On the basis of a Solomon Islands case study, we report that tropical rainforests hitherto perceived as untouched, pristine, virgin, etc., are actually sites of former settlement, extensive forest clearance, and irrigated/swidden agriculture. An unusually wide range of sources--rainforest ecology, forest classification and mapping, ethnobotany, land-use history, oral traditions, ethnographic and archaeological observations--supports our conclusions. These observations have bearings for contemporary perspectives on scenarios for rainforest regeneration after logging. They also force a revision of certain assumptions concerning Melanesian prehistory and historical demography, and indicate that interdisciplinary links between botany, archaeology and social anthropology are needed to achieve a better appreciation of rainforest dynamics.
This paper examines what the author terms “compressed globalisation” in the South Pacific region, with a focus on the Solomon Islands. Building on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork in the biodiversity “hot‐spot” of Marovo Lagoon, the author addresses the complexity of a variety of local–global encounters during the 1990s, involving indigenous resource‐owning villagers, transnational logging and mining companies, and foreign conservationist initiatives by non‐governmental organisations (NGOs). Emphasis is given to the contested status of rainforests around the Marovo Lagoon. While Asian logging companies desire quick exploitation of large timber reserves, Western NGOs (and similar governmental agencies) desire the conservation of the forests in the name of global biodiversity. The villagers who own the forests through state‐backed customary law follow unpredictable paths between the diverging types of foreign (and global) desire, emphasising their own autonomy over conditions for contemporary village life. These postcolonial encounters are characterised by mutual uncertainty and unawareness about the moral and political agendas of the “other party”. However, lack of shared understanding far from inhibits actual collaboration, whether it be short‐term logging deals or NGO‐initiated “community‐based conservation projects”. In these projects, defined through indigenous concepts, diverging desires appear to converge, however unsteadily.
This study examines traditional fisheries‐related resource management through a case in which local communities, from a basis of customary, ‘common property’ control over the sea and its resources, handle a multitude of development issues. Presenting first some important issues relating to people's role in fisheries management and to the ‘common property’ debate, the article then describes a traditional system for management of land and sea resources in a Pacific Islands society; that of Marovo Lagoon, Solomon Islands. Emphasis is given to fisheries resources, with a view to explaining in practical terms how a system of customary marine tenure operates under the wider social, political, economic and ecological circumstances of change arising from development pressures. Against this background, assessments are made of the viability of this traditional fisheries management system under present conditions of state control and of both external and internal pressures for large‐scale resource development enterprises.
The Marovo Lagoon of the Solomon Islands in the south‐west Pacific covers some 700 square kilometres and is fringed by a unique double chain of raised barrier reefs and by the high volcanic islands of the New Georgia group. Since the 1980s foreign companies have been exploiting the resources of the reefs and rainforests of Marovo, while the lagoon and its surrounding lands have simultaneously attained international status as a hotspot for biodiversity. Over the past decades the tribal groups of Marovo who own the lagoon and the land through customary law have engaged with the fishing and logging companies and international conservation agencies in a multitude of ways, generally aiming to retain the privileges of control over resources embodied in ancient but highly adaptable systems of land and marine tenure. Chiefs and other leaders in Marovo have also initiated and supported academic research in the area by social and natural scientists, with the aim of documenting resource use, management institutions and traditional environmental knowledge. In this article the author discusses recent interactions in the Marovo Lagoon between local development agendas and introduced agendas of biodiversity management, and argues for increased dialogue between local and scientific ways of knowing and classifying biodiversity. The arguments emerge that in this field of encounter between local and non‐local knowledge, there is at least as much potential for convergence as for conflict.
In this paper, I critically examine a number of notions about
interdisciplinary research approaches to the challenges posed by the world
today. I juxtapose this critique with a discussion of interdisciplinary
developments in Pacific studies, raising questions as to how deeper
dialogues between academic disciplines and the worldviews of Pacific
Islanders may be reached. While interdisciplinarity is widely seen as
a politically correct agenda for contemporary research on processes of
globalization and development, caution is needed against prevailing
optimism about the potential for solving multidisciplinary problems
through interdisciplinary innovation. Such optimism may overrate
the potentials of broad (as opposed to deep) research approaches
and may reflect disregard, if not arrogance, toward the complexity
of the matters addressed. The drive in some European countries for
research on "sustainable development" indicates close ties between
interdisciplinary aspirations and the bureaucratic ambitions of
research administrators. Under such circumstances interdisciplinarity
becomes an object of institutional conflict and internal debate
between institutions, as well as between bureaucrats and scientists,
more than a question of creative epistemological contact between
plural knowledges in and beyond academic disciplines in a search for
increased knowledge more generally. The avoidance of such pitfalls in
the further development of Pacific studies requires close attention to
and appreciation of initiatives from within Oceania, coming from beyond
the domains of conventional disciplines. In this paper, such paths toward
interdisciplinarity are exemplified in a discussion of epistemological
encounters between Oceanic and western knowledges, and with reference
to the emerging currents of "Native Pacific Cultural Studies."
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