Small Islands, Big Issues

Nabila Gaertner-Mazouni & Peter Brown

Small Islands, Big Issues: Dialogues towards an Oceanic ecosystem of knowledge

The present volume, an initiative of the Université de la Polynésie française (University of French Polynesia, Tahiti), is the result of research collaboration between small island universities in the English-speaking and French-speaking Pacific. It builds off work undertaken since 2014 when the Pacific Island Universities Research Network (PIURN) was created with the aim of developing a space for more formal interaction among Island scholars than had previously been the case. One of the stages in the development of this network was the implementation of a structure for the organization of biennial conferences and other events to bring together researchers from Oceanic island ‘neighbours’ thousands of kilometres apart. This is also consistent with certain initiatives of individual institutions, such as the ambitious Nārua project of the University of French Polynesia aiming towards major change of the University’s profile and greater regional integration.

Our collective work is a further stage in the articulation of these connections contributing to the production and dissemination of Oceanian knowledge. It draws upon the complementary perspectives of scholars working in the ‘natural’, ‘human’ and ‘social’ sciences engaged principally, though not solely, in research related to the physical and human environment of Oceania, where the themes and approaches of the various authors have implications beyond their discipline boundaries, beyond the boundary of the Pacific. The scale is significant, with contributions ranging from eastern Polynesia to northwestern Melanesia, from Tahiti to Papua New Guinea, via Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands.

The Pacific Ocean is the largest single natural phenomenon on the planet. It is also a patchwork of island nations. This zone of major geostrategic and ecological interest is characterized by a strong diversity of topography, cultures and levels of human imprint on the environment. At the same time, the countries and territories of this vast and complex region share a number of features, beginning with a common ancestry going back some 5,000 years and a (very largely) common linguistic substratum; they are also relatively small islands, with the notable exception of Papua New Guinea, and have very low population densities. Oceania’s ecological systems, often very productive biologically despite variations from west to east (lower to higher levels of endemic species), are also rich in terms of cultural and linguistic heritage. These ecosystems are, however, very fragile, their manifold vulnerability due to both local and global factors.

The volume addresses a number of ‘big issues’ for Oceania concerning both the biosphere and human society. The effects of climate change on land and seascapes, environmental degradation and pollution and the question of food security are vitally important for peoples’ lives, including for their very survival. Questions related to the preservation of cultural heritage, the problematic of the transmission of language(s) and more generally the place of traditional knowledge within the formal education system are also key to providing for harmonious futures. Similarly, an understanding of the context of violence is related to perceptions of self and others and to social inclusiveness, including for women in the political sphere. In different ways, all these issues have to do with sustainable development and human well-being.

The notion of ecosystem is inherent to the physical and human life of these islands and its populations. To account for this, we have looked to present an ‘ecosystem of knowledge’, requiring multiple perspectives bearing on each other for the whole to ‘hold’. The volume shows that there is no simple model for the production of knowledge. We have attempted to provide a framework in which academic research across different domains is put into perspective with local epistemologies in a process of co-construction of knowledge.

We should say at the outset that the divide on which western science has historically been based, between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences, between study of the natural world and study of human societies and their peoples, is not an operative assumption or approach in these complementary chapters, despite their recourse to discipline-specific methodologies. As several chapters show, ‘scientific knowledge’ in the western tradition has its own great diversity across the academic spectrum of the so-called ‘natural’, ‘human’ and ‘social’ sciences. In inviting a ‘navigation’ across questions of political science, chemistry, marine biology, sociolinguistics and other language studies, education science, ecology, economics, history and literary criticism, we also hope that the reader will see the interest of these inter-connections which are explicitly or implicitly present in many chapters.

The work also demonstrates that the nature/culture divide common to western assumptions about the relation between humans and their environment is not a meaningful dichotomy for the indigenous peoples of Oceania. Several contributions take into account the understandings of actors ‘on the ground’ (farmers, fishermen, cultural practitioners, etc.). For example, there are chapters devoted to the study of different species, vegetal or animal, which call for a feedback loop between local communities and academic researchers, the ones assisting the others, showing that indigenous knowledge can be of value to the scientific community.

Conversely, academic research can provide corroboration of indigenous understandings which in turn ideally find community expression through public policy development and the choices of decision-makers. The notion of ‘research’ is thus extended, as ‘scientists’ gain from and contribute to local knowledge in areas as broad as nutrition in Papua New Guinea, languages in Polynesian islands, market gardens in Vanuatu, tourism development in small islands, education policy and cultural heritage integration.

This combination of approaches, involving different scales, can alert us, for instance, to situations or events that need to be considered for social and human well-being in terms of environmental degradation, food security, economic and sociopolitical development, historical and cultural shifts – and to be forewarned to deal with future challenges. That is to say that the question of understanding how to optimize a society’s human potential and its resources comes to the fore in this work. Engaging the citizenry more generally is vital, including through reform of education policy. In adopting this approach to the construction and value of Oceanian knowledge, we modestly hope to echo, in ‘a loose analogy but firmly based’, the words of A. G. Tansley (1935: 290), the creator of the term ‘ecosystem’, for whom this idea rests ‘at least in the case of the more complex and highly integrated communities, on the close inter-relations of the parts of their structure, on their behaviour as wholes, and on a whole series of other characters’.

Questions of cultural practice, public policy and communication thus abound in this volume which deals with ‘complex and highly integrated communities’ stretching across traditional academic disciplinary lines. One example is the multi-faceted treatment of the subject of conservation, presented dynamically and creatively, not merely as a reactive ‘preservation’ impulse, whether this concerns threatened species and environmental damage or languages – one quarter of the world’s languages are spoken in Oceania – or the marginalization of certain categories of people, notably the low level of political representation of women. And contrary to certain clichés, small Pacific islands know the phenomenon of urbanization and rural exodus. In this context, of migration and cultural shifts, the value of a holistic approach is seen, for example, through an assessment of the contribution of urban gardens in schools to food security and health, opening up multidisciplinary and pan-Pacific perspectives on climate change.

The volume shows that islands of the ‘Great Ocean’, though separated by vast distances, are interconnected in ways beyond what the Tongan-Fijian anthropologist and writer Epeli Hau’ofa described imaginatively as a ‘Sea of Islands’. In the age of dramatic climate shifts, even a place as ‘remote’ as Rapa Nui (Easter Island) can be exemplary of a fate befalling the world’s oceans, as it bears the brunt of the impact of the invasion of plastic. The Pacific shows that nowhere is remote; the peripheral has become a decentred centre.

The contributions to the work indicate that if at least some of the solutions to problems, including questions of health and nutrition, can be found in one’s own backyard, the Oceanic backyard highlighted here can in turn be of import to other parts of the world, particularly in terms of the interest of engaging local populations, seen as organic communities, in the process of creating and applying knowledge. In this sense, the ‘local’ can be the ‘global’. On the other hand, it is clear that small islands are not in a position to provide independent solutions to what are overwhelming(ly) global issues, whose impact on them comes from elsewhere. In this sense, it is the global that is local, where Oceania can pinpoint issues of pressing universal concern, for example, in the areas of food security, community well-being and protection of the ocean.

Not all disciplines are represented in this volume. This was not a policy decision by the editors but the result of a response to an invitation that was extended to researchers working in PIURN universities. We are pleased that this response included submissions by a number of doctoral students as well as more senior colleagues and full Professors, including in co-authored works. On the one hand, this made for a number of difficult choices, while, on the other, it engaged a research training component, which is one of the aims of the PIURN structure to foster research in ‘small islands’ dealing with ‘big issues’.

This is not to say that disciplines do not have their own customs, conventions and methodologies. The editors are well placed to know how these can become normalized, for example, in terms of referencing and presentation of bibliography. This has involved a fascinating, and sometimes intricate exercise in harmonizing practices, which vary greatly from journals in the natural sciences to monographs in the humanities, as between language-specific conventions.

Finally, this book has been deliberately structured with academic contributions in two languages, French and English, in order to reflect the reality of the situations of universities and research centres in this geographical area. This ‘duality’ is of course the legacy of different colonial histories, but our aim here has been to underline the interest (and added value) provided by these inter-crossed views and languages. Yet while some articles are written in French, a number of scholars working in French-speaking universities chose to write their chapter directly in English, including the chapter involving collaboration between New Caledonia and Vanuatu, where French remains one of this independent country’s official languages.

In spite of the cross-referencing, explicit or implicit, of many chapters, for the purpose of exposition we have found it useful to divide the work into three thematic sections: (1) science, traditional knowledge and local communities: food security, climate change, environmental degradation; (2) education, mediation and transmission: culture, heritage, language; (3) public policy, questions of violence, economic and social well-being: political sphere, gender relations, history, tourism.