Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2019

This article looks at salient interpersonal uses and meanings of two prominent Tok Pisin social relations nouns – wantok ('friend', 'same language speaker') and lain ('group', 'family', 'clan') – which it is proposed exemplify key cultural Melanesian concepts in some anthropological literature of the area. Whereas certain aspects of language use in Tok Pisin were identified as potentially divisive and socially harmful, some scholars endeavoured to identify a group of concepts indicative of culturally specific Melanesian values. For example, the words wantok and lain were claimed to jointly represent 'the value of the clan' across Melanesian societies, while embodying and supporting a distinct world-view of the Melanesian peoples. This article studies two Tok Pisin texts which focus on the cultural significance of concepts of wantok and lain in their rural/traditional environment. While the first text offers a native speaker's insight into the social significance of the cultural expression wantok sistem ('system favouring friends'), the other one details the roles of lain in the passage of a bride-price ceremony. Given that both texts presuppose the cultural background of rural Tok Pisin, a brief look at some characteristic usage of the two words in electronic media suggests that certain aspects of traditional uses and meanings of these words may be extended and employed to conceptualize new social and political phenomena.

An increasing number of Japanese ethnographers have conducted fieldwork research in Pacific Islands in the last few decades, which has resulted in a growing corpus of ethnographic literature. This is partly related to the historical role that Japan has played in the Pacific and partly to its geographical proximity to the area. While this geo-historical advantage combines with the availability of ethnographic works produced by non-Japanese scholars, the latter remain largely unable to access anthropological literature only available in Japanese. This not only limits the international circulation of ethnographies produced by Japanese anthropologists of the Pacific, but also the possibility of engaging with a larger body of anthropological traditions and, thus, with the overall project of 'World Anthropologies'. This article discusses the reasons why Japanese ethnographies of the Pacific provide not only a technical advantage for non-Japanese scholars of Pacific Islands but also a qualitative difference in terms of anthropological perspectives. In particular, it examines the differential impact of different colonial and postcolonial debates on Japanese and anglophone anthropology in relation to ethnographies of urban Melanesia.

The kingdom of Tonga known as the Friendly Islands is a bilingual country where the official languages are Tongan (lea faka-Tonga) and English (lea faka-Pilitānia). In a bilingual environment like Tonga, the ability to translate effectively between the two languages is a fundamental skill to communicate well and to achieve academic success. The main focus of this article is to approach translation through a sociocultural lens, and more specifically, through a Tongan-inspired tāvāist perspective: 'Okusitino's Māhina's Tā–Vā ('Time–Space') Theory of Reality. This theory has influenced a range of practices from many disciplines and social activities, such as translation. Theorizing translation in and across tā ('time') and vā ('space') informs the relationships between languages, cultures and educational backgrounds in the transmission of 'ilo ('knowledge') and poto ('skills') among all members of the society. In exploring the theory this article will consider two translation case studies of English to Tongan literature: Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince (1943).

Barriers to acquiring and using a shared sign language alienate deaf children and adults from their fundamental human rights to communication, education, social and economic participation, and access to services. International data collected by the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) identify that in economically developing countries, deaf individuals are at particularly high risk of marginalization, which applies to countries in the Pacific region. This report provides a snapshot of the status of deaf people as sign language users in six Pacific nations: Fiji, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor Leste and Kiribati. Information was contributed by sign language interpreters from these countries during a panel convened at the first Oceania regional conference of the World Association of Sign Language Interpreters, in Fiji, 2018. The report outlines conditions for education through sign language and the emergence of sign language interpreting as a means of increasing access and social equity for deaf people in these countries, albeit this remains largely on a voluntary basis. While Fiji and PNG governments have recognized the status of sign languages in their respective countries and allocated some resources to the inclusion of sign language users, practical support of deaf sign language users tends to be progressed on grounds of disability rights rather than language rights; e.g., several Pacific countries have ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights for People with Disabilities, which includes provisions for sign language users, and deaf advocacy efforts have gained political traction from alliance with disability organizations.

The form and function of female aggression have been for many years an important social issue that demands investigation. Many studies of female aggression have focused on the perpetration and victimization of girls and young women from western countries. As a result, existing theoretical models and empirical foundations of girls' aggression are based on these defining constructs. The purpose of this article is twofold. The present study of adolescent females in the Cook Islands seeks to understand the role that perpetrators play in the type and the target of aggressive behaviour. It also examines the qualitative findings of girls' aggressive behaviour by boys, girls and their teachers and its gendered relationship inside the Cook Islands environment. The outcomes inspect the cultural context of girls in the Cook Islands that make their understanding and experiences of physical aggression and relational aggression unique and highlight the difficulties of young women positioned themselves between Cook Islands traditional values and asserting their contemporary Cook Islands' identity. The discussion highlights that aggression by girls in the Cook Islands is derived from a particular past and present that can in turn shape understandings of addressing aggression in the future.

In this article, I argue that art can enable a critique of museological conventions, along with related ideas of natural history and extinction, which together have structured practices of preserving and representing departed species as scientific specimens. I draw on the case of the huia specifically, a bird species endemic to New Zealand, which became extinct in the early twentieth century, as a result of multiple ecological, cultural, political and economic forces stemming from colonization. I suggest the preservation of individual huia birds in the form of scientific specimens demonstrates how Victorian aesthetics and ideas about the natural world shaped the modality through which non-human life was, and to some extent still is, recorded and portrayed according to particular archival norms. Utilizing concepts from recent scholarship in the field of extinction studies, I critically consider how the works of two artists which feature the huia, challenge the traditions of the museum and the archive. First, I examine how Fiona Pardington's photography of huia specimens frames the species as a life form that became extinct in a context scarred by the complex and violent entanglement of people and nature. Second, I show how a work of sound art by Sally Ann McIntyre, which is centred on the inaudible recordings of huia specimens played on Kapiti Island, the bird's original habitat, highlights that extinction results in the loss of multispecies relationality.