There are two species of shellfish known as tuatua in New Zealand, Paphies subtriangulata and Paphies donacina. The former is intertidal in habitat while the latter is subtidal. These shellfish are common on open sandy beaches in New Zealand, and large specialised middens are numerous in such areas. There have been only a few excavations of such sites, and little is known about the role of tuatua in pre-European subsistence economies. This paper reviews nutritional and economic aspects of these shellfish and suggests suitable regression models which can be used to estimate the amount of meat from archaeological deposits. Tuatua are shown to be rich in protein and carbohydrates compared with other species of shellfish and the common types of fish caught in pre-European New Zealand.People and Culture in Oceania, 17: 1-26.
Key words: New Zealand; archaeozoology; shellfish; tuatua; Paphies subtriangulata; Paphies donacina; subsistence economics.
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This paper argues for the validity of conceptualising the prehistoric colonisation of East Polynesia as a process involving a collection of social practices situated in a specific cultural context. I argue that voyaging and navigation were bound up in structures of power and ideology within society. The ability to monopolise and store the knowledge, techniques, and methods required for voyaging out of sight of land was a source of power for certain members of society, source made all the more potent because it was located in the mind - in memory and oral tradition - and thus could be controlled by the select few. The ability to draw on this arcane knowledge conferred status, mana, and resources as a result of its exercise. Colonisation was thus a political process involving competition over access to resources and places. These arguments lead to the conclusion that the colonisation of East Polynesia is a making of place, a process by which the oceanic landscape is imbued with meaning and significance. Throughout the process of colonisation social identity was bound to and associated with specific locations at an increasingly local level: it represents a 'settling down,' a domestication. This was achieved through the interplay of various ideological arguments. In the tensions created through the struggles for control over mobility, access, and land, we see these ideologies play out.People and Culture in Oceania, 17: 27-46.
Key words: East Polynesia; colonisation; voyaging; archaeology; ideology; power; landscape.
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The people of Madang, who live in small-scale communities surrounding Madang town, have produced guitar band music since the end of World War II. Today, a couple of villages are known as places where laments for guitars are composed and performed at Christian funeral and burials. To the young people this practice of composing and playing guitar music for mortuary rituals is a way to express loss and to induce crying among the mourners. The songs are composed in the native languages in most cases. In Yabob village laments for stringband are generally called sore singsing, or "songs of sorrow," in which the image of a sailing canoe
--a metaphor for a dead person in the native language--appears frequently. This type of lament is unique in that no lamentation, except for women's crying, is known in Madang before the arrival of Christianity. This new phenomenon is a product of the contemporary cultural landscape where the native languages, with their incorporation of the Tok Pisin word sore, have created a feeling of loss induced by the sound of the guitar. Guitar band music was once regarded as a mere entertainment, but as broken love and separation from the homeland were taken as themes for the songs it has become capable of expressing much deeper feelings. The evaluation of sore singsing varies according to cultural background, from the positive attitudes of Yabob residents to total rejection by outsiders who have little knowledge of Yabob images and general and persist in associating guitar band music with outdoor 'disco' dancing sessions.Laments sung with stringbands, especially for mortuary rituals, are apparently a new vehicle of expression as well as a local invention as a result of the dissemination of guitar band music by means of media such as the radio and cassette tapes and live band performances for dancing. This makes the cultural aspect of the sore singsing, or "sorrow songs" as the local residents sometimes characterize them in Tok Pisin, even more subtle: there are multiple discourses in and on the performative context, for the genre crosses the boundary between Christian piety and earthly entertainment, and between the authentic and the spurious, both of which constitute kastom or tradisen in Papua New Guinea. In this article, I explore the issues surrounding this music-making invention, which has been a vital part of expressive culture in Papua New Guinea, in an attempt to present the way musical expression attracts a particular range of feelings among the people in the contemporary cultural landscape. People and Culture in Oceania, 17: 47-66.
Key words: guitar band music; lament; Madang; Papua New Guinea; oral poetry; social change.
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I will describe two incidents in the village where I conducted my research which can be described as cultural dramas-events which lead us to a reality where the process of change occurs in line with the intentions of the persons concerned, or actors. I think V. Turner's concept of social drama is still very effective to explain and analyze the social process of conflict. Here I develop his concept of social drama into that of cultural drama.
Today, together with political and economical globalization, many cultural conflicts have arisen in the local and the global sphere. We can consider these conflict phenomena as cultural dramas. To understand each phase of cultural drama we have to know that there are various cultural codes, from which actors choose one to extract a more advantageous meaning than their opponents. From the actors' intentions and their choice of actions we can clarify the codes and contexts and meanings of the drama for them. In analyzing the two cases the role of Christian missionaries and the meaning of 'Fijian Christianity' become clear. Although along with the globalization of Christianity there exists a strong story of Civilization in which all the indigenous gods were beaten by the Christian God, an old lay preacher of the village dreamed that one of the ancestral gods protected him. I analyze his mental conflict as a cultural drama in which the world of the Christian God and that of the ancestral gods cannot coexist. They are theologically contradictory. However, his interpretation integrated the contradictory situation and made it possible for the indigenous god to survive under the title of 'converted indigenous god.' This is an example of the Fiji-Christians' strategy through which they enable their ancestral gods to survive in the same world where they live as Christians. People and Culture in Oceania, 17: 67-82.
Key words: Fiji; Christianity; drama; ritual; apology; stranger.
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I will discuss the reorganization of the meeting house system in a contemporary village in Tabiteuea South, Kiribati. The aim of this paper is to clarify how local people in peripheral society respond to the current global situation. Globalization has been accelerating throughout the twentieth century. This trend admits no exception in the modern world, even the small Pacific Island countries. It is likely that peripheral society is forced to lose its 'tradition' in the process. Dissolution of community and increased individualization may be emphasized in so-called Westernization.
In the case of Tabiteuea atoll, from the historical viewpoint, it might be said that 'traditional' community, once organized by the district meeting house system, has collapsed through Christianization and European domination since the nineteenth century. Some observers have said that individualization has emerged along with the historical change in the atoll. It is certain that villagers recall only a few myths and fragments of knowledge concerning the 'traditional' meeting house in Tabiteuea South today. But in my observation, present-day villagers are integrated into the village community that is centred around the meeting house, and are far from individualized. At meetings in an edifice, the unification of villagers is emphasized and the local egalitarian idea within the social group is symbolically realized under the authority of elderly men. People design their social life within the reorganized meeting house system in the island. Far from vanishing, the meeting house system is actively functioning at present.
I would say that reorganization of the local meeting house system is a flexible adjustment of the peripheral society to the modern situation. In reinventing their 'tradition,' local people in a peripheral society such as Tabiteuea have retained their autonomy in the process of globalization. People and Culture in Oceania, 17: 83-113.
Key words: globalization; peripheral society; village autonomy; meeting house system; decision making; Tabiteuea South; Micronesia.
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