US AND THEM: BELIEFS ABOUT HUMAN NATURE HELD BY YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

1982 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. C. Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Secondary Students ◽  
Solomon Island ◽  
Solomon Islands ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The South ◽  
Student Sample ◽  
The University

Beliefs in overall trustworthiness, strength of will and complexity of others were investigated in: (a) 72 secondary students (mean age 17 years) from King George VI School in Solomon Islands, and (b) 120 students (Fijians, Indo-Fijians and other Pacific Islanders) at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji (mean age 23 years 5 months). The 36-item Wrightsman's Children's Philosophies of Human Nature Scale was used. Solomon Island subjects completed the inventory twice (to compare their attitudes to people inside and outside the wantok (pidgin term for immediate village, or group of people perceived as close.) it was shown that people outside the wantok are perceived as less to be trusted (p<0.01), and more complex (pK0.05). In a sex comparison it was shown that males were more likely than females to trust people outside the wantok and found them less complex (p<0.05. In analysis of the results from the University student sample, males were shown (pK0.01) to see people in general as having more strength of will and rationality than females. In an ethnic comparison it was shown (p<0.05) that Indo-Fijians had a higher belief in the trustworthiness of people than Fijians. This confirms previous research. The University students took the inventory under standard conditions. It is suggested that future research would find it fruitful to continue to explore the differences in attitudes, in this part of the world, toward people perceived as either “close” or “distant”.

scholarly journals EDITORIAL: Pacific media advocacy

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-10
Author(s):  
David Robie
Keyword(s):  
Solomon Islands ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
Journalism Education ◽  
The South ◽  
Educational Training ◽  
Media Advocacy ◽  
Regional University ◽  
National University ◽  
The Media ◽  
The University

IN SAMOA during July 2015, a new Pacific journalism education and training advocacy era was born with the establishment of the Media Educators Pacific (MEP) after a talkfest had gone on for years about the need for such a body. A draft constitution had even been floated at a journalism education conference hosted at the University of the South Pacific in 2012. The initiative created unity of sorts between the Technical, Vocational and Educational Training (TVET) media institutes from Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, and the regional University of the South Pacific journalism programme. Founding president Misa Vicky Lepou of the National University of Samoa pledged at the time to produce a vision with a difference:

scholarly journals REVIEW: Making sense of the Solomon Islands upheaval

2005 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-201
Author(s):  
Michael Field
Keyword(s):  
Solomon Island ◽  
Solomon Islands ◽  
The South ◽  
Research Fellow ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Development Institute ◽  
Senior Research Fellow ◽  
Senior Research ◽  
The University

Review of The Manipulation of Custom: From uprising to Intervention in the Solomon Islands, by Jon FraenkelDr Jon Fraenkel, a senior research fellow at the University of the South Pacific's Governance and Development Institute, has produced a solid and readable account of the [Solomon Island] uprising. He has more than an academic, however, and his own journalism, particularly with the London-based Economist was the among the scraps of evidence that were used to build up Canberra's intervention justification. 

Transcending the colonial gaze: Empathy, agency and community in the South Pacific photography of John Watt Beattie1

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry M. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Solomon Islands ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
The South ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Norfolk Island ◽  
The Church

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.

Book Review of Teaching and Learning with Technology: Pushing boundaries and breaking down walls

Open Praxis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 569
Author(s):  
Ramesh Chander Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
The South ◽  
The University ◽  
Learning With Technology

Book review of Teaching and Learning with Technology: Pushing boundaries and breaking down walls, edited by Som Naidu and Sharishna Narayan and published in 2020 by The University of the South Pacific Press.

LITTLE BUILDERS: CORAL INSECTS, MISSIONARY CULTURE, AND THE VICTORIAN CHILD

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Elleray
Keyword(s):  
South Pacific ◽  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Pacific Island ◽  
The South ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Coral Island ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
Child Reader

In his Preface to R. M. Ballantyne's most famous novel, J. M. Barrie writes that “[t]o be born is to be wrecked on an island,” and so the British boy “wonder[s] how other flotsam and jetsam have made the best of it in the same circumstances. He wants a guide: in short, The Coral Island” (v). While for Barrie the island is a convenient shorthand for masculine self-actualization, the question pursued here is the relevance of a coral island, or more specifically the coral that forms the island, to the child reader. Published in 1857 and widely recommended for boys in the latter half of the nineteenth century, The Coral Island presents three boys, shipwrecked in the South Pacific, who in the first half of the novel demonstrate their resourcefulness in forming an idyllic community. Their pre-lapsarian paradise is then disrupted, first by Pacific Island cannibals and then by European pirates, the juxtaposition implicitly presenting civility as a quality that must be actively maintained by the European reader, rather than assumed as inherent in ethnicity. The second half of the novel sees the boy narrator, and eventually all the boys, implicated in key Western activities in the South Pacific: piracy, trade, and missionary activity. The latter is important to Ballantyne, a staunch Christian himself, and is focused through the historical phenomenon of Pacific Island “teachers,” that is, converted Pacific Islanders who preceded or accompanied European missionaries in the effort to spread Christianity across the South Pacific. The missionary work highlighted in the novel, as this essay will show, is also integrally connected to the coral featured prominently in its title.

scholarly journals Free Roast Pig at Open Day: All you can eat will not attract South Auckland Pacific Islanders to University

Te Kaharoa ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Teena Brown Pulu
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Pacific Islander ◽  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
University Education ◽  
The South ◽  
University System ◽  
Obesity And Diabetes ◽  
Low Expectations ◽  
The University

I kid you not.  This is a time in Pacific regional history where as a middle-aged Tongan woman with European, Maori, and Samoan ancestries who was born and raised in New Zealand, I teach students taking my undergraduate papers how not to go about making stereotypical assumptions.  The students in my classes are mostly Maori and Pakeha (white, European) New Zealanders.  They learn to interrogate typecasts produced by state policy, media, and academia classifying the suburbs of South Auckland as overcrowded with brown people, meaning Pacific Islanders; overburdened by non-communicable diseases, like obesity and diabetes; and overdone in dismal youth statistics for crime and high school drop-outs.  And then some well-meaning but incredibly uninformed staff members at the university where I am a senior lecturer have a bright idea to give away portions of roast pig on a spit to Pacific Islanders at the South Auckland campus open day. Who asked the university to give us free roast pig?  Who asked us if this is what we want from a university that was planted out South in 2010 to sell degrees to a South Auckland market predicted to grow to half a million people, largely young people, in the next two decades? (AUT University, 2014).  Who makes decisions about what gets dished up to Pacific Islanders in South Auckland, compared to what their hopes might be for university education prospects?  To rephrase Julie Landsman’s essay, how about “confronting the racism of low expectations” that frames and bounds Pacific Islanders in South Auckland when a New Zealand university of predominantly Palangi (white, European) lecturers and researchers on academic staff contemplate “closing achievement gaps?” (Landsman, 2004). Tackling “the soft bigotry of low expectations” set upon Pacific Islanders getting into and through the university system has prompted discussion around introducing two sets of ideas at Auckland University of Technology (The Patriot Post, 2014).  First, a summer school foundation course for literacy and numeracy on the South campus, recruiting Pacific Islander school leavers wanting to go on to study Bachelor’s degrees.  Previously, the University of Auckland had provided bridging paths designed for young Pacific peoples to step up to degree programmes (Anae et al, 2002).  Second, the possibility of performing arts undergraduate papers recognising a diverse and youthful ethnoscape party to an Auckland context of theatre, drama, dance, music, Maori and Pacific cultural performance, storytelling, and slam poetry (Appadurai, 1996).  Although this discussion is in its infancy and has not been feasibility scoped or formally initiated in the university system, it is a suggestion worth considering here. My inquiry is frank: Why conflate performance and South Auckland Pacific Islanders?  Does this not lend to a clichéd mould that supposes young Pacific Islanders growing up in the ill-famed suburbs of the poor South are naturally gifted at singing, dancing, and performing theatrics?  This is a characterisation fitted to inner-city Black American youth that has gone global and is wielded to tag, label, and brand urban Pacific Islanders of South Auckland.  Therefore, how are the aspirational interests of this niche market reflected in the content and context of initiatives with South Auckland Pacific Islander communities in mind?

scholarly journals Genetic structure of the Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle (Oryctes rhinoceros) population and the incidence of its biocontrol agent (Oryctes rhinoceros nudivirus) in the South Pacific Islands

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kayvan Etebari ◽  
James Hereward ◽  
Apenisa Sailo ◽  
Emeline M Ahoafi ◽  
Robert Tautua ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Biocontrol Agent ◽  
New Caledonia ◽  
Solomon Islands ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Mitochondrial Lineage ◽  
The South ◽  
Oryctes Rhinoceros ◽  
Rhinoceros Beetle ◽  
The Pacific

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.

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