Center for Pacific Island Studies

recent publications

The latest issue of The Contemporary Pacific (21:1, 2009) features articles and dialogue pieces on Samoan population movement, the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture's Red Wave Collective, a personal story by Brij Lal, and an essay on Micronesia's place in Pacific studies. It includes book and media reviews and political reviews for Micronesia and Polynesia. The featured artist is Tongan painter Lingikoni Vaka`uta.

The Other Side: Ways of Being and Place in Vanuatu, by John Patrick Taylor, is the latest volume (number 22) in the center’s Pacific Islands Monograph Series (PIMS). It explores the social, spatial, and historical consciousness of the Sia Raga people of north Pentecost, Vanuatu. In the first major ethnography of this important region, author John Taylor examines how the historical interaction of indigenous and foreign cosmologies has affected contemporary cultural expressions in the region. According to PIMS Editor David Hanlon, “While focused firmly on north Pentecost, Taylor’s study speaks to a host of broader issues that include kastom, identity, the meaning of place, the nature of history, and politics of ethnographic field practices in postcolonial settings.”
John Taylor is a Simon Research Fellow at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.
Jean-Marie Tjibaou, Kanak Witness to the World: An Intellectual Biography, by independent scholar Eric Waddell, is number 21 in the center’s Pacific Islands Monograph Series. According to series editor David Hanlon, it is an “eloquent, poetic, moving, and deeply personal account of the life of Jean-Marie Tjibaou, the Kanak political leader and philosopher whose advocacy of his Melanesian people spoke to others within and beyond the Pacific region.” The volume is copublished by the East-West Center’s Pacific Islands Development Program.

Indigenous Encounters: Reflections on Relations between People in the Pacific, edited by Katerina Martina Teaiwa, is Center for Pacific Islands Studies Occasional Paper 43. The pieces in this collection, most of them by graduate students, reflect on specific events, places, observations, and experiences. In poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, the writings look at relations between people in everyday contexts from all corners of the Pacific. Tattoo artist Vaimu‘a Muliava’s tattoo design is featured on the cover.
Indigenous Encounters is available free of charge from the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at 1890 East-West Road, Moore Hall 215, Honolulu, HI 96822; or e-mail cpis@hawaii.edu.

The latest issue of the center’s newsletter, Pacific News from Mānoa, is online. To be added to the electronic mailing list, please contact the editor, Tisha Hickson, at ctisha@hawaii.edu.