Ebook: Pacific Futures: Projects, Politics and Interests

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the people of the Pacific in the past of cultural reproduction, where everything is what it has always been, or worse—outdated, outmoded and destined for modernization.

Pacific Futures asks 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 Rollason is 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.