Pacific Futures : : Projects, Politics and Interests / / ed. by Will Rollason.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• MitwirkendeR: Eriksen, Annelin,; Handman, Courtney,; Hereniko, Vilsoni,; Josephides, Lisette,; Lind, Craig,; Pascht, Arno,; Pickles, Anthony,; Robinson, Dave,; Rollason, Will,; Schieder, Dominik,
• HerausgeberIn: Rollason, Will,
• Place / Publishing House: New York; , Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists ; 2
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (256 p.)

The Pacific region presents a huge diversity of cultural forms, which have fuelled some of the most challenging ethnographic work undertaken in the discipline. But this challenge has come at a cost. Culture, often reconfigured as ‘custom’, has often served to trap the people of the Pacific in the past of cultural reproduction, where everything is what it has always been, or worse—outdated, outmoded and destined for modernization. Pacific Futures asks how our understanding of social life in the Pacific would be different if we approached it from the perspective of the futures which Pacific people dream of, predict or struggle to achieve, not the reproduction of cultural tradition. From Christianity to gambling, marriage to cargo cult, military coups to reflections on childhood fishing trips, the contributors to this volume show how Pacific people are actively shaping their lives with the future in mind.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures and Tables -- Introduction: Pacific Futures, Methodological Challenges -- 1 Imagining the Future: An Existential and Practical Activity -- 2 The Hanging of Buliga: A History of the Future in the Louisiade Archipelago, Papua New Guinea -- 3 Why the Future is Selfish and Could Kill: Contraception and the Future of Paama -- 4 Gambling Futures: Playing the Imminent in Highland Papua New Guinea -- 5 The Future of Christian Critique: Lost Tribes Discourses in Papua New Guinean Publics -- 6 A Cursed Past and a Prosperous Future in Vanuatu: A Comparison of Different Conceptions of Self and Healing -- 7 Chiefs for the Future? Roles of Traditional Titleholders in the Cook Islands -- 8 A Coup-less Future for Fiji? Between Rhetoric and Political Reality -- 9 The Devouring of the Placenta: The Criss-crossing and Confluence of Cosmological, Geomorphological, Ecological and Economic Cycles of Destruction and Repair in Ruatoria, Aotearoa/New Zealand -- 10 The Human Face of Climate Change: Notes from Rotuma and Tuvalu -- Notes on Contributors -- Index