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The Pacific: Gods and People
The Pacific: Gods and People
The great expanse of the Pacific Ocean is
inhabited space. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, more
than 14 million people live in twenty-eight nations spread across
the Pacific, and between them speak more than 1300 languages. For
many of these people the ocean is not so much a barrier as a known
landscape, across which they travel constantly, in boats (and today
in planes) exchanging goods and knowledge, and extending and
maintaining personal and family networks. Pacific islanders have
always been skilled navigators and linguists. As the scholar Epeli
Hau'ofa describes his Pacific
ancestors:
'their
universe comprised not only land surfaces, but the surrounding
ocean as far as they could traverse and exploit it, the underworld
with its fire-controlling and earth-shaking denizens, and the
heavens above with their hierarchies of powerful gods and named
stars and constellations that people could count on to guide their
ways across the
seas.'1
Throughout
the Pacific people have made and used objects to express their
power and rank. The Hawaiians clothed their leaders in sacred
feather cloaks which symbolized a connection to specific gods.
Chiefs in Palau used fine shell inlaid vessels for the ceremonial
presentation of gifts of food to their peers. In Fiji high-ranking
men wore precious shell and ivory breastplates. In Vanuatu the
achievement of status through ritual allowed people to wear special
masks and ornaments. In countries where the indigenous population
now lives within a settler society, power relations between the two
groups are often represented, and disputed through objects. Thus
Australian Aboriginal art very often makes claims for Aboriginal
authority over the land itself. For most of these objects this
power is made visible through the creativity, beauty and dramatic
presence with which their makers invested
them.
1
'Our sea of islands', The
Contemporary Pacific, 6:1 (1994), pp.
147-61.