Kalissa Alexeyeff

Touring Pacific Cultures

On 10 June 2009, outside the austere stone façade of the State Museum of Ethnology in Munich, an unusual construction began to emerge: a latticed wooden tower, tethered with vines, and tapering to the top. Commissioned by anthropologist and filmmaker Thorolf Lipp, this was a quarter-size replica of a land-diving tower, or gol.1 It was fashioned by three men, Betu Watas, Tolak Telkon and Mathias Wataskon, who had been flown from South Pentecost, Vanuatu, to build it for the opening of an exhibition of Lipp’s photographs, entitled UrSprung in der Südsee: An Encounter with the Pentecost Landivers.2 They had already spent some weeks in Obergünzburg, a small town in Bavaria, where they had reassembled an im, a bamboo and thatch house, replete with bamboo beds and kitchen artefacts, shipped from Vanuatu to complement the South Seas collection in a local museum.

Are You Being Served? Sex, Humour and Globalisation in the Cook Islands

This paper examines how popular jokes about White women and their sexuality are utilised by Cook Islanders to negotiate relationships with outsiders, particularly Western tourists. These jokes serve to unsettle tourist images of erotic paradise populated with welcoming island women and, further, offer a humorous commentary on the inequities of global capitalism.

Sea Breeze: Globalisation and Cook Islands popular music

This paper examines the dynamics of Cook Islands popular music, most commonly referred to as ‘island music’. Among Cook Islands communities at home and abroad, island music is performed at informal gatherings, at nightclubs and bars. It is also a central component of large functions such as weddings and island fundraising events. String bands—who perform island music—undertake performance tours through New Zealand, the Cook Islands and French Polynesia. These bands also record audiotapes and CDs of their music, which are extremely popular among Cook Islander communities across the region. Despite island musics centrality in many social contexts it is also the subject of much critical debate. It is viewed by some both as a ‘bastardisation’ of ‘traditional’ expressive forms and as an indicator of ‘global’ corruption; local music is seen as ‘swamped’ by Western popular music. I argue that these debates are symptomatic of anxiety about globalisation and related notions of authenticity, cultural ownership and loss. They are also ultimately concerned with negotiating locality and identity across the Cook Islands diaspora.

Regulating Cultural Performances in Oceania: the Complicated Relationship between Law, Creativity and Cultural Property

This paper explores a number of tensions around claims of rights over various aspects of cultural performance with a particular focus on the Cook Islands. We discuss the historical context of these tensions and trace the way in which certain anxieties and agendas have led to demands for, and the realisation of, new laws over cultural performances, most particularly the Copyright Act 2013 and the Traditional Knowledge Act 2013. We then discuss how such new regulatory frameworks have a potentially critical role to play in determining who has the rights to perform what, with effects that are likely to spill out from the confines of laws and court cases into popular discourses around claims over many manifestations of culture and creativity.

Sleeping Safe: Perceptions of Risk and Value in Western and Pacific Infant Co-sleeping

In many cultures, parent and infant co-sleeping is a common and accepted practice. In countries as diverse as Japan, Italy, and Cameroon, it is expected that infants sleep with their parents for protection, and co-sleeping is valued for the intimate sociality it is believed to foster (Yovsi and Keller 2007; Tahhan 2008, and this book; Toselli, Costabile, and Genta, this book). Among Mayan Indians and Swedish populations, co-sleeping is associated with infants’ emotional wellbeing (Morelli et al. 1992; Welles-Nystrom 2005). The only societies where infant co-sleeping (usually defined as bed sharing) is not widely practiced are Western, predominantly Anglo-Saxon countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and some European countries (Worthman and Melby 2002; Owens 2004). Medical literature and public-health material produced in these countries does not recommend bed sharing because of its association with SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Mainstream parenting ideas about infant care also connect co-sleeping and SIDS risk with concerns about lack of privacy and unhealthy infant development.

Collective Creativity: Art and Society in the South Pacific

Collective Creativity: Art and Society in the South Pacific is a fascinating snapshot of the fine art scene on Rarotonga, Cook Islands. It covers a ‘surge’ in the fine art production in the early 2000s and seeks to understand why and how ‘a place becomes a locus of artistic creativity’ (p. 3). Giuffre’s main argument is that this period of creativity is related to the forces of transnationalism, in particular, the movement of Cook Islander artists born in New Zealand back to their homeland to live. It is based on participant observation, interviews with artists (both Cook Islander and nonCook Islander artists), gallery owners, buyers during what appears as a tumultuous time in the Rarotongan art scene where the ‘control of cultural consumption, production, and especially, evaluation is a site of intense conflict’ (p. 41). The primary material is the highlight of Collective Creativity; it makes for absorbing reading and it provides unique insight into contemporary indigenous identity politics and how they are negotiated through notions of legitimacy, authenticity and rights. The book focuses on artistic creativity as a social phenomenon and especially the networks of relationships that channel the work of creative individuals. Chapter 1 examines theories of creativity, ranging from biological and psychosocial (the old ‘creativity is the product of mental imbalances’ argument) to more sociological explanations of ‘art worlds’ (after Howard Becker), which argue that the artist needs to be imbedded in the broader field of production which encompasses, distributors, critics, patrons and consumers. Chapter 2 provides a clear and informative history of Rarotongan society. It reads like it is written for a general audience and contains very few references to specific texts about precontact, colonial and post-independence social life and artistic production. While this makes for easy reading it also means that the critical complexities of some key issues raised, especially those regarding status, mana, and collective orientation, are glossed over. Here and throughout the book a number of broad, almost journalistic, claims are made about cultural change. For example the: ‘swamping of a fragile culture’ (p. 96), European contact having ‘fatally undermined the traditional bases of status’ (p. 103) and ‘the transition from mana to money’ (pp. 126 7), are claims that are not substantiated. In addition the chapter is overly