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This book studies Indian diaspora, currenlty 20 million across the
world, from various perspectives. It looks at the 'transnational'
nature of the middle class worker. Other aspects include: post 9/11
challenges; ethnicity in USA; cultural identity versus national
identity; gender issues amongst the diaspora communities. It argues
that Indian middl
This book studies Indian diaspora, currenlty 20 million across the
world, from various perspectives. It looks at the 'transnational'
nature of the middle class worker. Other aspects include: post 9/11
challenges; ethnicity in USA; cultural identity versus national
identity; gender issues amongst the diaspora communities. It argues
that Indian middle classes have the unique advantages of skills,
mobility, cultural rootedness and ethics of hard-work.
Women are significantly underrepresented in politics in the Pacific
Islands, given that only one in twenty Pacific parliamentarians are
female, compared to one in five globally. A common, but
controversial, method of increasing the number of women in politics
is the use of gender quotas, or measures designed to ensure a
minimum level of women's representation. In those cases where
quotas have been effective, they have managed to change the face of
power in previously male-dominated political spheres. How do
political actors in the Pacific islands region make sense of the
success (or failure) of parliamentary gender quota campaigns? To
answer the question, Kerryn Baker explores the workings of four
campaigns in the region. In Samoa, the campaign culminated in a
"safety net" quota to guarantee a minimum level of representation,
set at five female members of Parliament. In Papua New Guinea,
between 2007 and 2012 there were successive campaigns for nominated
and reserved seats in parliament, without success, although the
constitution was amended in 2011 to allow for the possibility of
reserved seats for women. In post-conflict Bougainville, women
campaigned for reserved seats during the constitution-making
process and eventually won three reserved seats in the House of
Representatives, as well as one reserved ministerial position.
Finally, in the French Pacific territories of New Caledonia, French
Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna, Baker finds that there were
campaigns both for and against the implementation of the so-called
"parity laws." Baker argues that the meanings of success in quota
campaigns, and related notions of gender and representation, are
interpreted by actors through drawing on different traditions, and
renegotiating and redefining them according to their goals,
pressures, and dilemmas. Broadening the definition of success thus
is a key to an understanding of realities of quota campaigns.
Pacific Women in Politics is a pathbreaking work that offers an
original contribution to gender relations within the Pacific and to
contemporary Pacific politics.
Women are significantly underrepresented in politics in the Pacific
Islands, given that only one in twenty Pacific parliamentarians are
female, compared to one in five globally. A common, but
controversial, method of increasing the number of women in politics
is the use of gender quotas, or measures designed to ensure a
minimum level of women's representation. In those cases where
quotas have been effective, they have managed to change the face of
power in previously male-dominated political spheres. How do
political actors in the Pacific islands region make sense of the
success (or failure) of parliamentary gender quota campaigns? To
answer the question, Kerryn Baker explores the workings of four
campaigns in the region. In Samoa, the campaign culminated in a
""safety net"" quota to guarantee a minimum level of
representation, set at five female members of Parliament. In Papua
New Guinea, between 2007 and 2012 there were successive campaigns
for nominated and reserved seats in parliament, without success,
although the constitution was amended in 2011 to allow for the
possibility of reserved seats for women. In post-conflict
Bougainville, women campaigned for reserved seats during the
constitution-making process and eventually won three reserved seats
in the House of Representatives, as well as one reserved
ministerial position. Finally, in the French Pacific territories of
New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna, Baker finds
that there were campaigns both for and against the implementation
of the so-called ""parity laws."" Baker argues that the meanings of
success in quota campaigns, and related notions of gender and
representation, are interpreted by actors through drawing on
different traditions, and renegotiating and redefining them
according to their goals, pressures, and dilemmas. Broadening the
definition of success thus is a key to an understanding of
realities of quota campaigns. Pacific Women in Politics is a
pathbreaking work that offers an original contribution to gender
relations within the Pacific and to contemporary Pacific politics.
Across Melanesia, the ways in which people connect to land are
being transformed by processes of modernization—globalization,
the building of states and nations, practices and imaginaries of
development, the legacies of colonialism, and the complexities of
postcolonial encounters. Melanesian peoples are becoming
landowners, Stead argues, both in the sense that these processes of
change compel forms of property relations, and in the sense that
"landowner" and "custom landowner" become identities to be wielded
against the encroachment of both state and capital. In places where
customary forms of land tenure have long been dominant, deeply
intertwined with senses of self and relationships with others, land
now becomes a crucible upon which social relations, power, and
culture are reconfigured and reimagined. Employing a multi-sited
ethnographic approach, Becoming Landowners explores these
transformations to land and life as they unfold across two
Melanesian countries. The chapters move between coasts and inland
mountain ranges, between urban centers and rural villages, telling
the stories of people and places who are always situated and
particular but who also share powerful commonalities of experience.
These include a subsistence-based community shaped by the legacies
of colonialism and occupation in remote Timor-Leste, villagers in
Papua New Guinea resisting a mining operation and the government
agents supporting it, an urban East Timorese settlement resisting
eviction by the nation-state its residents hoped would represent
them in the post-independence era, and people and groups in both
countries who are struggling for, with, and sometimes against the
formal codification of their claims to land and place. In each of
these instances, customary and modern forms of connection to land
are propelled into complex and dynamic configurations, theorized
here in an innovative way as entanglements of custom and modernity.
Moving between multiple sites, scales, and forms of collectivity,
Becoming Landowners reveals entanglements as spaces of deep
ambivalence. Here, structures of power are destabilized in ways
that can lend themselves to the diminishing of local autonomy in
the face of the state and capital. At the same time, the
destabilization of power also creates new possibilities for the
reassertion of that autonomy, and of the customary forms of
connection to land in which it is grounded.
This book is the first concise account of the history of the Fiji
islands from the beginning of human settlement to the early years
of the 21st century. Its primary focus is on the period since the
advent of colonial rule in the late 19th century to the present,
benefiting from the author's internationally acknowledged expertise
as a scholar and writer on the Fijian past. Besides factual
information, the book also offers a scholarly assessment of the
people and events which have shaped Fiji's history. The Historical
Dictionary of Fiji contains a chronology, an introduction,
appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section
has over 300 cross-referenced entries on important personalities,
politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This
book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone
wanting to know more about Fiji.
The New Port Moresby: Gender, Space, and Belonging in Urban Papua
New Guinea explores the ways in which educated, professional women
experience living in Port Moresby, the burgeoning capital of Papua
New Guinea. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship, the
book adds to an emerging literature on cities in the ""Global
South"" as sites of oppression, but also resistance, aspiration,
and activism. Taking an intersectional feminist approach, the book
draws on a decade of research conducted among the educated
professional women of Port Moresby, offering unique insight into
class transitions and the perspectives of this small but
significant cohort. The New Port Moresby expands the scope of
research and writing about gendered experiences in Port Moresby,
moving beyond the idea that the city is an exclusively hostile
place for women. Without discounting the problems of uneven
development, the author argues that the city's new places offer
women a degree of freedom and autonomy in a city predominantly
characterized by fear and restriction. In doing so, it offers an
ethnographically rich perspective on the interaction between the
""global"" and the ""local"" and what this might mean for feminism
and the advancement of equity in the Pacific and beyond. The New
Port Moresby will find an audience among anthropologists,
particularly those interested in the urban Pacific, feminist
geographers committed to expanding research to include cities in
the Global South and development theorists interested in
understanding the roles played by educated elites in less
economically developed contexts. There have been few ethnographic
monographs about Port Moresby and those that do exist have tended
to marginalize or ignore gender. Yet as feminist geographers make
clear, women and men are positioned differently in the world and
their relationship to the places in which they live is also
different. The book has no predecessors and stands alone in the
Pacific as an account of this kind. As such, The New Port Moresby
should be read by scholars and students of diverse disciplines
interested in urbanization, gender, and the Pacific.
Indians first arrived in Fiji as indentured laborers in 1879. Since
the Rabuka coup d'etat in 1987, and three subsequent Fiji coups,
Indian-Fijians have been emigrating from the country in earnest.
""Stopover"" is a haunting suite of photographs by New Zealand
artist Bruce Connew from the tiny Indian-Fijian sugar cane
settlement of Vatiyaka, taken during seven visits between June 2000
and November 2003, placing an extended family inside the story of
migration. Connew's narrative captions and a story by Brij V. Lal
take the reader to the heart of an embattled life.
Texts and Contexts is concerned with the development of Pacific
Islands history as a specialization in its own right. Specifically,
this volume examines the foundational texts that pioneered and
consolidated the new subdiscipline and served as the building
blocks and stepping-stone for further developments in the field.
Thirty-five texts, all of which represent defining points in the
development of Pacific Islands historiography, are examined. Much
more than retrospective appraisals of the foundational texts, the
individual chapters consider a text or complimentary texts within
the context of the time of writing and gauge what ongoing influence
they exerted. In some cases they suggest how a particular text has
been superseded by subsequent work that breaks new conceptual
ground in the ongoing process of revisionism.
Places matter. We are shaped by them, and in turn we shape them
physically and imaginatively. They connect us to time and locality,
perhaps even to life and death itself. This is a book about places
and how our engagement with them-complex, changing, and
varied-forms and transforms our understanding of them, of
ourselves, of the human condition itself. Pacific Places, Pacific
History brings together leading Pacific Islands studies scholars
and invites them to talk about the places they have inhabited and
to contemplate the meaning of that experience. The result is a
veritable collage of reflections, distinct and different from each
other but moving in their collective impact. Our engagement with
places becomes daily more complicated with the transnational
movement of peoples, ideas, technologies, and cultures. Global
capitalism relentlessly alters established ethnographic assumptions
about the meaning and importance of where we are and have been. The
essays presented here are about letting go, learning and
un-learning, transgressing physical, emotional, and intellectual
boundaries. They are about personal quests, narrated in distinctive
voices, raising particular concerns. Together they contribute
significantly to our understanding of how small islands in a vast
ocean enable us to see ourselves and the world around us.
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