The Pacific

要旨

In thinking of seas and oceans, Fernand Braudel famously illuminated his Mediterranean by imagining multiple civilizations joined by trade and cultural exchange; his Annales approach of a longue durée built upon archaeological and ecological evidence shaped a brilliant chronicle of kingdoms and powers. Yet as he noted of his subject itself, the Mediterranean was not even a single sea, but rather “a complex of seas, and the seas are broken up by islands, a tempest of peninsulas ringed by insistent coastlines.”1 To establish the project, he knew, “the question of boundaries is the first to be encountered.” Defining the “Pacific” is an equally daunting challenge. As Robert Borofsky has posited, “We need to remember that the field's self-defined area of study—the ‘Pacific’—is a constructed artifact of the discipline. Why, for example, should Pacific historians study large Pacific islands such as New Zealand and New Guinea but ignore the Philippines and Indonesia?” He also ponders the inclusion or exclusion of Australia in multiple accounts and points out the constructedness of Pacific designations: “For those living in Hawaiʕi, the ‘Pacific’ refers to the islands lying within ‘Melanesia,’ ’Polynesia,’ and ‘Micronesia’ (constructed categories themselves). For others on the West Coast of the United States, the ‘Pacific’ usually includes the Pacific rim—China, Japan, and Korea.”2 Such multiplicities evoke the question, What, where, and when is “Pacific history”? How can a subject be constituted? The what of the “Pacific” can first be reckoned through its cultural imaginary, for which there are multiple claims made upon its unique attributions: tales of “cargo cults,” atoll-centered nuclear testing, hula, kava, taro; the Samoan tatau, the voyages of Cook and Bougainville, cannibals and natives, blue lagoons; trading and exchange networks: kula, sandalwood, copra, tea, bêche-de-mer, Toyotas; Japanese capital, California, Tahiti; the Maori haka; the Treaty of Waitangi; whaling and blackbirding; coral reefs. It is a multilocal space marked by nominatives of conflict: Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, the Pali, Fatuaua, the mutiny on the Bounty, 1878 in New Caledonia, 1893 in Honolulu, nuclear testing in the Marshalls and Moruroa, Fiji coups, struggles in the Solomon Islands.3 The where of these moments and lives in the Pacific is the enormous water world covering one-third of the Earth's surface, framed by continents, joined by islands. It is a geography distinguished by a famous fluid distinction between north and south. The south is the realm of Herman Melville's Typee, Paul Gauguin's paintings, Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific; of writers Albert Wendt and Patricia Grace and stories of cultural collision, nationalist revolution, and coups. The north is the theater of East Asia, of labor migrations and capital flows to and from Japan and China and Hawaiʕi and the Philippines.4 To even begin to suggest history drawn from such a complex set of boundaries, nested temporalities, and geographies requires focus. The approach here is to underscore small islands, large seas, and multiple transits—not to concentrate on the continental and economic “Rim” powers of East and Southeast Asia and the Americas to define the Pacific, but to propose an oceanic history much more located in thinking outward from Islanders and local cultures. Such a “Pacific” has specific markers: it is heavily invested in anthropological methodologies and histories tightly linked to issues of political sovereignty and cultural preservation. Such histories explore “native knowledge,” and confront Euro-American narratives of discovery, adventure, and romance, while grappling with real implications of trade, migration, and empire. Much of the work is about constitutions of historical knowledge that are not academic (although they are increasingly becoming so) and about the highlighting of interdisciplinary categories—archaeological reconstructions, oral tales and dance, studies o

主題