Center for Pacific Islands Studies events this week

The below is excerpted from an email circulated by the Center for Pacific Islands Studies:

Aloha kākou, 

Please join us for these events:

Three events Tuesday, 2/11

 

1:30-2:45 Talk story with Dr. Edvard Hviding, University of Bergen, (see bio below) in Hale Pasifika (Henke Hall 308)

​3:00-4:15pm ​

“The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation: From Territorial Subject to American Citizen.” 

​by ​

Dr. Judith Schachter

​ ​

in George Hall 301

Judith Schacter is Professor of Anthropology and History, Department of History, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has been doing fieldwork in Hawai`i for over two decades, and the material has been published in chapters and essays as well as in her recent book, The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation: From Territorial Subject to American Citizen (Berghahn 2013). Recent publications include: “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Identities: Perspectives from Hawai`i” in Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture (May 2012); “One Hundred Percent Hawaiian: Life Stories, Politics, and Anthropology” in Anthropology and Humanism, June 2010; “’A Relationship Endeared to the People’: Adoption in Hawaiian Custom and Law” in Pacific Studies, Special Issue, Sept./Dec. 2008. Her next project will be an inquiry into the Americanization of Hawai`i in the 1950s.

​4:30pm ​

“The Elusive Concept of “Capacity Building” in International Development”

​by ​

Dr. Paige West

​ ​

in BusAd G103 

Dr. West's talk concerns the idea of “capacity” in Papua New Guinea. Dr. West argues that discussion of “capacity”, “capacity building”, or people “lacking capacity” plays a key role in contemporary accumulation by dispossession. She connects these discourses to images of primitivism and argues that the enduring image of the primitive does more than irritate anthropologists. Its material effects are the dispossession of Papua New Guineans from land, labor, natural resources, money, and rights.

​Friday ​

2/14 

10am-2pm “Roots Resilience Romance” UHM Sustainability Courtyard

“Roots Resilience Romance” with 1 Billion Rising campaign to stand for Women and Climate Justice. Join us to learn more, share your message on a poster, learn to cultivate native plants with your special someone, and join CPIS student Maria Barcinas for weaving demonstrations and discussion. 

​Edvard Hviding

Professor Edvard Hviding carries out long-term research on the Melanesian South Pacific and is the founding director of the Bergen Pacific Studies Research Group. Hviding presently (2012-15) is the scientific coordinator of the European Consortium for Pacific Studies (ECOPAS), and during 2008-12 he was director of the international collaborative research programme Pacific Alternatives: Cultural Heritage and Political Innovation in Oceania. Since 1986, Hviding has been engaged in long-term anthropological research in Solomon Islands, where he has carried out more than three years of fieldwork mainly in the Marovo Lagoon area of Western Province, from bases in the villages of Chea (on Marovo Island) and Tamaneke (in northern Marovo). He has also visited many other parts of Western Province and Solomon Islands more widely in connection with his work during the 1990s for ICLARM (now the World Fish Centre), and has carried out consultancy work on traditional marine resource management in a number of other Pacific Islands nations. Hviding’s enduring research interests cover a range of interrelated topics such as fishing, agroforestry and the customary tenure of sea and land; kinship and social organization; cultural history and languages of New Georgia; indigenous environmental knowledge and epistemology; leadership and customary law; and the local manifestations and consequences of globalization (including the development initiatives of the Christian Fellowship Church). He has published widely on these aspects of his research, in the form of many articles and book chapters and two monographs, Guardians of Marovo Lagoon (1996) and Islands of Rainforest (2000, with Tim Bayliss-Smith).

Hviding also carries out activities that connect his anthropological and linguistic work with rural educational needs in Marovo Lagoon, as shown by the three multilingual books he has published in Marovo and other New Georgian languages (as well as English) and distributed to schools and villages around Marovo and northern New Georgia and at Gizo. Currently this aspect of his work takes place in the context of UNESCO and Solomon Islands Government projects on vernacular education, and has involved the distribution of his book Environmental Encyclopedia of Marovo Lagoon (2005) as a locally informed teaching tool to many schools affected by the 2007 earthquake and tsunami. With professional film producers and in cooperation with the Solomon Islands National Museum, Hviding has co-directed and co-produced several anthropological documentary films based on his research in Marovo, including Chea’s Great Kuarao, which has been widely screened in Solomon Islands.

Hviding leads the Bergen Pacific Studies Research Group based at his university, and coordinates the international research programme Pacific Alternatives: Cultural Heritage and Political Innovation in Oceania with institutional partners in the Pacific (including the national museums of Solomon Islands and Vanuatu), Australia, the United States and Europe. This programme explores the possibilities for building a network of rural fieldworkers in several provinces of the Solomons, including prospects for reviving the cultural sector of the Western Province government. With Dr. Graham Baines, Hviding developed the “Bergen Initiative” after the earthquake and tsunami that hit the Western Solomons in 2007, in an attempt to connect the accumulated, mainly overseas scholarship on the Western Solomons to urgent and more long-term practical needs in that part of Solomon Islands. The establishment of the Western Solomons Research Database, in dialogue with Western Province leaders, is a major outcome of this initiative.