Islands on the Horizon

Author(s):  
Johannes Riquet

Chapter 2 explores the mediation of perception across the border of the tropical island. It initially discusses how the accounts of European explorers in the Pacific turned islands into discrete, highly aestheticized images. It then traces the multimedial paths along which these island-images travelled from the Pacific journals into the American cultural imaginary, manifested by Hollywood’s island films in the 1920s and 1930s, which transform the (proto-cinematic) visual strategies of the journals. While the chapter discusses the ideological needs Western island-images have been made to serve, it is especially interested in how these texts and films resist the freezing of the island into a bounded image and ask readers and viewers to reflect on their own aesthetic experience of islands. Accordingly, it complicates the cinematic gaze from the water to the island in three films: White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), The Hurricane (1937), and, finally, King Kong (1933).

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry M. Brown

For three months in 1906, John Watt Beattie, the noted Australian photographer – at the invitation of the Anglican Bishop of Melanesia, Cecil Wilson – travelling on the church vessel the Southern Cross, photographed people and sites associated with the Melanesian Mission on Norfolk Island and present-day Vanuatu and Solomon Islands. Beattie reproduced many of the 1500-plus photographs from that trip, which he sold in various formats from his photographic studio in Hobart, Tasmania. The photographs constitute a priceless collection of Pacific images that began to be used very quickly in a variety of publications, with or without attribution. I shall examine some of these photographs in the context of the ethos of the Melanesian Mission, British colonialism in the Solomon Islands, and Beattie’s previous photographic experience. I shall argue that Beattie first exhibited a colonial gaze of objectifying his dehumanized exotic subjects (e.g. as ‘savages’ and ‘cannibals’) but with increased familiarity with them, became empathetic and admiring. In this change of attitude, I argue that he effectively transcended his colonial gaze to produce photographs of great empathy, beauty and longevity. At the same time, he became more critical of the colonial enterprise in the Pacific, whether government, commercial or church.


2012 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 386-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Beck ◽  
George T. Jones

AbstractFiedel and Morrow challenge our argument that Clovis technology originated in the southern Plains or Southeast and from there was carried by populations migrating north. Upon entering the Intermountain West relatively late, they encountered a population utilizing a different technology (Western Stemmed), the latter having arrived independently from the Pacific coast. Fiedel and Morrow offer arguments in favor of Clovis-first in the Intermountain West and coastal California and against the coastal route, Clovis origins in the south, and technological differences between Clovis and Western Stemmed. We evaluate these arguments and find their supporting evidence, when provided, meager and unconvincing.


2021 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Joanna Siekiera ◽  

Cooperation in the South Pacific region is unique due to the characteristics of its participants. Following the period of decolonization (1962-1980), countries in Oceania have radically changed. Achieving independence gave those nations international legal personality, yet complete independence from their former colonial powers. The following consequence was gaining an opportunity to draft, adopt and execute own laws in national and foreign policy. PICT (Pacific island countries and territories) have been expanding connections, political and trade ones, within the region since the 1960s when permanent migration of islanders and intra-regional transactions began. Migrations along with foreign aid are considered as the distinctive characteristics of the Pacific Ocean basin. Since the 1980s, the regional integration in Oceania, through establishing regional groupings and increasing the regional trade agreements number, took on pace and scope. The MIRAB synthetic measure (migration, remittances, aid, bureaucracy) has been used in analyzing the Oceania developing microeconomies. Last but not least, migration and foreign aid have been retaining the region from a deeper and more effective stage of regionalism.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kayvan Etebari ◽  
James Hereward ◽  
Apenisa Sailo ◽  
Emeline M Ahoafi ◽  
Robert Tautua ◽  
...  

Incursions of the Coconut rhinoceros beetle (CRB), Oryctes rhinoceros, have been detected in several countries of the south-west Pacific in recent years, resulting in an expansion of the pest's geographic range. It has been suggested that this resurgence is related to an O. rhinoceros mitochondrial lineage (previously referred to as the CRB-G biotype) that is reported to show reduced susceptibility to the well-established classical biocontrol agent, Oryctes rhinoceros nudivirus (OrNV). We investigated O. rhinoceros population genetics and the OrNV status of adult specimens collected in the Philippines and seven different South Pacific island countries (Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu). Based on the presence of single nucleotide polymorphisms (snps) in the mitochondrial Cytochrome C Oxidase subunit I (CoxI) gene, we found three major mitochondrial lineages (CRB-G, a PNG lineage (CRB-PNG) and the South Pacific lineage (CRB-S)) across the region. Haplotype diversity varied considerably between and within countries. The O. rhinoceros population in most countries was monotypic and all individuals tested belonged to a single mitochondrial lineage (Fiji, CRB-S; Tonga, CRB-S; Vanuatu, CRB-PNG; PNG (Kimbe), CRB-PNG; New Caledonia CRB-G; Philippines, CRB-G). However, in Samoa we detected CRB-S and CRB-PNG and in Solomon Islands we detected all three haplotype groups. Genotyping-by-Sequencing (GBS) methods were used to genotype 10,000 snps from 230 insects across the Pacific and showed genetic differentiation in the O. rhinoceros nuclear genome among different geographical populations. The GBS data also provided evidence for gene flow and admixture between different haplotypes in Solomon Islands. Therefore, contrary to earlier reports, CRB-G is not solely responsible for damage to the coconut palms reported since the pest was first recorded in Solomon Islands in 2015. We also PCR-screened a fragment of OrNV from 260 insects and detected an extremely high prevalence of viral infection in all three haplotypes in the region. We conclude that the haplotype groups CRB-G, CRB-S, and PNG, do not represent biotypes, subspecies, or cryptic species, but simply represent different invasions of O. rhinoceros across the Pacific. This has important implications for management, especially biological control, of Coconut rhinoceros beetle in the region.


1971 ◽  
Vol 10 (59) ◽  
pp. 255-267
Author(s):  
Stefan L. Hastenrath

AbstractField observations during a journey through the arid regions of the South American Andes in June-July 1969 are evaluated in conjunction with available air photographs and reports from adjacent regions of the High Andes. Results indicate an increase of the Pleistocene snow-line depression in the western Cordillera from about 700 m at lat. 12° S. to more than 1 500 m at lat. 30° S. The Pleistocene snow-line depression decreases from the Pacific to the Atlantic side of the Andes, but particularly strongly so on the poleward fringe of the arid region. From this geomorphic evidence it is suggested that the atmospheric circulation during the glacial period was characterized by an Equatorward displacement of the boundary between tropical easterlies and temperate-latitude westerlies.


2006 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 227-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Stuck ◽  
A. Güntner ◽  
B. Merz

Abstract. The variability of the simulated hydro-climatology of the WaterGAP Global Hydrology Model (WGHM) is analysed. Main object of this study is the ENSO-driven variability of the water storage of South America. The horizontal model resolution amounts to 0.5 degree and it is forced with monthly climate variables for 1961-1995 of the Tyndall Centre Climate Research Unit dataset (CRU TS 2.0) as a representation of the observed climate state. Secondly, the model is also forced by the model output of a global circulation model, the ECHAM4-T42 GCM. This model itself is driven by observed monthly means of the global Sea Surface Temperatures (SST) and the sea ice coverage for the period of 1903 to 1994 (GISST). Thus, the climate model and the hydrological model represent a realistic simulated realisation of the hydro-climatologic state of the last century. Since four simulations of the ECHAM4 model with the same forcing, but with different initial conditions are carried out, an analysis of variance (ANOVA) gives an impression of the impact of the varying SST on the hydro-climatology, because the variance can be separated into a SST-explained and a model internal variability (noise). Also regional multivariate analyses, like Empirical Orthogonal Functions (EOF) and Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) provide information of the complex time-space variability. In particular the Amazon region and the South of Brazil are significantly influenced by the ENSO-variability, but also the Pacific coastal areas of Ecuador and Peru are affected. Additionally, different ENSO-indices, based on SST anomalies (e.g. NINO3.4, NINO1+2), and its influence on the South American hydro-climatology are analysed. Especially, the Pacific coast regions of Ecuador, Peru and Chile show a very different behaviour dependant on those indices.


Author(s):  
Peter Dauvergne

Chapters 2–6 survey the political and socioeconomic forces underlying the global sustainability crisis. Understanding the scale and depth of contemporary forces of capitalism and consumerism requires a close look at the consequences of imperialism and colonialism on patterns of violence and exploitation. This chapter begins this process of understanding by sketching the history of ecological imperialism after 1600, seeing this as a reasonable starting date for the beginning of what many scholars are now calling the Anthropocene Epoch (or the age of humans, replacing the geologic epoch of the Holocene beginning 12,000 years ago). It opens with Captain Pedro Fernandes de Queirós’s voyage across the Pacific Ocean in 1605–06 to “discover” modern-day Vanuatu, before turning to look more globally at the devastation of imperialism – and later colonialism – for the South Pacific, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Over this time conquerors enslaved and murdered large numbers of indigenous people; cataclysmic change came as well, however, from the introduction of European diseases, plants, and animals. This chapter’s survey of imperialism, colonialism, and globalization sets the stage for Chapter 3, which explores the devastating history of the South Pacific island of Nauru after 1798.


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