The Pacific Islands: Environment and Society (review)

The Pacific Islands: Environment and Society, edited by Moshe Rapaport. Honolulu: Bess Press, 1999. ISBN 1-57306-083-6, cloth; 1-57306-042-9, paper; vi + 442 pages, maps, photographs, tables, notes, bibliography, index, and Island Gazetteer. Cloth, US$49.95; paper, US$39.95.

Humboldt tried to write, in several volumes, about the entire cosmos, but since the late nineteenth century geographers have learned to be more circumspect and have confined their efforts to single regions. However, there comes a time when even the classic regions of nineteenth-century geography can no longer be covered properly by a single author, and the Pacific Islands may now have entered this stage. Half a century ago even a vast and populous region like India could be tackled with panache by a polymath scholar like Oskar Spate, but in the Pacific we have rather few examples of equivalent ambition. Harold Brookfield achieved something close to a classic regional text in his book Melanesia: A Geographical Interpretation of an Island World (1971), but it is hard to think of more recent examples that encompass even part of the Pacific Islands in all their modern diversity. Even books that seem to promise a holistic overview turn out to be relatively specialized. For example, Matthew Spriggs' fine book The Island Melanesians (1997) covers a large area but lingers for so long on its prehistory that the last five hundred years are covered in a gallop, while Paul Sillitoe's An Introduction to the Anthropology of Melanesia (1998) does an excellent job in reviewing the ethnography of rural New Guinea but seldom strays far from that island or from the anthropological literature.

As a result we lack overviews. The scholarly focus has shifted to the microscale where the challenge of making broader generalizations and regional comparisons can be avoided, and where no attempt at a holistic analysis is expected. For this reason alone--for its regional scope and holistic ambitions--Moshe Rapaport's edited volume Pacific Islands: Environment and Society is to be welcomed. An increasingly literate and sophisticated readership resides in or near the Pacific Islands, visits the region, or merely studies it in universities, and these people will continue to ask the same questions about the islands that fascinated their equivalents in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: when, how, and why did these farflung scraps of land, large and small, evolve into their present-day diverse patterns of environment, society, and culture? This book promises to provide this readership with many of the answers, in one volume, and in far richer detail than alternative sources of information, including Internet websites. If more books like this one existed then we might perhaps see fewer of those science-fiction bestsellers that seek to locate the origins of Pacific cultures in lost civilizations, places beyond real time and space. Can works of solid regional scholarship displace these alternative, New Age and hidden-racist tracts, which have in common a refusal to allow Pacific Islanders a fair and autonomous share of world history and world geography?

To a remarkable extent this book manages to fulfill its potential, largely because of skillful and rigorous editorial control. So many so-called edited books turn out to be merely vehicles for allowing established academics to ride their latest hobbyhorses (my own proposed chapter for this book, which completely failed to meet the terms of reference the editor set out, was rightly rejected by him on these grounds). Editorial indulgence results in books full of interesting but idiosyncratic contributions, tortuously linked by desperate editorial sleight of hand. In contrast the topics chosen by Moshe Rapaport span a full and interesting if not quite comprehensive range. The book is subdivided into six sections (physical environment, living environment, history, culture, population, economy). Is anything missing? The Pacific as seen from the outside, as a geopolitical space for American, Japanese, French, or Russian ambitions in the twenty-first century, is an issue hinted at but not really...