Dr Tom White
Pacific Secularities | Governance, Development and Well-being in Oceania
RESEARCH PROJECTS
Seeking to deepen our understanding of the histories, politics and effects of modern law, governance and socio-economic development in the predominantly religious Pacific, my projects have gathered around six primary (and overlapping) topics of interest:
1. The Levuka Study
Health, well-being, religious change and cooperation networks on the periphery of Fiji's market-economy
Winds of change are sweeping the Pacific Islands. Traditional cooperative systems of resource and labour sharing – the very practices that bind a community together – are being challenged and replaced by the exchange logics of the market economy. At the same time, new insurgent churches are threatening the extant socio-ritual order. The rapid rise of Pentecostalism – and possibly a spreading secularisation too – is undermining the old governing authority of the chiefs and their establishment churches. How, then, does this massive social upheaval - reforging social relations and introducing new worldviews and behaviours - affect a population's health and well-being?
The New Zealand Royal Society Marsden-Te Apārangi funded project, The Levuka Study, is the first longitudinal study to systematically measure these broad social changes against individual self-reports of personal well-being. As the lead field researcher, my role has been to work on the design, planning, piloting and overall day-to-day management of this project, entailing the year-on-year collection of survey data from a cohort of 560 adult Fijians living in two villages and two informal settlements in the port town and former capital of Fiji, Levuka.
The project chose Levuka because of pre-existing social connections with the community. But we also chose Levuka because it is an ideal fieldsite for studying how different communities adapt their social systems when challenged by market change and uncertainty, and for studying how such social change affects individuals' health and well-being differently. Even before Fiji's capital moved to Suva in the 1880s, Levuka's economy relied on a single primary export commodity: first sandlewood, then beche-de-mer, then copra, and now tinned tuna. In 2013, Levuka also became a UNESCO World Heritage site, but many of its 19th Century colonial builidings require urgent repair. With the devastation of Cyclone Winston and Covid-19, tourism in Levuka's has further struggled, while capital flight and brain drain remain big problems. Quiet, beautiful and historically unique, Levuka also has a demography of different communities living in close proximity to each other, all seeking to respond to these same challenges. These range from the high-ranking Methodist chiefly village of Levuka-Vakaviti, to the informal settlement of Wailailai inhabited by Anglican ni-Solomoni (many descended from Fiji's 'blackbirded' labourers), to the kailoma (Fijians of part-European decent) villagers of Vagadaci, and lastly, the ethnically and religiously diverse settlement of Baba, the largest of them all. For a comparative study of social change in the Pacific, few places could be more informative.
Now, quantifying and comparing how complex and dynamic social processes affect individual health and well-being is clearly extraordinarily difficult. It requires the thorough, systematic and culturally-nuanced collection of a wide range of data from the same individuals, and repeatedly over time as their lived conditions change. For example, research tools need to quantify how a person’s health and well-being might be affected when they move from subsistence living to paid employment, have children, marry, move to a city or to a new church. How might these changes also affect (or be affected by) the strength and breadth of their support networks (how often and who with do they share food, money or tasks ), or their practise of certain lifestyle behaviours, such as smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol or kava? Moreover, what role does age, gender, inherited wealth, customary rank, religiosity, ethnicity or land tenure, to name but a few potential factors, also play in these calculations?
The project began as early as 2021, but suffered delay due to Covid. Though finally, in late 2022, working alongside Dr John Shaver (Baylor University) and Professor Patrick Vakaoti (Otago), we undertook initial consultations with local leaders, completed cultural protocols and piloted the questions and translations of our large-scale survey. In addition to conducting GIS and kinship mapping, as well as ethno-histories for each site and an extensive census for every household, we decided that an effective annual survey must acquire data on the following conditions and behaviours:
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income and work-type,
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major changes to household wealth or composition in the last year (e.g. births, deaths, inheritances...etc,not listed in initial census)
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current residency (if migrated out, why?)
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self-reported social rank from 1-10 (in the village or settlement, and in wider Levuka),
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money sharing networks (with amounts shared and biographical data on cooperating partners)
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food sharing networks (with biographical data on cooperating partners)
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labour sharing networks (with the type of task shared and biographical data on cooperating partners),
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self-reports on physical health (1-10),
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illness frequency,
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alcohol consumption,
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tobacco consumption,
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kava consumption,
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perceptions on illicit drug use (cannabis and meth),*
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religious affiliation,
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church denomination switching,
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church and prayer group attendance,
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prayer frequency,
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church donations,
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self-report on personal happiness (1-10), and
20. self-report on personal life satisfaction (1-10).
* to avoid compromising either the informant or the study – and to mitigate socially desirable reporting – this question asked the informant to say ‘how bad is cannabis/meth from 1-10, rather than about possible illegal behaviour.
In early 2023, I led the training and coordination of five local researchers in their collection of this ethnographic survey data. We successfully collected data from 227/228 households in the greater Levuka area, and from 560/567 of all adults aged 18-65 living at the sites. In early 2024, I returned to Levuka and the research team (with two new members) successfully completed the Year 2 data collection for the cohort, with the cohort size growing to 571.
Analysis of the data is on-going, but presentations have been made locally, including at a research seminar for the School of Law and Social Sciences at the University of the South Pacific in late 2023. Moreover, early results are showing important and sometimes surprising correlations. For example, a strong correlation between tobacco and alcohol avoidance and prayer frequency holds across all denominations – yet a similar correlation does not hold true across all denominations when looking at church attendance. We see also marked differences in how personal income more prominently affects self-perceived social status for women than it does for men. We have also seen how levels of happiness and life satisfaction grow with age (which – at least until recently – has been the opposite for Western societies). Crucially, we have also seen how historical and cultural differences between the two villages and the two informal settlements – such as levels of patri-localism and chiefly status – translates into different economic and religious behavioural trends.
Should you wish to know more about the study please contact me at tomwhitesmailbox@gmail.com
Other relevant materials can be found here...
The attached working document describes the project background and methods in greater detail.
Market stalls selling local produce on the Levuka sea-front. Sellers used to take their wares to the Suva before ferry prices went up too far. TW.
A Levuka ferry wrecked by the 2016 Cyclone Winston left a few kilometres down the coast for Levuka town. Image TW.
The preferred material for housing is wood... TW.
Then concrete... TW.
Then tin... TW.
Across the Y1 560 cohort, 86 adults had switched churches in their life-time. The above chart (TW, made in R) shows that the 'rise' of Pentecostalism is far from a simple dynamic. When breaking down switching at a village/settlement level, these dynamics are markedly shaped by site-specific factors.
2. Fijian constitution-making and religious nationalism
My three-year, fully-funded and award-winning doctoral project based at Otago University (NZ) tracks the legal and political history of religion in Fiji, and traces the complicity of religion in a 'politics of race' that has long divided Indigenous Christians and Indo-Fijian Hindus and Muslims, and underpinned military coups in 1987, 2000 and 2006. In this historical analysis, the project evaluate Fijian constitution-drafters various attempts to find a way to reconcile Indigenous majority/ethnic minority interests, rights of religious freedom, decolonisation and the demands of international donors. Through reading Fijian politics through colonial and postcolonial constitutional debates about Christianity, God, nationhood and the legal limits of religion, the project offers insights into the distinctive features of the dominant political theologies of the Pacific Islands, and the contradictions, inconsistencies and uncertainties of 'Western' law and governance as applied in the Pacific region. Though of broader, theoretical importance (and my apologies for the rather technical jargon), the project interogates how global discourses of 'religion' - along with the semantic imprecision with which this term and other connoted terms are variously deployed in the Pacific - enables partisan actors to reimagine and consolidate diverse lines of political opposition within a 'secular' and liberal constitutional register (yikes!). Let me explain:
In March 2012, Fiji's ruling military strongman, Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama, announced the drafting of a new constitution, Fiji's fourth since independence in 1970. Upon this announcement, he further listed twelve 'non-negotiables', with one proving more ruinous to any cross-political consensus than any other: that Fiji would be a 'secular state.' From August to October, thousands of public submissions poured in from across the country, with nearly a quarter of them expressing either unqualified support or moral outrage over the new policy. The debate became so rancorous, and Bainimarama so furious with those opposing secularism, he abandoned the public drafting process and proceeded to assemble his own deeply flawed draft from behind closed doors.
Yet when examining what was locally referred to as Fiji's 'Christian state debate', underpinning nearly all these submissions were deeply contradicting understandings of what a 'secular state' actually meant. Indigenous chiefs and villagers insisted on a 'Christian state' as a bulwark against the far-reaching 'secular' social and moral decay and growing 'godlessness' they witnessed in their communities. Their arguments focused on casinos and prostitution, opencast mining, nightclubs and homosexuality. Indeed, 'secularism' - a word with no meaningful translation in Fijian - was assumed as an outright embrace of this perceived creeping, capitalist immorality. While liberals, Indo-Fijians and the military saw a 'secular state' simply as preventing churches (and in particular, Fiji's Methodist Church) controlling state institutions and preventing religious bigotry by public officers. They saw 'secularism' as the only democratic option for a religiously diverse country. Although widely-perceived by both sides as two antithetical and opposed policies - a secular or a Christian state - the 'two sides' were effectively talking apples and oranges. Indeed, from one point of view, it seemed that if the country could just get past the divisive nomenclature, a great many commonalities would emerge. But, of course, it is often in the interests of political actors for there not to be consensus and agreement, and the slippery semantics of secularism provided an excellent means for keeping people at angry crossed purposes.
To document the divisive rhetorics and politics that drove this political dialogue failure, the project employs a variety of methods and sources. The primary archive for this dissertation is the 7,000 plus public submissions sent to Fiji's 2012 Constitution Commission, led by the renowned legal scholar Professor Yash Ghai. Quantitative and qualitative methods are used to map out, explain and interrogate the contradictory interpretations for secularism in these public submissions. I then use supplementary primary texts to situate the public submissions in both their legal, political and historical context. This includes legal texts (past constitutions, decrees, parliamentary bills, court proceedings and judgements); official state documents (colonial officers’ letters, parliamentary debates and reports, government statements, drafting-process booklets, commission press releases); other political media (party manifestos, press releases, official declarations); and a range of civil society ephemera sourced from archival visits to private and public collections. This has involved trips to the National Archives of Fiji, the Pacific Collection at The University of the South Pacific, the Pacific Theological College library, and the private collections of the Citizen’s Constitutional Forum and Ecumenical Centre for Research, Education and Advocacy, all in Suva. In Australia and New Zealand, this has included the Brij Lal Collection held at the Noel Butlin Archives Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra, and the Hocken Collection and the Presbyterian Research Centre, Knox College in Dunedin. The research has also involved several visits to the UK National Archives at Kew in London.
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Interviews and observations provide further data in addtition to the textual analyses, especially regarding the events of the 2012 drafting process itself. This includes thirty-one in-depth interviews with political, religious and civil society leaders in Fiji, including archbishops, presidents and general secretaries of national religious and civil society bodies, constitution commissioners, politicians, lawyers, academics and human rights activists. In addition, participant observations of political marches and public talks, Constitution Day celebrations, and direct observations of sedition trials for Fiji's Christian state separatists, add further ethnographic depth. The research also, where relevant, draws upon personal experience attained from living and lecturing in Fiji’s capital, Suva, between 2012-2015.
During and since the completion of this doctoral research I have presented my results in seminars, conferences and workshops in Oceania, Asia, Europe and North America. See the CV page for further details.
Should you wish to know more about this research project please contact me at tomwhitesmailbox@gmail.com
Other relevant materials can be found here:
Fiji's 'race-free', military-regime drafted 2013 Constitution, translated from English into Fijian (Bauan) and Fiji-Hindi. Translations differed for 'secular state.' TW
1 of 844 submissions sent to Fiji's 2012 drafting body asking 'O Viti me vanua vakarisito ko Viti' [popularly translated as 'declare Fiji a christian state'].
A late 1980s image of 1987 coup-leader and Fiji's current (reformed) Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka. Google Images.
Copies of the 1995/1996 constitutional submission to the Reeves Commission held at the Brij Lal archives in ANU. Photo. TW
Otago PhD Thesis Submission! February 2020.
3. Multiple secularities and governing 'religion' in Oceania
In 2022, Leipzig University's Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Group, Multiple Secularities, invited me to expand on my doctoral research at a residential six-month fellowship.
Across the world, societies differentiate things as either religious or not religious, and this has major implications for law and governance. Is a Sikh's kirpan (a small ceremonial dagger ) an 'article of faith' or 'a weapon'? Is a women's burqa an instrument for self-fashioning a relationship with God, or a symbol of patriarchal oppression? Is Scientology a 'religion' (and therefore protected from taxes and FDA regulations), or a 'cult' or a 'business'? When does a sculpture of an ancient Papuan spirit move from being a 'piece of art' to a 'religious artifact'? When does an old church needing public funds for its restoration switch from being a 'religious building' to 'cultural heritage'? What should communist, atheist societies do about the ritual of marriage? Is a chief's ruling that there must be only one village church part of his 'customary authority' or an illegal act of 'religious oppression'? These questions are most familiar in modern 'secular' democracies where separating 'church and state' is widely seen as integral to peace, tolerance and progress. Yet all societies in some form or another appear to distinguish 'the sacred' and 'the profane', the 'worldly' and the 'otherworldly,' and shape their social norms and behaviours accordingly.
My fellowship at Leipzig sought to bring the Pacific experience to the comparative scholarship on these 'multiple secularities'. The inspiring weekly seminars and workshops at the Centre led to a paper presentation at the European Association for the Study of Religion in Cork that year (see video recording in this section), followed by further conference presentations and new directions for my research: (1) deeper into history; (2) to other Pacific Island jurisdictions; and (3) into Pacific Islands case law.
(1) Historical contexts: In my PhD I focused on the pragmatics of Fiji's constitutional politics of religion: how the novelty of the idea of a 'secular state,' or the preceived foreignness of separating out religion from non-religion, meant politics largely determined the term's subsequent articulation and use. Though colonial hegemonic structures - including secularism or Christianity - did not simply wash over pre-existing Indigenous forms of meaning, but were fundamentally reshaped by these earlier conceptual structures. In my subsequent research - such as that shown in the video presentation opposite - I describe how Indigenous distinctions between 'people of the land' and 'chiefs of the sea' - a system of political classification that pre-dates contact with the West - issues a conceptual scheme by which the law and the politics of the religion/secular dual is alternatively understood and experienced in Fijian contexts.
(2) Comparative contexts: Whereas the PhD focused on Fiji, subsequent research has examined the comparative contexts of Samoa, Papua New Guinea and other Pacific Island states, where intra-Christian conflict is more prevalent than the inter-religious conflict of Fiji. In these contexts, moreover, lawmakers have tended to lean-in to strengthening links between the church and the state, rather than loosening them as in Fiji. In 2017 in Samoa, for example, lawmakers redrafted the constitutions to explicitly declare the country as a Christian state. In 2021, PNG's Constitutional advisory body were asked by the Executive National Committee to explore similar legal reform. Yet these two Pacific Island states also differ markedly in their social and political contexts. PNG's extraordinary cultural and religious diversity and political fragmentation provides the backdrop for a shooting Pentecostalism, while the land upheavals of large mining projects and fears of witchcraft, compound social conflict. In Samoa, party politics, and legal discourses and institutions that pitch the authority of the village elders against human rights judgements of the courts, underpin much of the conflict over law and religion.
(3) Case law: Compared to Western jurisdictions, courts rarely arbitrate on religion in the Pacific Islands. Though some important cases include, sentencing for sorcery-related murders (PNG, Solomons), court interventions on church leadership and succession (Fiji, Solomons, and Samoa) the House Speaker, a evangelical Christian, removing carvings of local gods from the parliamentary buildings (PNG), insurgent churches being banned by local village councils (Samoa, Tuvalu, Solomons), relocation of the ritual Nagol jump (Vanuatu), the taxability of church ministers incomes (Samoa), religion in schools, sodomy laws and religious freedom in the army (all Fiji). While there have been some excellent national scholarship on these legal questions (such as the work on Melanesian witchcraft accusations by Miranda Forsyth and Richard Eves), and substantial work on legal pluralism in the Pacific, there is virtually no comparative law and religion scholarship on these cases. This is particularly evident when looking at the reams of case law analysis on this topic in the alternative contexts of the US and Europe. And yet, these contexts are incredibly important test cases! Law on religion outside the West is frequently critiqued for its 'Protestant bias'. One might think, therefore, that the overwhelming Protestant Pacific should find these laws relatively intuitive. Yet time and again, judges are a pains to try and avoid or circumvent firm judgements on these issues. I have presented on these cases - and their comparative law implications - in Law and Society and Religious Studies conferences in at Otago University (2022) and Victoria University of Wellington (2022) and internationally, at a secularism workshop in Princeton (2023).
In addition to the above, I am presently working on a book chapter to look at the case of the Korean-founded Grace Road Church organisation in Fiji. Frequently branded as a 'doomsday cult' - its leaders have been either remanded in custody or deported from Fiji, or imprisoned in Korea. It is also one of the most successful businesses in Fiji, with an impressive portfolio of farms, restaurants, shops and construction services. Drawing on the Multiple Secularities method of thinking more deeply about the world's diverse practices of how we draw lines around what is and isn't religion (is it a cult, or a business?) this project looks at how Pacific Islanders are (re)defining the legal limits of religion in their own novel and society-changing ways.
Should you wish to know more about any of the above lines of research please contact me at tomwhitesmailbox@gmail.com
Presentation at European Association for the Study of Religion Annual Conference (Cork, Ireland). "The Trials of the Ra Christian State secessionists in Fiji's secular state". 29 June 2022. [apologies for any of my Covid-related brain-fog!]
Forsyth and Eves' edited collection on the legal and cultural responses to witchcraft accusations in Melanesia (2015)
Research design document for the Pacific Secularities project (2021)
A Grace Road Church restaurant in Suva. TW
Booklets handed out at Grace Road Church restaurants rebutting the prosecution of their leader Rev. Ok Joo Shin
4. Ethics and Governance in Pacific democracy-building
What role can universities play in building democracy and decolonising society ? Alternatively, what should a 21st Century university graduate look like? @hat skills, experiences or virtues should she (or he) take from a universty education? Is it sufficient to simply teach the knowledge and skills of their future trade or profession, or should universities seek to improve their character too? And, crucially, from what moral authority might these secular institutions assume to pronounce on right and wrong when operating in deeply religious contexts? This research project combines in-depth interviews, thematic analysis of reports, senate minutes, teaching documents and student evaluations, participant observation and auto-ethnography to evaluates the merits, costs, values and efficacy of Fijian universities' mandatory Ethics and Goverance courses. The project further examines how the different impressions and attitudes towards these courses reflect competing visions over what universities in Pacific Islands ought to be and do.
It was in early 2012, just as Voreqe Bainimarama announced his new constitution-process (see above), that I joined the the Ethics and Governance Department at the Fiji National University (FNU). The lecturing position entailed delivery of the university's mandatory Ethics and Governance paper. We taught this holistic, inter- and trans-disciplinary paper at different levels of sophistication to all students across the university, from certificate to bachelors, across the different schools and colleges, and throughout FNU's eight regional campuses. The Ethics and Governance paper, moreover, was matched by parallel mandatory Ethics and Governance papers in Fiji's two other universities (The University of the South Pacific and The University of Fiji), though each with their own distinct content and objectives. Since the teaching of these papers first began in and around 2010, nearly 40,000 students have attended classes and sat exams on political, corporate and personal governance, and on critical thinking and moral autonomy, which adds up to just under 5% of the country's entire population.
Along with a department colleague, Makereta Mua, I was invited by Dr Unasi Nabobo-Baba, the present Vice-Chancellor of FNU to contribute an academic article on these mandatory Ethics and Governance papers for a Special Issue on Pacific Universities with the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management. Rather than issue a straight-out apologetics for these mandatory ethics and governance courses (which we supported), we felt a more constructive approach was to report on the (often bitter) intra-university debates - between college deans and ethics staff, Council members and faculty - on whether these holistic and mandatory courses should be taught at all.
Access to the final article can be found here. If you do not have a subscription with Taylor and Francis, please email me for a copy should it be of interest.
Four sample of slides taken from an old FNU Ethics and Governance course. TW
5. Ritual and belief in climate change adaption
Climate change is a devastating present and future threat to the homes and livelihoods of Pacific Island peoples. In addition to the potential harm caused by stronger cyclones, flash flooding, coral bleaching and drought, sea-level rise - during storm surges and king tides - breaches sea walls, kills crops, salinates fresh water supplies, floods homes, halls and burial grounds, and provides breeding grounds for dengue-carrying mosquitos.
While meeting the severity of climate threats to Pacific Island peoples with honesty, it is also important to recognise that apocalyptic narratives of sinking islands and victimhood are counter-productive, even neocolonial. Barnet and Campbell (Climate Change and Small Islands States, 2010) describe 'discourses of danger' in the climate change and development industry, where 'vulnerable' communities are positioned as increasingly subject to the good will and favour of international donors. With aims to address the one-sidedeness and harmfulness of such frames, a research team combining Professor Sudesh Mishra, Dr Maebh Long, Dr Matthew Hayward, Mr Sekove Degei and Mr Eliki Drugunulevu (USP) and myself (FNU) received combined funds of FJ$25,000 from our two universities to established the Fijian Narratives of Climate Change Project. The aim of the project was to investigate what structures of meaning or modes of expression were Fijians alternatively using to make climate change sensible and subject to their local epistemologies, whether this be in song, dance, story-telling or religious myth and ritual.
As part of this project I undertook interviews with climate change advisers in Suva, participated in local workshops and conferences held at USP, FNU and the Pacific Theological College, ran seminars with my Ethics and Governance students at FNU - who were always an excellent bouncing board for ideas - and in 2015 - conducted four separate fieldtrips to four villages spread across the island group, all having experienced sea-level inundation from global warming. These village visits first entailed the completion of the customary protocols (a sevusevu) and then an extensive group talanoa (a free-flow focus group structured by iTaukei norms of reciprocity and respect) with the village elders, who led much of the conversation. The back-and-forth, and sharing of stories and personal experiences lasted several hours. The trips then concluded with walking the local grounds with the turaga ni koro (village headman), and examining the changed landscape, including breached coastal defences, abandoned houses and ruined crops.
Three of the villages, the two villages in eastern Viti Levu (Tailevu Province) and one of the villages in eastern Vanua Levu (Cakaudrove Province), were trapped by their predicament. Unlike some other villages, the principal mataqali (phratry-group) did not own any adjacent, higher-situated land to relocate. Funds for adaption initiatives were also limited Though any sense that these villagers may have viewed themselves as the passive victims of what I saw as the ultimate culprit - Western carbon-based capitalism - was absent. When asked about what had caused the rising seas, they concentrated on local factors, such as the cutting down of nearby coastal mangroves and 'not respecting the vanua'.
The fourth village we visited, also in eastern Vanua Levu, however, is now a global climate change case study, being one of the first settlements in the world to officially relocate because of global warming. Here we visited the abandoned village a couple of kilometres away, the wide river the adults used to cross on their way to school, and walked around the new village site. Crucial to the objectives of our study was to find out how the village planned, carried out and recalled their relocation. The elders told us that what they experienced was divine intervention, a re-living of the story of Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt, where they were likewise saved by God, but from environmental (rather than pharaonic) bondage. With the village moving collectively to the new site - locally named Kenani (Canaan) - the village also now celebrates the move on its anniversary, much like the Judaic Passover.
Across the Pacific Islands, chiefs, churchmen, development specialists, environmental scientists, lawmakers and activists are mobilising around the threat of climate change, lobbying at COP summits and innovating adaption strategies that marry scientific technologies with Indigenous knowledge. How climate change is experienced and understood by those living on the global warming front line, however remains somewhat marginal to these efforts, and yet this is crucial to the success of adaption initiatives. For example, the peoples of the Cartaret Islands in Bougainville (PNG) have likewise undergone efforts to relocate their communities. However, and for many deeply sympathetic reasons, former residents often return to their old homes, despite the flooded conditions. Homelands are extra-ordinarily hard to abandon, even when still relatively nearby. With the 'Kenani' villagers moving collectively - and thereby providing the conditions for the experience to be communlly-ritualised - it has enabled the village to take ownership of their plight, turning an 'evacuation' into an 'Exodus'.
The findings of this research project was shared in conference presentations in Fiji, Auckland and Wellington, and later written up for publication is a special issue cultural anthropology journal. This article was then selected by The Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand as their national entry for republication in the global facing, multi-lingual journal Deja lu. If you want to know more about this study, you can read the following academic article discussing the two Vanua Levu villages in greater depth. Do email me at tomwhitesmailbox@gmail.com if you cannot access the article.
Another article worth regarding from the Fijian Narratives of Climate Change Project is by Maebh Long.
In December 2013, the European Consortium for Pacific Studies (ECOPAS) hosted its first conference at the University of the South Pacific (USP) on the theme ̳Restoring the Human to Climate Change in Oceania‘.3 The 4-day conference opened with the prophetic play, Moana: The Rising of the Sea, a dramatic anticipation of sea-level rise and the dismal fate this spells for atoll-nations in the Pacific, iInspired by the poem ―"Tell Them" by Marshall Islander Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner.
Village talanoa with the turaga ni koro, village elders and a provincial council officer. Image TW.
The turaga ni koro pointing out the river he used to walk across as a child on his way to school. Image TW.
Newspaper clippings on the hall of the village wall. Image TW.
6. Coding Pacific democracy and traditional culture
Content to be posted shortly