Category Archives: Pacific

I’ve meant for several days to post an excerpt from a fascinating study by the omniscient Head Heeb about potential secessionist gangsters on Rotuma.

On May 19, 2000, a group of indigenous Fijian nationalists, led by George Speight and supported by a number of influential chiefs, seized control of Parliament and held it for more than 50 days. On May 29, with Parliament still under siege, the military declared the government deposed and took over in opposition to both Speight and the elected legislature. During the next few months, Viti Levu and Vanua Levu were in a state of chaos, with attacks on Indo-Fijian tenant farmers and mutinies within the military. All this prompted renewed discussion of independence on Rotuma.

That’s where the organized crime angle comes in. Present on Rotuma at the time, ostensibly as a “tourist,” was Tzemach ben David Netzer Korem, the titular vice president of a micronation known as the Dominion of Melchizedek. The Dominion claims various Pacific and Antarctic territories and asserts a pseudobiblical basis for its sovereignty, but is in fact a complicated financial scam. Korem (whose real name is Ben Pedley, and who proudly notes that his high school class “voted him ‘Most Original'”) has used the apparatus of Melchizedek to conceal various securities and tax frauds, and has also made money from sales of licenses and travel documents.

However shady Korem may be, however, he has shown a considerable amount of skill in promoting Melchizedek’s interests. Among other things, Melchizedek has actually managed to secure diplomatic recognition from the Central African Republic and Burkina Faso (aided, I suspect, by a certain amount of money under the table), giving it a patina of respectability and increasing the value of its travel documents. With the chaos surrounding the Fijian coup, however, Korem saw the chance to take Melchizedek to the next level. If Rotuma became a de facto sovereign state under a friendly government, it would become not so much a shell company as a shell nation in which Korem could establish banks, corporations and other financial entities beyond the reach of the law. A unilateral declaration of independence on Rotuma likely wouldn’t be recognized, much as Somaliland’s separation from the dysfunctional Somali state hasn’t gained international recognition, but in some ways that would be even better for Korem – a Rotuma existing apart from international institutions would be a legal black hole like Transnistria is for the Russian mob.

There’s more for those interested.

It was common rumour in the Gilbert Islands that certain local clans had the power of porpoise-calling; but it was rather like the Indian rope-trick; you never met anyone who had actually witnessed the thing. If I had been a reasonably plump young man, I might never have come to see what I did see on the beach of Butaritari lagoon. But I was skinny. it was out of sheer pity for my poor thin frame that old Kitiona set his family porpoise-caller working. We were sitting together one evening in his canoe-shed by the beach, and he was delivering a kind of discourse on the beauty of human fatness.

“A chief of chiefs,” he said, “is recognized by his shape. He is fleshy from head to foot. But his greatest flesh is his middle; when he sits, he is based like a mountain upon his sitting place; when he stands, he swells out in the midst, before and behind, like a porpoise.” it seemed that in order to maintain that noble bulge a high chief simply must have a regular diet of porpoise-meat; if he didn’t, he would soon become lean and bony like a commoner or a white man. The white man was doubtless of chiefly race, thought Kitiona, but his figure could hardly be called beautiful. “And you,” he added, looking me up and down with affectionate realism, “are in truth the skinniest white man ever seen in these islands. You sit upon approximately no base at all.”

I laughed (heartily, I hope) and asked what he thought could be done about that. “You should eat porpoise-flesh,” he said simply, “then you too would swell in the proper places.” That led me to inquire how I might come by a regular supply of the rare meat. The long and the short of his reply was that his own kinsmen in Kuma village, seventeen miles up-lagoon, were the hereditary porpoise-callers of the High Chiefs of Butaritari and Makin-Meang. His first cousin was a leading expert at the game; he could put himself into the right kind of dream on demand. His spirit went out of his body in such a dream; it sought out the porpoise-folk in their home under the western horizon and invited them to a dance, with feasting, in Kuma village. If he spoke the words of the invitation aright (and very few had the secret of them) the porpoise would follow him with cries of joy to the surface.

SOURCE: The Calling of the Porpoise, from Chapter 6, “Strange Interlude” of A Pattern of Islands, by Sir Arthur Grimble (John Murray, 1952).

So, do they come when they’re called? Does the skinny white man eat them or not? The rest of the excerpt is online at the wonderful and wide-ranging EclectiCity.

Prompted by Doug Muir of Halfway Down the Danube

When the new Pacific island nation-states gained their constitutional independence, mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a heady optimism. Independence had come peacefully and cooperatively. There had been no revolutions, no bloody wars of national liberation. Independence was given, sometimes virtually imposed, rather than taken. Power shifted readily from colonial administrators to existing indigenous political elites. The independence constitutions of the new nation-states were largely informed by Western democratic institutions and values.

But in more recent times, the optimism has diminished. Along with growing economic problems for most Pacific nation-states, there are now very considerable tensions between notions of Western liberal constitutional democracy and some indigenous political values and traditions. The Fiji coups of 1987 were a major wake-up call for historians and others who still viewed the Pacific islands as pleasant, romantic, peaceful locations. These coups, in the name of protecting the rights of indigenous Fijians, caused great consternation to those commentators deeply committed to the commonly held dual ideals of democracy and indigenous rights. In this case, they could not hold both at once.

While the Fiji coups were rather extreme examples in the Pacific context, the underlying tensions between constructs of indigenous “tradition” and “the West,” and the politics of Pacific culture, are lively and serious issues in modern scholarship.

“Tradition” is constantly reinvented in all human societies. In Oceania, indigenous tradition has long been constructed by Westerners. It is also constructed from within island societies, often as a necessary anticolonial response and as a basis for an assertion of identity. This identity tends to be expressed more in cultural terms–a cultural nationalism–since political nationalism is often a problematic concept in islands where nation-state boundaries have been arbitrarily imposed, where even concepts of a political nation might have no indigenous precedents, and where so many citizens live outside their state.

Sometimes this process of asserting cultural identity is also used for particular internal purposes that might be regarded as less than noble, such as by some current political elites to maintain their own positions in the face of growing demands by some of their citizens for a more democratic sharing of influence and resources. Traditional indigenous values of status and even “class”–for example, differences between “commoners” and “nobles”–are not always compatible with notions of democracy.

Historians dealing with these matters often feel the need to tread very warily and not give offense. Criticism can so readily lead to accusations of racism. For historians there is the temptation to suspend the critical facility and to appeal to cultural relativism, a situation ethics based on notions of what is loosely referred to as “the Pacific way.” Thus, for example, certain practices involving matters of ethnicity, class, or gender or of social, government, and business policy that would be condemned elsewhere in the world are sometimes quietly condoned. As an example, the near-absolute monarchy in Tonga seldom receives the condemnation from crusading democrats that such monarchy might receive if it were elsewhere in the world. In the case of Tonga, it is more likely to be regarded as a “quaint” and beneficent system. Meanwhile, the reification of indigenous tradition, by both insiders and outsiders, has contributed to post-colonial stereotyping. As Stephanie Lawson comments:

The construction of the dichotomy between “traditional” and “Western” that has been so roundly condemned in anticolonial literature has now been inverted in a form which pervades the rhetoric of those who denounced it in the first place. This unquestioningly produces the same false essentialism which has seduced past generations of scholars into believing that there are determinate characteristics of Western and non-Western “minds.”

And the dichotomy is so obviously simplistic anyway. Some of the most “Western” of notions have become thoroughly entrenched within and often central to “tradition,” most obviously Christianity. A fundamental problem with academic discussions about Pacific cultural politics is that moral judgments can too readily belie the enormous complexity of issues. The idea of authorative history is no longer acceptable, yet to offer the opposite, the idea of history as an infinitely relative “multivocality,” may in the long run be equally unhelpful. Both strategies are just as inclined to create cardboard cut-outs of their respective selves and others.

SOURCE: Nature, Culture, and History: The “Knowing” of Oceania, by K. R. Howe (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 72-74

For reasons that were thought perfectly appropriate and correct at the time, imperial Pacific history depicted indigenous societies as fundamentally weak, flawed, and degenerate. In postcolonial history, indigenous societies are more likely to be strong, resilient, adaptable, and vibrant. The underlying reason for the contrast is the fundamental shift in explanatory paradigm from nature to culture and the associated reevaluation of the relative merits of Western and non-Western cultures. The result is that imperial values have been inverted. Today’s Pacific historians operate in an ideological environment that tends to privilege the idea of indigenous societies. Notions of indigenous culture and custom have been reified.

Chapter 1 argued the case for a twentieth-century reconceptualizing of Pacific nature in the form of the ideal tropical island. Something similar has happened to the idea of Pacific culture. Both the generality and the specificity of indigenous Pacific culture have commonly been re-ennobled. At its extreme level, perhaps more in the realms of journalism and political rhetoric than academic history, is the claim that Pacific islanders, and indigenous peoples elsewhere, have culture, whereas many Westerners, especially in “newer” countries such as Australia and New Zealand, do not. More commonly, islanders are attributed characteristics commonly thought to be lacking in Western society. They are spiritual rather than materialistic; holistic rather than analytical; sharing, caring, communal, and inherently democratic rather than individualistic and self-interested. They are deemed to embody pre-industrial ideals such as honesty and self-sufficiency, as opposed to corrupting values of urban modernity, and they have a closer affinity with nature. There exists a late-twentieth-century version of the noble savage.

Of course such idealizing and privileging of indigenous societies have been recurrent themes in Western thought over the past thousand or more years. The current postcolonial version is a natural and necessary reaction to now outmoded imperial views and colonial practices. Just as imperial history attempted to disempower islanders, postcolonial history is an attempt to reverse that process. It positively supports attempts to improve identity and life for peoples who have been colonized and marginalized. But it does create an environment in which historians sometimes have difficulty depicting multidimensional aspects of indigenous culture in colonial/postcolonial encounter. Criticism or what might be construed as negative comment about island societies tends to be avoided. The idea that island societies, like societies everywhere, may be riven with internal conflicts and contradictions and engage in reprehensible practices is not commonly expressed, by either insiders or outsiders. If such critical comment is made, it is more often than not explained as a consequence of colonialism.

SOURCE: Nature, Culture, and History: The “Knowing” of Oceania, by K. R. Howe (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 70-71