The debate about braed praes 1 as either gift or commodity has a long and complex genealogy in foreign writings on Oceania, engaging anthropologists, Christian missionaries, policy-makers, and feminists. Debates between ni-Vanuatu have been equally protracted, passionate, and complicated, creating an echo chamber of resounding conversations. Such debates and political contests about bride price address deep questions about the value of a woman -as a person, a worker, sexual partner, and mother -and engage profound philosophical questions about the local traction of imported distinctions between subjects and objects, persons and things, and how indigenous categories have been transformed by the longue durée of Christian conversions and simultaneous processes of commoditisation, complicit and conflictual. How have these transformed the 'value' of woman as bride and the character and significance of braed praes? Can the entrenched binaries in such debates be eclipsed by seeing braed praes as both gift and commodity?
Tradition always encodes a relation between past and present, but that relation may be constituted as continuous or discontinuous (see Handler and Linnekin 1984). Pasts are related to presents in different ways -at one extreme the past may be seen to flow effortlessly and continuously towards the present, at the other the past may be seen to be irrevocably separated from the present through a rupture, a break, which must be bridged through revival. Such differences in the construction of past-present relations are nowhere more apparent than in how the past is evoked in the politics of tradition in contemporary Pacific nations.! Here I compare these processes in two independent states -Vanuatu and Fiji.The terms kastom (custom or tradition in Bislama) and vakavallua 'the way of the land' in Fijian seem to be local variants of a pan-Pacific concept of tradition. 2 What I suggest here is that these t~rms mark quite different articulations of past and present. Kastom is predicated on a sense of rupture and revival, vakavanua on a sense of continuity between past and present. Kastom tends more thoroughly to expunge European elements and is associated not just with a moral criticism of European ways but with more trenchant opposition towards foreigners in general and whites in particular. Vakavallua incorporates European elements -Wesleyan Methodism and British codifications of chiefly hierarchies and land tenure -that are now seen as part of the way of the land This is in contrast to 'the way of money' , associated not only with foreigners, Europeans and Fiji-Indians, but also indigenous practitioners of the' way of money'. In Vanuatu, Christianity and colonialism are seen much more as a rupture with a heathen past, in Fiji (at least from the viewpoint of the eastern confederacies) as flowing continuously from ancestral practices (Toren 1988).
This paper considers the relation of indigenous and foreign in how "the Pacific" and the "Pacific Rim" have been and are imagined. First, I ponder the power of cartography through the lens of two maps derived from the eighteenth century and speculate as to how such maps differed from indigenous genealogies of places and peoples. Second, I explore the origins and the lasting significance of the partitioning of the Pacific into the spatiotemporal regions of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, and consider some indigenous uses of these foreign constructs. Third, I reflect on how academic and policy representations of the Pacific "region" and "rim" have been shaped by geopolitical concerns and developmentalism starting in the 1970s, from the viewpoint of Australia (and in a more fleeting way, the United States). Fourth, through a brief exegesis of the influential writings of Epeli Hau'ofa, I consider his alternative vision of Oceania as a "sea of islands." Finally, I confront the specter of new ethnological typifications derived from a reading of "roots" and "routes" as dichotomy rather than dialectic, and stress the need for refocusing on the relations and creative exchanges between Islanders living in and between region and rim.
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