Pacific Futures Projects, Politics and Interests [Hardcover]

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 worseoutdated, outmoded and destined for modernization.

Pacific Futuresasks 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.

Will Rollasonis Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University, UK, having received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Manchester in 2008. He has published on mimesis, race, and the postcolony in Papua New Guinea in the context of sports, marine resource harvesting and clothing. His monograph,We are Playing Football,was published by Cambridge Scholars Press.

Overall, the essays are well-written, structured, referenced, detailed and reveal instances of Pacific life not well known or previously published, and this makesPacific Futuresa useful addition to any library of fieldwork reports theoretical pieces and general anthropology works.? Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies

The plural futures of the books title highlights the value of ethnographic research into the diversity of projects of Oceanic peoples, but also the indeterminacy and weakness of future as a singular or abstract analytical concept. But in their deliberate break from the slippagelCf