Paul Geraghty

Value of traditional oral narratives in building climate-change resilience: insights from rural communities in Fiji

In the interests of improving engagement with Pacific Island communities to enable development of effective and sustainable adaptation strategies to climate change, we looked at how traditional oral narratives in rural/peripheral Fiji communities might be used to inform such strategies. Interviews were undertaken and observations made in 27 communities; because the custodians of traditional knowledge were targeted, most interviewees were 70-79 years old. The view that oral traditions, particularly those referring to environmental history and the observations/precursors of environmental change, were endangered was widespread and regretted. Interviewees’ personal experiences of extreme events (natural disasters) were commonplace but no narratives of historical (unwitnessed by interviewees) events were found. In contrast, experiences of previous village relocations attributable (mainly) to environmental change were recorded in five communities while awareness of environmentally driven migration was more common. Questions about climate change elicited views dominated by religious/fatalist beliefs but included some more pragmatic ones; the confusion of climate change with climate variability, which is part of traditional knowledge, was widespread. The erosion of traditional environmental knowledge in the survey communities over recent decades has been severe and is likely to continue apace, which will reduce community self-sufficiency and resilience. Ways of conserving such knowledge and incorporating it into adaptation planning for Pacific Island communities in rural/peripheral locations should be explored.

Vanished islands in Vanuatu: new research and a preliminary geohazard assessment

Abstract Oral traditions recalling the disappearances of islands in the volcanically and seismically active central part of the Vanuatu archipelago were collected from informants on Ambae, Maewo, Malakula, and Pentecost Islands. Analyses of the details of these traditions and the meanings of the names of the vanished islands suggest that they once existed. Vanished islands off north‐west Malakula, named Tolamp and Malveveng, are likely to have subsided abruptly down the slope to the interarc rift marked by the South Aoba Basin. The unnamed vanished island off the western tip of Ambae is likely to have subsided during a volcanic or seismic event. The vanished island named (Vanua) Mamata between Ambae, Maewo, and Pentecost is also likely to have slipped down the flank of the slope to the South Aoba Basin. Island disappearances of this kind are memorable expressions of the geohazards that affect areas like central Vanuatu. The novel approach adopted here is argued to be an important adjunct to more conventional approaches to geohazard assessment in such places.

Where in the World is Ulimaroa

The continent of Australia had a number of appellations until the early 19th century. The most enigmatic of these was Ulimaroa. This name was first used in 1776 by the eccentric Swedish geographer Daniel Djurberg and, subsequently, by a number of other European cartographers. The name originates from Captain James Cooks 1769–70 visit to New Zealand. A number of authors have attempted to account for its meaning, but none has been successful. This paper reviews their efforts, before considering linguistic and historical evidence to propose that Ulimaroa actually referred to an island known to the New Zealand Māori. It also briefly explores the implications for the extent of voyaging by the New Zealand Māori and their knowledge of the pig.

In Memoriam, George Milner, 1918–2012

Professor Emeritus George Milner, well known to Oceanic linguists as the author of Fijian grammar and Samoan dictionary, as well as numerous articles, passed away peacefully at his home in South Petherton, Somerset, England, on July 7, 2012, at the age of 93. 1 He was born George Bertram Milner on September 9, 1918, and received his early education in Lausanne, Switzerland, before moving to Manchester Grammar School in England. Bilingual in English and French, he would later publish a number of scholarly articles in French. In 1937 he was awarded a scholarship to Christâ��s College Cambridge to study Modern Languages, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1940, whereupon he joined the Army Intelligence Corps and served with the Eighth Army in the Western Desert and Italy. Like many who served in the war, he preferred not to talk about it. After the war, he joined the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, having been awarded a scholarship to study Fijian, culminating in a Master of Arts degree in 1947, after which he became lecturer in linguistics at SOAS. His research in Fijian, and subsequent fieldwork, was commissioned and supported by the colonial government, feeling perhaps that the most recent grammar (Churchward 1940), though a good reference grammar, was not suitable as a primer ( Milner 1971a:405, SchA¼tz 1972:76). During this time, he first came into contact with Josua Bogidrau, a native of Tubou, Lakeba, Lau, who had previously worked with Arthur Capell on his compilation of a new Fijian dictionary, and was now seconded to SOAS for sixteen months in 1946 and 1947. Bogidrau was, incidentally, the grandson of Melaia Lutu, who had been one of Arthur Hocartâ��s principal informants for his classic study of Lauan culture, The Lau Islands ( Hocart 1929). After acquiring the rudiments of Fijian from Bogidrau, Milner prepared to go to Fiji to carry out fieldwork, under the guidance of G. K. Roth, a senior colonial administrator who had done anthropological fieldwork in Fiji ( Roth 1953Roth 1973), and who was considered at the time the authority on Fijian culture. Roth arranged for Ratu Sukuna, then Secretary of Fijian Affairs and also an authority on language and culture, later to become Fijiâ��s leading statesman of the mid-twentieth century, to write for George a sketch of the dialects of Fiji, to guide him in his fieldwork (Scarr n.d.:425). Milner and Ratu Sukuna were to become firm friends, and Sukuna assiduously read the manuscript grammar and recommended hundreds of amendments during a visit to London in 1953. The historian and bibliographer Philip Snow (1998:62) commented that Milner would have made an excellent biographer of Sukuna, â��combining scholarship and personal knowledge of a high order.â�� Fieldwork lasted 14 months during 1948 to 1949, most of the time being spent in the village of Vatani in Kaba, to the south of the island of Bau, considered then to be the basis of Standard Fijian, though some time was spent in Ba and Nadroga in Western Fiji ( Milner 1952, 1971a:412). Ever the keen observer, Milner was taking copious notes as he watched the villagers of Kaba build the house he and his wife and their new-born baby Michael would stay in, and these resulted in a unique study of the language of house-building in Fiji ( Milner 1953a), which remains the only one on this topic. When I carried out fieldwork in Kaba in the 1980s, some people still remembered George fondly, and referred to him as Tamai Maikeli (â��Michaelâ��s fatherâ��), following the naming custom of that part of Fiji. From 1949 to 1950 he also visited Tonga and the Solomon Islands to conduct linguistic and anthropological fieldwork. The resulting publication, Fijian grammar ( Milner 1956), was acclaimed as â��perhaps the first complete grammar of a Melanesian or Polynesian language to be written by a professional linguistâ�� ( Biggs and Nayacakalou 1958:80), and â��the most important work on Fijianâ�� ( SchA¼tz 1972:75); for other reviews, all positive, see Buse (1958), Capell (1959), Carr (1958), and Robins (1958). At the same time, there were those who disliked it...

Suffixation as a place naming strategy in the central Pacific and its implications for prehistory

This article uses comparative linguistic data to arrive at some generalizations about the place naming practices of the early inhabitants of the Central Pacific (Fiji, Rotuma, and Polynesia) who are believed to have arrived there some three thousand years ago. In particular it focuses on a pair of suffixes, -(C)a and -(C)aga, that had similar functions of nominalization and were therefore used quite extensively in various types of derivation, including place naming. Many place names so formed are indicators of the environment that prevailed when the place was named, so have great potential value in the reconstruction of prehistory.

The lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society ed by Malcolm Ross, Andrew Pawley, and Meredith Osmond (review)

This volume is the latest in the series resulting from the Australian National University’s monumental undertaking to reconstruct linguistically the society and world of the speakers of Proto-Oceanic (POC), undertaken by the Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. Of the seven proposed volumes, the first, published in 1998, was on material culture, the second, published in 2003, on the physical environment, and the third, published in 2008, on plants. This volume, entitled Animals, should be understood to cover “animals” in the broadest sense of the term (might “fauna” have been less ambiguous?), including fish, aquatic invertebrates, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, and other terrestrial invertebrates. In addition, there are two chapters by Andrew Pawley on special topics—“Stability and change in Oceanic fish names,” and “Were turtles fish in Proto Oceanic?: Semantic reconstruction and change in some terms for animal categories in Oceanic languages”—and finally two appendices (“Data sources and collation” and “Languages”), a list of references, and three indexes (“Index of reconstructions by protolanguage,” “Alphabetical index of reconstructions,” and “Index of English and biological terms”). All chapters are authored by one or more of the editors, except for that on birds, which is by Ross Clark. As we have come to expect from Pacific Linguistics, this is a highly competent piece of work, and an impressive one, too, in many ways, not least in sheer volume—there are over 600 pages, 17 maps, 44 tables, 91 figures (mostly drawings of fish and other natural species), and nearly 500 Proto-Oceanic reconstructions (many more if variants and other levels are considered) based on data from nearly 600 languages (including “dialects”). The work will be useful not only to those interested in the prehistory of the Pacific, and to ichthyologists, zoologists, and ornithologists, but also to linguists looking for data on semantic change, sound change, subgrouping, and so on. Overall, the volume is easy to read and to use, and typographical and other errors are few. Some may quibble about the arrangement of topics, for instance, that whales and bats are included under mammals, when most (perhaps all?) Oceanic languages class them as “fish” and “birds,” respectively. But the authors explain that it is not certain that Oceanic taxonomies agree on these classifications, and, in any case, the typical reader would probably expect to find the “scientifically” based taxonomy being followed. Developments in the field since the earlier volumes have led to some changes. One is the inclusion of two new first-order “subgroups” of Oceanic: the Temotu subgroup (Reef Santa Cruz and Utupua and Vanikoro) and the Southern Oceanic linkage (Vanuatu and New Caledonia). Because of the now even more “rake”-like structure of the higher echelons of the Oceanic subgroup—that is, there being many first-order subgroups—the authors have felt the need to guard against a proliferation of reconstructions based on just two of these first-order subgroups. They have, therefore, proposed two

Fait de langues: Revue de linguistique n o 23–24: Les langues austronésiennes (review)

In this collection, Elizabeth Zeitoun, well known for her work on Formosan languages, gathers together 25 papers in an attempt to “give an overview of current linguistic research in Austronesian languages” (7) to a francophone audience. It is therefore not, nor does it claim to be, an encyclopedic work on the Austronesian language family in the tradition of Tryon (1995). All the papers are in French, six—those by Reid and Liao, Ross, Starosta, Hsin, Austin, and Radetzky—having been translated and adapted from the English by the compiler/editor herself (designated “scientific director”) with the assistance of a number of colleagues. Two of these—Reid and Liao, and Ross— had previously appeared in the Taiwanese journal Language and Linguistics. Wisely, example sentences in translated articles retain their English translations in addition to the French. Authors are a mixture of those well known to anglophone Austronesianists (Laurent Sagart, Lawrence Reid, Malcolm Ross, the late Stanley Starosta, Alexander Adelaar, Jean-Claude Rivierre, Françoise Ozanne-Rivierre, Claire Moyse-Faurie, Isabelle Bril, Jean-Michel Charpentier) and a number of less well-known authors. All articles have been subjected to two reviews and revised accordingly. The book is divided into four sections: geography, history, and typology (7 papers); grammatical studies (12); ethnolinguistics (2); and sociolinguistics (4). Areas covered are Austronesian (4), Taiwan (6), Philippines (3), Malagasy (4), Malay (1), Indonesia (1), Oceanic (1), Vanuatu (1), New Caledonia (2), Polynesia (1), Pacific pidgins (1); understandably, then, there is a francophone bias, with virtually no input from Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, or Micronesia, but rather surprisingly nothing at all from French Polynesia either. These papers are preceded by a general introduction by Zeitoun, and followed by a general bibliography, a list of abstracts in both French and English, and a list of the hundred-odd Austronesian language names that are mentioned in the book, arranged geographically. The first section (geography, history, and typology) begins with a paper by the editor outlining the geographic spread and the history of the Austronesian languages, and discussing their internal relationships. This is a useful introduction, but there are a few inaccuracies: Chamorro and Palauan are assigned to Western Austronesian on linguistic grounds, not geographic (12), Nauru is missing from the list of Micronesian nations, Fiji is wrongly included in Polynesia (14), and it is not true to say (19) that Proto-Austronesian (PAN) final consonants were lost in Proto-Oceanic. This introduction is followed by Laurent Sagart arguing that the Sino-Tibetan family is related to Austronesian, both descending from a language spoken by millet and rice farmers in the Huang He Valley of northern China around 8000 BP; I found the morphological evidence here particularly persuasive.