Oceanian Journeys and Sojourns

2015

PART 1

PEOPLE AND PACIFIC PLACES

1. SEEKING THE HEART OF MOBILITY

JUDITH A. BENNETT

Pacific leaders must have a sense of pride in themselves and their cultural histories in order to be able to survive the turbulences of their modern environment. This means that you must be able to find yourselves in your cultural histories and indigenous references before tackling the references of others.

Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Taisi (2010)

The essays in this book seek to explore some of the vast range of journeying within Oceania. Journeys ‘through space and time’, to use Eric Waddell’s words in this work, emerge most clearly in studies of movement in specific island settings. Such settings are pivotal in the human production of cultures and ways of knowing. Following this introduction to present our contributors and Murray Chapman in part one, the essays are organised around these two central themes; part two considers the meanings of mobility in Oceania, and part three addresses the meanings of cultures in the region in terms of artefacts, practices, ways of knowing and research.

We learn of Murray Chapman’s journey via an interview with David Gegeo, who shares Murray’s abiding interest in indigenous epistemologies (Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo 2001). Just as Oceanians do, Murray, who lives now in Hilo on the ‘Big Island’ of Hawai`i, has always carried his home place with him through space and time. His working-class origins, emphasising the value of fairness reinforced by the social democracy of a kinder Aotearoa-New Zealand (as it was before the late 1980s), have left their cultural imprint on Murray. His intellectual and research journey has traversed Oceania several times. From the dirt floor of a humble Māori home in Murupara, New Zealand, to the highly polished linoleum-tiled floors of the University of Washington, Seattle, to the split-palm flooring of leaf houses in Tasimauri, Guadalcanal, and on to the cured-concrete hallways of the University of Hawai`i, he has walked the talk and researched, but listening all the while. He has done his own share of ‘circulating’ around the region, attending many conferences where he has contributed as an academic, as well as taking up a number of visiting fellowships at Cornell, New York, Liverpool, Noumea and Honiara. Then – the glorious luxury of it – as an emeritus professor in theoretical retirement, he went to listen to the young and the bright at conferences in Apia in 2002, Suva and Dunedin in 2006, Papeete in 2009 and Wellington in 2012. He last took a sojourn to the Solomons in 2009 to catch up and tok stori with old friends.

Journeys have been described as ‘short-term migrations’, ‘movement’, ‘circulation’, ‘rural–urban drift’ and evidence of ‘depopulation’. But journeys are more than these terms imply, for although these concepts have proved useful for geographers and other social scientists from the 1950s to the early 1980s, they can still connote forms of mechanistic and individualistic reaction to capitalist pressures. Thus, in this model derived from neoclassic economics, individuals and populations from so-called less-developed regions move in certain directions towards developed labour markets because of external or etic forces, such as the lack of local earning opportunities and/or the need to improve their standard of living (Lewis 1954).

In the Pacific these factors, with a dash of dependency theory, were explicit in the dominant paradigm of the MIRAB economies – where migration, remittances, aid and an oversized bureaucracy were seen as the means of financial survival for small island countries from 1985 for a decade and beyond (Bertram and Watters 1985; Barcham et al 2009). Those who chose ‘migration’ were characterised generally as being in transition between the periphery and the centre, ‘out of place’ from their point of origin and victims of ‘social displacement’. This kind of movement can be measured statistically in several ways, most commonly with censuses. Such concepts and statistics rarely capture ‘the processes as well as the structure of movement dynamics and how these have operated over time’ (Chapman 1978, 561), but as metaphors of movement they have powerfully influenced economist government planners, whose policies may then reflect a false reality (Chapman 1991, 274).

While economic factors are often part of the motivation, journeys are something more and of wider compass. As a result of his 1960s microscale studies of ‘circulation’ on south Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, human geographer Murray Chapman found that, in practice, people journeyed to and from a specific place for a variety of socially mediated reasons (1970). In a seminar searching for other ways of conceiving movement/circulation in 1978, Chapman hinted at the need for a better articulation of the context within which it occurs, a theme he reiterated in later work and encouraged his students to explore (1978, 562–63; Skeldon 1995, 92; Bedford 1999, 8). Longitudinal studies of movement over days and months, as critics of Chapman’s method implied, are not of themselves enough to show ‘how migration fits into a person’s whole life’ (Halfacree and Boyle 1995, 99). Aware of this, Chapman had broadened his scope from movements entailing absences of 24 hours or more to life biographies of movement (1971, 10–20; 1976). Well beyond his 1970s’ hinting about context, Chapman in a seminal article in 1991 cited the work of students and colleagues to show that older descriptors of movement/journeys in Oceania did not tally with the holism of lived practice (1991). Oceanian scholars began more and more to apply their ‘alternative ways of knowing’ to the ebb and flow of people journeying across space and time, so humanising mobility’s complexities (Chapman 1991, 1995).

Of journeys and sojourns

‘Journey’ is a Middle English word originally meaning a trip of a day; ‘sojourn’, closely related, meant one that was even briefer, less than a day’s duration. As with cultures, so does the meaning of words change and evolve while translation of concepts is never exact. More recently, a journey may imply a lifetime and a sojourn can be part of it, a shorter stay in one location, but one that implies an intended continuation of a longer journey through time and space. Another connotation in the word ‘journey’ is the implied return home. This may be a final return or, with time, a sequence of leavings and returns to natal places. As David Gegeo reminds us, ‘place’ in all its forms relates to this – the geographical location of a home or natal place; whereas ‘space’ can be the location a person occupies while on their journey, while still ‘inextricably tied to place’ (2001, 495). For some the return may be in their lifetime or that of children or descendants because, for most Pacific people, there is always a connection to ancestral home places.

In recent decades, when they set out to journey beyond their islands, Pacific Islands people often have the potential to be permanent migrants, but few see themselves as such (Ahlburg and Brown 1998; Wright-Koteka 2006, 116–19; Connell 2008). Unlike the western Irish in the nineteenth century, they have no need for the equivalent of an ‘American wake’ – a ceremony similar to a wake for the dead but held for those migrating, almost certainly forever, to distant America or elsewhere. This Irish ceremony reinforced love of home, kin, religion and the desire to return for the glory of the family and the name of Ireland – supposing the traveller made good in the New World and could afford to return. Those who did not return would become potential contacts or links for relatives still to leave Ireland (Miller 1985, 489, 556–61). In spite of the very limited technology of communications and travel at the time, remittances to home, gifts (‘a token of love’) and letters sent both ways preserved ties. The migrants’ imagined social space – often for several generations – was still that of Ireland and family but enacted in places far from the home to which few could return (Fitzpatrick 1995, 467–515, 614–20).

These days, modernity has vastly expanded the scope of journeying for the people of the Great Ocean, the Oceanians, as well as the rest of the world. More people travel and can travel further and more quickly and be in contact more readily than their ancestors, as the technologies of air travel and electronic communication shrink the gap of distance, in a sense enlarging the spaces for being part of a wider family. Imagined spaces, spaces of the heart and mind that carry place, have been materially extended especially since the 1950s and 1960s, far beyond the capabilities of 150 and more years ago. Like the Lapita progenitors of the Polynesians, who seem to have learned their navigation techniques in the ‘voyaging corridor’ of the seas around the island of New Guinea prior to about 3500 BP, once people know they are able to return they are more likely to venture forth (Irwin 1992, 18–30).

Mobility and stability

In part two, a number of the contributors have elucidated the several and nuanced motives for movement of people. They reveal that in specific societies even bald economic pressures are set within a context of sociocultural relations, and commonly are responses to, or expressions of, the sequence of life stages. People journey with a purpose that is culturally mediated and framed. Not all journeys are to distant destinations, as several of our contributors deftly reveal. Some are localised and brief while others, though localised, may last for many years.

Sa`iliemanu Lilomaiava-Doktor in her discussion of malaga or journeys reveals a wide range of Samoan journeys and sojourns – for marriage, birth, funerals, family gatherings and education, as well as routine things such as fishing, marketing and employment. These journeys are closely tied to the life stages of the people moving or to those of the people they go to be with. They are also bound to a person’s responsibilities to the `aiga or wider family and often to the village community, nu`u, and vice versa. Sa`iliemanu illuminates journeys within Samoa but makes it clear that Samoans now have a wider social universe located beyond Samoa in the Pacific ‘rim’ countries of the western United States and New Zealand. Enduring cultural imperatives adapt easily to modernity and its means of movement.

Improper journeyings occur too – wandering about, living off relatives, or seeking out unsanctioned sexual encounters. ‘Unfocused wandering’, around the town, say, can be transformed into a more positive sojourn if, for example, the person returns with benefits for his or her `aiga or extended family. On the other hand, if a major social expectation is flouted, such as by serious theft or land disputes, enforced journeys may be required of the offenders to exclude them from the village.

A pivotal concept and frame to these malaga is the fa`a-Samoa, the Samoan cultural way which, as Sa`iliemanu points out, is ‘a set of interpretative practices’ wherein common symbols and understanding are both shared and negotiated. The Samoan concept for social space, va, is central to how people relate and behave towards one another and thus to their identity within the `aiga and beyond. Intrinsic to the fa`a-Samoa and to the wellbeing of the `aiga is the idea of service and sharing. Samoans have socialised and harnessed inclinations towards individual selfishness in an insightful manner.

Reciprocity underlies all things in Samoa; likewise, in Satowan in the Caroline Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, where Lola Quan Bautista from Guam considers emic or insider understandings of mobility. In their ideal form, these are based on reciprocity and respect. Lola’s lens brings into focus small journeys and sojourns highlighting the subtle conventions of movement during different life stages, and also between male and female. Small Satowan Island is ‘a little world made cunningly’ (Donne in Patrides 1985, 437). Although a world of movement, it also has its boundaries where certain people shall not move at certain times and stages of their own or others’ lives. As in Samoa, there are proper and improper types of journeying – wandering to ‘see the world’ can soon become aimless or result in trouble for the person concerned. Here too, the consequences for inappropriate journeys are usually more portentous for the wellspring of life and land – the woman, and thus her family and reputation.

Lola elucidates the intricacies of community life but also is bound to her community. She uses her knowledge to benefit others and is an advisor for United Pacific Islanders Corporation, a non-profit body formed in 2012. Its purpose is to address the social and economic challenges faced by migrants in new, poorly serviced subdivisions on Guam. Many Chuuk and Yap people are settled in the subdivision of Gill-Baza near Yigo town, in northern Guam. Part of Lola’s work has been the making of the film Breadfruit and Open Spaces, filmed to raise awareness of the developer’s lack of responsibility towards this community following the local authority’s threat of eviction (Bautista 2011, 2013).

Asenati Liki’s study of the work of women, the Teine uli in Samoa, considers the descendants of Samoan women and Melanesian men who came to Samoa for work on copra plantations in the nineteenth century. It is a study of recent journeying for work by female kin within the framework of the `aiga. Decisions to journey are a corporate choice, sometimes to benefit the individual but more often to benefit the group in some way, at least in economic terms and almost certainly in social worth and respect. It is an assertion, too, of how personhood emerges in social relationships and of the significance of women in society – significance not always understood by Western feminists whose emphasis is on the independence of the individual woman, rather than on their relational identity as part of a kinship group.

Asenati, as a Teine uli (dark-skinned woman), also tells of her own personal journey in Samoa and her studies in New Zealand, Fiji and Hawai`i, in an account grounded in societal and personal experience and knowledge. She also reminds us that while academic research may provide intellectual satisfaction for the researcher, unless it is meaningful and useful to the people it focuses upon it has little real social worth. This social worth is inextricably linked to the corporate responsibility of the `aiga as well as that of Samoa itself – an essential societal practice that has bearing and implications on plans and programmes formulated in other places from a different cultural purview.

The peoples of Oceania must be among the most planned-for people on the globe. For decades, scarcely a month goes by without some well-meaning overseas government, aid agency or non-government organisation coming up with a plan or programme to develop something, ranging from wool spinning and weaving in New Guinea highland villages in the 1970s to, more recently, entrepreneurship, improving the status of women, and governance. For Samoa, providing a corrective cultural reference point for such aid-driven enthusiasms depends on careful scrutiny of such plans, government financial incentives for its own indigenous experts, and projects that acknowledge social change – such as enabling more women to hold leadership positions in the public sector (Liki Chan Tung et al 2013). Often in the past in much of the Pacific, foreign consultants have been preferred because they are funded by external aid agencies, therefore costing governments nothing – at least in monetary terms (Hunter 2010).

Sa`iliemanu, Lola and Asenati write of indigenous Oceanian societies and offer examples to illustrate specific points, but give the reader a more generalised perspective, almost a group portrait of emic patterns of journeys and various sojourns. Raymond Young, in contrast, provides a fine-grained study of specific Fijian people and, to many outsiders, their seemingly complex relationships with kin. He discusses how their journeys are always embodied, enacting connections and, in some cases, disconnections with the dominant pathways of Fijian identity: wakolo ni veiwekani – the pathway of blood, the connection to relatives by blood; and wakolo ni vanua – the pathway of land, associated with connections to the chiefs and the land. In this analysis of the essence of Fijian culture, past and present are linked in these pathways, which can be activated in several ways but have a fluidity that can respond to changed circumstances, as his intricate accounts show. These metaphors of movement and connection are ideational, but in their material embodiment they are templates for action as well as reflections of social and reciprocal transactions.

Even more specific and certainly personal, there are also individual journeys recounted here, largely independent of the academy’s lens, most clearly in Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka’s and Jully Makini’s stories of their lives told from first person or rather, in Oceanian thinking, from within the first person plural. Neither of these two Solomon Islanders was a student of Murray Chapman’s, but their accounts are the very stuff of life, human and not overly abstracted. Being from Solomon Islands the accounts are particularly resonant with Murray’s interests, because that archipelago was the site of his research. Both Tara and Jully, as with the people of the movement studies, embed themselves in a cultural and relational context in multiple ways. Tara, currently an academic at the University of Hawai`i, tells of his expanding pathways as he journeyed across time and place for education and employment. Some became places of sojourn. He sees in his journey the twin forces of rootedness to place and identity, like a fixed tree, as well as mobility in the image of the canoe, a dominant metaphor on Tanna, Vanuatu, as Joël Bonnemaison learned, but applicable to most Pacific societies that include a sea coast as part of their mental maps (1994). The one stays fixed, the other moves. Tara’s home place of Haimatua, in Tasimauri (the south coast of Guadalcanal), remains the pivotal site of his identity, as does his connection with his maternal clan. He is who he is by these ties to land and blood.

Tara also explains the way people of his own society conceive mobility, reinforcing and expanding on what Murray Chapman learned almost 50 years ago when he studied the movement of people in Tasimauri, the Weather Coast. The concepts of lela, bamai, tuhu vera and oli vera are related to movement and the reasons people move about. Most years Tara returns for a visit to home, but believes he will eventually come home to stay. In the process of the journey, as he reveals, he has developed multiple identities around his Tasimauri core, a feature of most mobile Oceanians (Maron and Connell 2008; Borovnik 2005). This is not always without its costs, however. What is unsure, as Tara indicates, is how his journeying will set his children, growing up in Canberra, Fiji and Hawai`i, on yet more journeys, probably never to live in Tasimauri. It is possible that this second generation will be citizens less of Tasimauri and more of Solomon Islands as well as what Epeli Hau`ofa has called ‘Our sea of islands’ (1994) – mentally more canoe people than land-bound, yet identifying with wider Oceania (Thaman 1985), with a more encompassing and more unbounded space than Tara’s and certainly of his ancestors, including his revered grandfather and taovia (leader), Dominiko Alebua (Kabutaulaka 2002).

Jully Makini’s story is not a reflection of her place and space in a world of many journeys. It is more her personal view of Solomon Islands’ journey into darkness in the late 1990s and early 2000s during a time of civil unrest that saw the government overthrown by the militia. At the time she saw with a poet’s lens and recorded with a poet’s pen. Solomon Islands’ journey was one that Tara also was inadvertently recruited to be part of, when asked by the Guadalcanal militia to represent them in negotiations with the Malaitan factions in 2000. When Jully wrote her account she was living in the Western Province amid the vagaries of life in that time and space – an uncomfortable time on the cusp of the worst disorder since World War II, which resulted in the deaths of over 100 Solomon Islanders (Fraenkel 2004; Moore 2005). Moreover, the dislocations of the ‘tension’ or ethnic conflict saw the greatest movement of Solomon Islanders in a short timespan since that same war in 1942, when hundreds fled inland to escape the invaders (Bennett 2015).

If we were to step back from that immediacy in Jully’s life and consider those she mentions, we can see some revealing aspects of how this civil unrest rippled out across the islands. People fleeing the strife in Honiara, the capital of Solomon Islands, demonstrate some confirmation of patterns of population movement that the anthropologist cum sociologist J. Clyde Mitchell formulated in 1961 regarding south-central Africa. ‘Circulation’ of workers between homelands and workplaces was common there, but over time the commitment to the workplace can become more significant – not simply financially, but also in terms of expanding social and familial relationships. The result was often a decline of regular labour oscillation or circulation and decreased visits to kin in the home place (Mitchell 1961, 278).

For those Solomon Islanders who had committed themselves for an extended time to live in places other than natal lands, such as Honiara, the need for safety from the conflict pushed them to return to where they had customary rights and felt secure. For much of Oceania, as the Māori whakataukī or proverb of the Ngāti Ruanui tribe of Taranaki declares, ‘E kore au e ngaro, he kākano, i ruia mai i Rangiātea’ – ‘I shall never be lost, the seed that was sown from Rangiatea’ (Raiatea in the Society Islands). People rooted in a place where they or their ancestors were born and cultivated its resources always have a right to be there. Nonetheless, the warmth of the welcome they receive can depend on keeping aflame the hearth of family connections. In some cases, these Honiara ‘refugees’ of the unrest returned to places in the Western Province where they had no houses and no food-producing gardens needed for survival. Normally, home-based kin would have welcomed the returning families when visits were short and/or expected, such as at Christmas time. Many ‘refugees’ had not even done this over the years, neglecting reciprocal relations, the pan-Oceanian social and affective insurance (see also Tetiarahi 1989, footnote 7, 85).

Unlike some other writers, Jully does not valorise the extended family, including her own, above all other relationships. She speaks warmly of her family members but also with considerable compassion of neighbours around Gizo and Munda, whether they were New Georgians, Malaitans or I-Kiribati resettled in the Western Solomons during colonial times. In part, this reflects her experience of having two places where she grew up – in Honiara as well as the Western Solomons. That experience taught her much of the common humanity of fellow citizens of the Solomons and gave Jully more a sense of identity to a wider society than most of her generation. Even her resentment of the Bougainvillians was not specific to ethnicity or island identity, but to their sometimes shameful behaviour in the lands of their hosts.

This right to be in another’s homeplace is not canvassed in any detail by those who write of their own Polynesian or Micronesian societies. It is a delicate subject. Throughout the Pacific, as populations increase quite dramatically on islands with a limited resource base, as well as the impacts of climate change, this will be a real challenge (SPREP 2013). Lola touches on this when she discusses the Satowan people, who are residing on lands to which they have very little claim. In the diverse and myriad societies of Melanesia, however, sojourners who stay too long outside their natal places are not always welcome on the lands of others, as 22,000 Malaitans discovered in 2000 when many young Guadalcanal men resisted their presence on the island by force (Fraenkel, 2004; Moore, 2005).

In part three there are other journeys with outcomes less personalised. One involves material culture and how its products moved over vast distances. Judith Bennett reveals how, during World War II, American naval officer John Burke carried with him the places of home and his interests there to the spaces of Solomon Islands and New Hebrides (Vanuatu). A competent military historian, he believed in the value of oral history as much as the written record. His ethnographic interests saw him compile some introductory material on the societies of Solomon Islands – sufficient at least for the practical purposes of the military. Active in American politics and well educated at Columbia University, he seems to have had some provocative dialogue with Malaitans about the future of their relationships with the British colonisers in the Protectorate of the Solomon Islands.

John Burke’s foray into the Pacific War ended, however, in his death there. The tons of objects and carvings he collected from the islands went on a journey to his homeland where they were allocated an impoverished narrative in art galleries and museums. Some of these objects, considered too vocal of a changed Solomon Islands from so-called ‘traditional’ time, were discarded, while others went on another journey around the United States in a major art exhibition. Although they carried the artistry of their creators, they were stripped of any real history. Like their creators, the voices of these objects in the late 1940s were rendered mute in the classifications imposed by foreign curators. There was little listening to indigenous Pacific voices in art circles, any more than there was in the Western academy’s ‘dreaming spires’ (Allott and Allott 1979, 539).

Some silences can be heard, however, and can carry meanings as diverse as words cloaked with metaphor and set within a shared culture. Yvonne Underhill-Sem’s journey into the meanings of women’s silences in Wanigela, the home village of her Papua New Guinean husband, leaves the reader more attuned to ‘the aural’ of ‘maternal bodies’ as an aspect of cultural identity of those women who largely remain at home in their country. Just as the kinship connections and the embeddedness of the individual within the wider family is significant for Samoan mobility, a similar process applies to the home-bound, maternal body that places the mother and her child within ‘a constellation of kinship relationship spanning time and space’. But here Yvonne’s focus is more on how listening for silences surrounding conception and childbirth can speak of cultural givens, at least among women, which do not need to be articulated verbally. She argues that the flesh of the maternal body is in fact not the same when removed from its familiar home of Wanigela. In an urban setting it is constructed differently.

This prism on mobility and ‘relational places’ has considerable import for human geographers, demographers and planners, though the meaning they take from this may be vastly at odds in purpose. In casting light on these women in ‘out-of-the way places’ and listening with her eyes, ears and her entire body, Yvonne enables their pregnant silences to be heard beyond their place in a less subtle world where, alas, clamorous and usually male voices are often heeded more. Moreover, her approaches to women’s perspectives (Underhill-Sem 1999, 2004, 2013) along with others, such as Asenati’s and Lola’s from the late 1990s to the present, have carried human and population geography well beyond the men’s houses that so fascinated Melanesianists of earlier times. Women anthropologists, committed to action-oriented methods, have also achieved a similar widening of focus in their collaborative work in Vanuatu concerning women in employment (Rodman et al 2007).

Yvonne’s intellectual journey ventures into the exciting field of feminist geography where there is a place for the further development of emancipatory action for women in daily life. And rightly so, since Oceanian women are among the least represented in national parliaments of all the world (Slade 2010; Inter-Parliamentary Union 2010), just ahead of the Arab states. In light of this disquieting fact, Yvonne’s involvement in the academy as well as advocacy in other organisations is as important for this and coming generations as Murray Chapman’s consistent support for women graduate students has been throughout his career (Underhill-Sem 2004; Underhill-Sem and Lewis 2008; Lewis, Lewis and Underhill-Sem 2009).

In different ways, both Gordon Nanau and Eric Waddell address significant issues surrounding knowledge, the research process and their meanings for Oceania.

Several of the contributors have taken the ‘postmodern turn’ (Best and Kellner 1997), yet all have had training in an academic setting to enable them to undertake research based on certain models or paradigms, albeit with considerable eclectic exchange across so-called disciplines and ways of knowing. Disciplinary emphasis, on the other hand, while still the essence of most universities’ approaches, does not effectively reflect the holistic approaches of Oceanians to knowledge (Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo 2001; Thaman 2003; T. Teaiwa 2004, 229–30), which in many respects are post-disciplinary. Different ways of knowing, which can both challenge and enrich a variety of disciplinary methodologies, must be the substance of the academy if it is to be true to its ancient values.

Although Gordon Nanau is less concerned with approaches to ways of knowing, he wants Solomon Islanders to have access not only to the subject matter, but also to the tool of a more discipline-based formal education. Perhaps this can become one tool in a ‘bag of tricks’ that can be co-opted to a wider cultural repertoire of inquiry (Swindler 1986, 277; Wood 2006, 45). Many Oceanians have not been exposed to this form of education or the excitement and privilege of knowledge creation and, equally significant in a region still emerging from colonialism, knowledge recovery. Gordon discusses attempts to rectify this for Solomon Islanders. The aim in 1990 was to establish a research culture at the Solomon Islands College of Higher Education (SICHE) based in the capital Honiara, to inform teaching, to develop skills for staff and students, to form institutional links with overseas scholars and institutions, and to assist the government.

The long and tortuous process, which Gordon describes, to achieve even partial success by 2009 illustrates that, for all the valorisation of indigenous ways of knowing in several academic circles of the last 20 years (Smith 1999; Denzin, Lincoln and Smith 2008), indigenous governments do not always see these as significant. This could be blamed on colonisation of the mind, but also reflects the slim intellectual base and capacity of a new government and the public service in a country catapulted in 1978 into early independence from Britain. Development and articulation of appropriate research methods and indigenous epistemology take time, as does research itself. Especially as the Solomon Islands government teetered towards collapse in 1998–2000, but also beyond, time and energies at SICHE went to sheer institutional survival. In the midst of the conflict in 2000, for example, the Malaitan militia burned the library, research collections and laboratories at the agricultural research centre at Dodo Creek, a huge loss to the country’s knowledge base and capacity. SICHE escaped the worst but its fearful staff had to concentrate on the basic teaching of those who would fill the many roles needed to restore society.

Today there are scores of Solomon Islands graduates from universities in the region and beyond and an increasing number with higher degrees. Locally, more understanding of the worth of research is changing attitudes, just as being isolated from outside funding during the ‘Tensions’ of 2001 did, although briefly with a period of marked reluctance by outside specialists comfortably removed from the crisis. Even so, private commercial consultancies from home and abroad, now common, may limit attempts to further research education in the existing institutions of learning in Solomon Islands. There is hope for a more systematic approach, however, with the establishment of the new Solomon Islands National University (SINU) in 2013, which can build on the foundations Gordon describes.

Eric Waddell recollects an earlier era in Pacific research, providing a salutary reminder of the need to keep our past in front of us – appropriate counsel as we conclude this collection. He reminds us of some Western researchers who had their own ideas of the exotic, the ‘anthropologists’ Eldorado’, with its associations of closed traditions and ‘primitives’. Though far less common today and long discussed and debated by scholars in the last 30 years and more, people of Pacific heritage still recall it with some indignation (Salesa 2014, 39).

There is much more than historical context here in Eric’s essay, however. It contains an enduring vision that can take us forward. Although Pacific people in education and research have realised some of this vision, some still awaits action. In November 2003 Eric and several other scholars from tertiary institutions in and around the Pacific Islands met in Honolulu to take part in a conference titled ‘Learning Oceania: Towards a PhD program in Pacific Studies’. Eric’s interpretation of this was the intention to ‘explore the possibility of establishing an interdisciplinary, and perhaps an inter-institutional’ doctoral programme in Pacific studies. As early as this, he was aware that the Pacific needed to be examined as part of, and within, a global context, to be envisaged in terms of what some now call the ‘new thalassology’ that is only recently gaining traction among historians and, indeed, many social scientists (Armitage and Bashford 2014, 6–7).

The organisers’ original aims, however, were focused more on the former than the latter because Pacific studies at the doctoral level would be a new direction for the University of Hawai`i (Center for Pacific Islands Studies 2003). Certainly, post-conference, no pan-Pacific base was set up to pursue these goals, although this and subsequent conferences at the centre did support and encourage relevant university programmes in specific places, such as New Zealand, and the development of coherent undergraduate courses across the University of Hawai`i’s system of 10 campuses that, in time, almost certainly will grow its own graduates for the PhD at the flagship campus of Mānoa. These conferences also raised methodological questions about what Pacific studies was and should be. While some now involved in PhD programmes in Pacific studies see the disciplines of history and anthropology as having much to offer (T. Teaiwa 2010, 112–17), others want a place for fields such as health sciences, because this is an area of great concern in the Pacific today (Macpherson 2010).

New Zealand universities currently offer at least three programmes leading to doctoral work in Pacific studies; so far, the University of Hawai`i’s Center for Pacific Islands Studies, currently establishing an undergraduate and consolidating its MA programme, has yet to offer such an advanced degree. Nonetheless, the centre has been pivotal in encouraging the kinds of discussion we see here in Eric’s paper, among interested parties in and around the Pacific, even if inter-institutional co-operation for a PhD programme seems still a long way in the future. From 2000 to 2003 prior to ‘Learning Oceania’, some shared resources and teaching modules at undergraduate level had involved the use of e-learning between the University of Hawai`i and the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and subsequently with the University of the South Pacific, Fiji. Even so, institutional challenges – differing semester times, differing technological access and expertise, differing understanding of the circumstances in each location – revealed the need for further work and development (Hempenstall, Nicole and Wesley-Smith 2010). The web has great potential for inter-institutional exchanges, as seen within New Zealand most months since 2012, where graduate candidates in Pacific studies and other relevant programmes are linked professionally to seminars organised by the University of Victoria, Wellington (Suaalii-Sauni 2014, email to author).

Eric Waddell frames his discussion as a journey that is both personal and public, because he acts on his belief in sharing both knowledge and experience. His journey is a philosophical one traversing the reclaiming of indigenous ways of knowing as valid for the academy. He affirms the worth of emic experience of Oceanian scholars such as we see in this volume. Eric is less enamoured of theories, presumably in the social sciences, that cherry-pick ‘knowledge generated by and within the Pacific to fuel distant theoretical debates’. As with the old Oceanian navigators, whose knowledge had to be subjected to verification by the ‘stern test of landfall’ (Lewis 1972, 10), all theory needs to be put to the hard test of the real world: the landscapes, the villages, the towns, mines, forests and seas, and the meaning and worth of this for the peoples of Oceania. On the other hand, Eric’s is a middle way, a message with enduring currency. He warns against ‘the excessive indigenisation of Oceania’, and sees the synergies of research and learning networks ‘within and beyond the region’ as the most creative pathway into the future, a view also shared by Edward Said (1991, 24) and James Clifford (2001, 482–83).

Overall, these two papers by Gordon and Eric focus respectively on the micro and the macro of research development and academic goals pertaining to the Pacific as a region; the one based in a poorly-funded new college in a very young and still-insecure state; the other in a well-funded institution with a long and commendable record of research attached to the US. Though contrasting in many aspects, the histories of these two journeys, their subject matter and likely futures reveal that any serious academic enterprise takes not only time but also leadership, patience and persistence. In part two, we see in most essays the finished output of research by and about the Pacific and indigenous meanings of mobility. While the research journeys of the authors were not without pitfalls, they received solid institutional support that facilitated their endeavours. Fittingly, the collection ends with this dual retrospect of the struggles that committed individuals and institutions have been through and still face in trying to foreground research in and about the Pacific and Pacific studies: histories well worth thoughtful consideration to carry with us in all our journeys into the future.

Tracing the threads to the centre

Each contributor here, whether colleague, friend or former student – or all of these – holds a thread connected to Murray Chapman in a wide network that spans the Oceanian world, linking in New Zealand and Canada. And, if we include the many students outside the region whom he has taught or supervised in his career at the University of Hawai`i and the East–West Center, his contacts link into South and Southeast Asia and beyond. Since, like the contributors here, Murray Chapman is part of all he has met, such meetings of minds and people are worth tracing.

Eric Waddell recalls first meeting Murray aboard a plane going between Rabaul on New Britain, New Guinea, and Honiara back in 1967, when both were doctoral students coming from ‘field work’. In terms of their attitudes to indigenous scholarship and methodologies they share much in common. They renewed contact 20 years later when Eric came as visiting scholar to the University of Hawai`i. Jully Makini, poet and writer, came into Murray’s life in late 1985 by telephone, and was at the East–West Center in January 1986 taking part in a workshop on movement through time led by Murray and John Waiko. Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka made Murray’s acquaintance in mid-1993 in Suva at a seminar about Guadalcanal, and has seen much of him over the last decade since coming to work first at the East–West Center and then at the University of Hawai`i. In early 1999 Gordon Leua Nanau, newly on staff as first principal research officer at SICHE, Honiara, encountered Murray when he was invited to advise on research. As a student, Judith Bennett arrived at Hawai`i to work on an MA in history and to join the Guadalcanal Weather Coast project in 1972 with several other Masters’ students, led by Murray and Peter Pirie. Yvonne Underhill-Sem met Murray in early 1984 when he was her committee chair for an MA in geography.

David Gegeo, having first seen Murray in the mid-1970s, became re-acquainted in Honiara in mid-1987 at a workshop on Pacific recollections of World War II. David began his PhD in politics that same year at the University of Hawai`i, with Murray on his committee. In 1995 Sa`iliemanu Lilomaiava-Doktor commenced her doctoral studies in geography with Murray as committee chair, as did her fellow countrywoman, Asenati Liki. Raymond Young was introduced to Murray in 1999 at the annual Pacific Islands Studies conference, also at the University of Hawai`i. Late the previous year Murray had been an examiner of his PhD thesis in geography at the Victoria University of Wellington. The lone sociologist among his students, Lola Quan Bautista of Yigo, Guam, first made Murray’s acquaintance in spring 1996; he was soon on Lola’s PhD committee. Murray has also supervised a number of other Oceanian students. Some wanted to be part of this collection but their intended contributions became victims of the multifarious demands put on young Oceanian scholars and graduates by their professions and their communities. The same factors have conspired to make the gestation of the offerings here more protracted than this editor had planned.

As can be seen by these relationships and David’s interview with Murray, there are two dominant concerns in Murray’s life: his profession and people, especially Oceanians. Professionally, Murray brought to the study of population movement a careful methodology of measuring short-term sojourns as well as long-term journeys, and even longer-term relocation of Guadalcanal villagers in the Duidui and Pichahila regions of Tasimauri. He asserted a continuity in mobility patterns and behaviour that predates contact with a wider world – before Europeans came to Solomon Islands – linking these to expanded motives for movement in more recent times (Chapman 1970, 1976, 1977a, 1977b). Quite separately, others such as Bedford (1971, 1973, 1974) for Vanuatu, Skeldon (1974, 1977) on Peru, and Hugo (1975, 1982) in Java, saw the same trajectory but at times came to different conclusions about the process.

Murray, however, combined micro and macro measures: the micro, based on careful recording and arduous observation over time, day by day for months; the macro, based on the recollections of the people concerned. These combined longitudinal data sets revealed a new perspective on movement that no one else in the Pacific region had developed before and, for at least the next decade, few chose to implement, with the partial exception of Richard Bedford (1973), Shashikant Nair (1980) and Wardlow Friesen (1983). Seeing the utility of the concept of ‘circulation’ being weakened by scholars who set it oppositionally against ‘migration’, Murray insisted they were parts of a continuum and generally preferred the term ‘mobility’ or ‘movement’ to encompass both (1991, 289; 1992b; 2005).

Murray’s contribution as a professional academic, mainly in relation to his detailed recording and analysis of village mobility and in assisting what some Māori call the ‘browning of the university’ with indigenous scholars active in the academy, has been best described by fellow geographer, Richard Bedford (Bedford 1999). Although Richard does not delve into some of the pivotal influences on Murray’s early thinking, Murray’s interview with David reveals that he came to the Solomon Islands as a research area via his MA work in 1958–1960 at the University of Auckland. His Master’s thesis research drew him to the themes of population, society and movement in the forestry towns of Kawerau and Murupara in New Zealand (Chapman 1966, 1998). When still a graduate student, Murray was not afraid to seek beyond metropolitan perspectives and early on looked to comparable political and socioeconomic situations among less-developed societies. In preparing seminar papers on the Solomons he found little work existed on the movement of people there. So where else might a solid body of work on so-called tribal societies be found, but Africa?

One remarkable thinker who worked in south-central Africa was J. Clyde Mitchell. He had no hesitation crossing the disciplinary boundaries of anthropological participatory observation and the quantitative methods of sociology to produce network analysis. His work and that of other sociologists and social anthropologists of the British functionalist school incorporated field surveys in the home areas as well as the target urban centres of those who moved. Mitchell saw a distinction between the rate and incidence of movement (Masser and Gould 1975). The rate incorporated economic motives while the incidence addressed more personal and familial motives (Mitchell 1959). In the 1960s he developed a theory of movement as circulation, based upon observations in Africa, which showed that while people moved away from home for paid work, they did it in the context of tribal values. Eventually, so Mitchell posited, social relationships in the place of work, usually a town, would tend to replace those of the natal area (for example, 1961). Other researchers in Africa in the late 1960s also used retrospective migration histories collected via time-consuming interviews (Alverson 1967; Mitchell 1969). Thus for Murray, the strands of field studies, retrospective movement data and the concept of circulation offered possible approaches to movement of people in other regions, namely the western Pacific Islands.

As significant for Murray, and indeed most of his students, Mitchell thought it important to inform how the study of a particular village or urban enclave can mesh with wider concerns and situations at a regional or national level. In this vein, early in his career during a summer workshop held at Honolulu in 1965 before leaving for the Solomons, Murray considered how geography generally could contribute to ‘development’ (1969a) and, more particularly, with field enquiries done, how his Weather Coast material might be of use to policy makers (1969b, 1985b).¹ Leading a field study of population and resources of south Guadalcanal in 1974, Murray Chapman and Peter Pirie, with a team of students, provided an array of data. This research informed discussions among the first local group responsible for writing a five-year plan of 1975–79 for the country’s development, a group headed by Tony Hughes and composed of Bobby Kwainanara, Frances Saemala and Milton Sibisopere, all recent university graduates (Chapman and Pirie 1974; Chapman and Bennett 1980; Chapman 1987; Solomon Islands 1975). About a decade later, the 1974 report was also used to justify increasing the rural wage rate (M. Chapman, pers. comm.).

Torsten Hägerstrand, a Swedish geographer, was also important in Murray’s intellectual genealogy. Like Mitchell (1985), Hägerstrand (1973) valued the possibilities of what a single case study might reveal and how it might upset orthodox thinking, an approach that spoke to Murray who was not averse to shattering the smugness of academic calabashes. Hägerstrand had a quantitative eye, and ably depicted change over time visually in maps (for example, Hägerstrand 1963). He also inspired Murray’s illustrations of tribal circulation by means of azimuthal projections, the scale radiating out from a central point, which dramatically reveals a visible dimension to layers of movement in distance and frequency (Hägerstrand 1957; Chapman 1969a, 1970, 1976). In many respects, as Peter Larmour confirms, such illustration reflects the ‘mental maps’ of Solomon Islanders regarding their concepts of relationships with land (Larmour 1979, 31–35).

As