSPAS doctoral scholars working on the Pacific, are pursuing a program which is defined by a discipline, and which entails the writing of a long thesis, between 80,000-100,000 words. Only the economics discipline has a compulsory coursework requirement, but all disciplines have an expectation that graduate scholars attend a series of weekly seminars. For example in anthropology, that entails a Wednesday morning colloquium and a Friday afternoon graduate seminar and at appropriate moments in the pre and post fieldwork cycles, a theory and methods seminar and a thesis writing group. Seminar expectations have increased in recent time, partly in response to the new pressures for speedy completion, which means that the federal government will not only not fund but will penalize academic units where scholars take more than three and a half years to complete their doctorate.
Perhaps because of such increased pressures, the traffic of graduate scholars between seminars in the various parts of RSPAS seems dramatically reduced in recent time. In any week in the Coombs building, there are likely to be about five or six seminars on a Pacific theme - sponsored by a disciplinary or a project entity. In the past these seminars were likely to attract Pacific researchers, staff and graduate scholars from across the spectrum of the School and the ANU. But increasingly as staff time is more pressured (increased student loads, grant-writing and burdens of academic audits) and graduate scholars' completion times more frantic, these Oceanic, transdisciplinary journeys are seen as a luxury. Moreover, although the pattern of supervision at the ANU (a primary supervisor and two to four advisors) is expressly aimed at facilitating cross-disciplinary conversation, this is succumbing to budget pressures too. With the more generous and vague central funding in the past, many of us supervised and advised students in other areas without thought of a financial return, but this no longer seems viable. Although the Vice Chancellor promotes a strong rhetoric of one university and wants cross-disciplinary and cross-campus supervision to increase, the opposite seems to be happening. So far the central accountants seem unable to work out the formulae whereby this would be enabled. And so transdisciplinary conversation across Oceania is diminished in this way too.
There has admittedly been a history of cross-disciplinary conversation in the School, over the last fifteen years typically under the aegis of research projects, like the Comparative Austronesian Project, the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Project, the Resource Management in Asia and the Pacific project and the Gender Relations Project (now Centre which I head). But whereas a decade ago, projects were likely to be supported primarily on the basis of the academic arguments advanced, more recently projects partially funded by the School's recurrent budget will only be supported if they attract large external grants from government and multinational corporations. So SSGM is reliant on funding from AusAID and DFAT (and its present head, David Hegarty is in fact seconded from that organization). RMAP secures funding from a variety of government departments in Australia and the regions of Asia and the Pacific, mining and logging companies and NGOS to do work on sustainable development and environmental issues. This is all important work, but increasingly means that academic priorities are being skewed to those more confluent with political agendas, often emanating from an increasingly conservative federal government. So, scholars have to debate with and sometimes collaborate with policy-makers and politicians who tend to see the Pacific through the lens of aid dependency or as an 'arc of instability' where sovereignty is no longer sacred and where Australian intervention may prove necessary. The political crises in PNG, Fiji and the Solomons have fuelled that vision of course.
I hope I have not painted too dismal a picture of my own school at present. It is admittedly a dystopic vision, which plays to the perduring rivalries between Honolulu and Canberra as collaborative but competitive loci in Oceanic scholarship. But my portrait is based on my underlying fear that the greatest intellectual vigour will be insufficient to revitalise transdisciplinary scholarship and visionary Oceanic scholarship in Canberra. This is partly due to the external pressures of a conservative, aggressively neoliberal government which through its funding of research and graduate education, is increasingly intruding not only on what we learn and teach but how we do so. But there is also that other process of internal 'subjectification' by scholars, whereby the 'dull, bureaucratic practices' of the new audit cultures in Australian universities extract some normative compliance as the price of survival.
The geographical location of the university is crucial, not just because it is 'in the islands' but because the land and seascape is a ground saturated with memory. Beneath the concrete that we stand on we have not only the foundational presence of ancestral Hawaiians, but the sedimentations of both the violence and the pleasure of cross-cultural encounters, with haole, with those who came here as labourers and immigrants (Chinese, Japanese, Filipinas) and, perhaps most important in this context, other Pacific Islanders. Of course this ground is also saturated with the presence of the United States of America, with its Janus face of imperial military might and consumptive pleasure. Teresia Teaiwa's innovative concept of militourism seems home made for Hawai‘i. If we look at the map of Oahu we see how much ground is dedicated to military bases and how certain arterial highways built through the sacred grounds of ancestral Hawaiians are primarily about connecting those bases rather than moving workers between home and office or transporting tourists on pleasurable sight-seeing journeys. One image of my time in here 1998 is etched in my memory as allegory - seeing the stunning Keali'i Reichel perform his moving sovereignity songs to a large and rapturous audience in Kahala Mall, while in the background a lurid red sign advertised Cosmic Candy.
History is written in the ground, and in Hawai‘i that ground goes beyond the taro gardens, the sacred temples and the palaces of royalty, to the sites of Christian churches and plantation settlements, to locales stretching from the Arizona memorial, through the hotels of Waikiki and the shopping malls of Kahala and Ala Moana.
Oceanic history is of course not just sedimented in the Hawaiian landscape but in the bodies and memories of people who live and study here. Both the written and the oral histories of locals and those who come here from other parts of the Pacific constitute a rich resource for future doctoral scholars. But the richness of this is not just in the diversity of persons and the communities from which they come, but how they are brought together in the pedagogy of a Pacific studies program. As the review envisages
the graduate population is likely to continue to be a fertile mix of local students, students from the mainland and students from other parts of the Pacific. The ethnic configuration of staff and students at UH has of course been a subject of great political contest. As in the wider society, the relation between indigenous Hawaiians, other Islanders, haole and Asian Americans on this campus is a complex and fraught sedimentation, totally at odds with rosy portraits of rainbow ethnicities. But these relations, though fraught also seem, from the perspective of Canberra at least, to offer pedagogic and political opportunities. From my experience in graduate teaching at UH for six months in 1998, I would hazard the claim, for example, that the sensitive but pervasive dialectic between dwelling and moving in Islander experience, between indigenous and diasporic attachments in Islander sensibilities, can be more tellingly explored in this place. (Of course several universities in Aotearoa New Zealand and Suva in Fiji are also locations where similar dynamics, difficulties and potentials are also present).
In this new Oceanic way of knowing it is crucial that graduate scholars are equipped with methods that are both ecumenical and rigorous. As well as the methods cultivated by the Western disciplines (participant observation, interviews and oral histories, analyses of primary sources, texts and images), indigenous ways of knowing are being reinvigorated and legitimized here: the orality of chant, genealogy and talk story, the material and spiritual knowledges of building houses and constructing and navigating canoes, the performative expressions of dance and music, the visual languages of Oceanic arts. These traditions also have their own disciplines, their own expert teachers, their own standards of rigor. Finally, these should be complemented with skills in the new technologies, of video and film, and interactive combinations of text and image in CDs, DVDs, and website design. Although there are large problems about how far these visual and electronic technologies can reinscribe the privileges of wealth and locale, these ways of knowing seem to me to be potentially far more compatible with indigenous Oceanic ways of knowing than the privilege too long accorded words on a printed page. They can portray the dynamic practices of culture, in a more full-bodied, sensual and kinaesthetic way than even the best writer of words can conjure. Moreover, the products of knowledge disseminated in such media are far more likely to find interested audiences among other Islanders than the large written tomes which are still the privileged genre of doctoral dissertations.
It is not unduly optimistic then to envisage a doctoral program in Pacific studies that will be exciting, innovative and rigorous. But will it also be decolonizing and empowering for Islander scholars? That in part depends on the academic success of these programs and the availability of good fellowships and jobs after graduation, a point that Teresia emphasised in her writing for this workshop. But it will also depend on the persistence of an enabling and empowering funding environment. Are there clouds on the horizon here?
I am alluding to the way in which certain voices in US Congress have recently launched an attack on those area studies programs that are seen to be sites for the expression of anti-colonial or anti-American sentiments. We have for the past twenty years or so been so used to associating area studies with outdated problematics and with the geopolitical interests of the American imperium, that this suggestion that area studies can be dangerously decolonizing comes as rather a surprise. Critics of area studies in the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific have long pointed to the way in which such knowledge had both a pragmatic and symbolic value in the politics of the Cold War. Dirlik, Connery, Fry and others have written persuasively about how the language of the 'Pacific rim' and the awkward conjugation of 'Asia-Pacific' emerged at a certain point after the Cold War when the makers of foreign policy in the United State were envisaging a less Manichean division of the world and were trying to solicit Japan and later China as 'partners' in a new global world order.
But with the politics of the global 'war on terror' a new Manichean division has arisen. The division of West and Islam as the preferred 'clash of civilizations' is of course less likely to divide enemies and allies in the Pacific than in other regions of the world. But can we be confident that area studies in the United States will not be subject to some new strictures, which might appear as the academic equivalent of the Patriot Act? In writings from participants in this workshop and correspondence with other email interlocutors in the United States, I wonder if the threats to the new area studies scholars who are seen to be anti imperial and even anti-American may at some future time threaten the vision of an empowered indigenous knowledge of Oceania here in Manoa. I hope not.
Since my presentation has been not only long and rambling, but seems unduly dystopic, I want to conclude with a more optimistic vision of Oceania, inspired by Donna Haraway's recuperation of the figure of cyborg. The cyborg, the stuff of sci-fi fantasies and Terminator movies seemed, until her revisioning to be solidly linked with scientistic, masculinist and militaristic conjugations of man and machine, which threatened to eclipse organic feminine modes of giving birth to humans. Haraway recuperated the cyborg for feminist purposes, and in the process challenged the way in which women and nature, men and technology are conflated in essentialist binaries in Western habits of thought. Why should the body end at the skin she asks? The technologies which we create also become part of our persons, absorbed into our being. She thus posits a more fluid view of gendered subjects and objects, of persons and things, and a more situated and partial politics of knowledge.
This vision of a fluid and contextual personhood and of partial situated knowledges is reminiscent of another famous feminist vision, grounded not in the contemporary cultural politics of the United States but in the ethnography of Melanesia, Marilyn Strathern's The Gender of the Gift. Here she fixates not so much on the difference of male and female natures, which she reveals as Western fantasy, but on her 'persuasive fiction' of the radical difference between Melanesian and the West, between a world of permeable and partible persons and a world of autonomous isolated individuals for whom relationality is a problem rather than a necessary human condition. Now although I have criticised her vision for its ahistorical denial of the relation between Oceania and the West, I here recirculate it as a way of looking at that very relation. It is important to dissolve the racist binaries which made some the subjects of knowledge and others the objects of knowledge. But it is equally important to make our ways of knowing permeable and partible, whereby technologies of knowing can be attached/ detached and vigorously exchanged between differently situated persons. An optimistic future in Oceanic studies depends on admitting the partiality, the situatedness and the fluidity of knowledges, refusing both the insularity of isolated autarchic disciplines and of autonomous authors with fixed, atavistic identities. We must get better not only at 'dancing with strangers', but recognising that other people have already, through the sedimentation of historical debts, already become part of our own being.
11th November, Remembrance Day, Sydney-Honolulu
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