Music in Pacific Island Cultures: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture by Brian Diettrich, Jane Freeman Moulin, and Michael Webb (review)

Pacific Island cultures loom large in the touristic imagination of the Global North, and a great deal of ethnographic work conducted in the Pacific is central to the canons of anthropology (Malinowski; Strathern) and ethnomusicology and dance ethnology (Feld; Kaeppler). Yet there are fewer publications that give readers a sense of the locally rooted and globally networked complexities of contemporary Pacific Island life. Ethnomusicologists Diettrich, Moulin, and Webb have taken on the huge task of introducing readers to contemporary Pacific life—from the struggles of decolonization and cultural reclamation to the vernacular cosmopolitanism of the ‘local’ or ‘island style’ in contemporary public culture—while also providing an introduction to this public culture through music and its recent history. Their short book, Music in Pacific Island Cultures, offers an entry point to the contemporary and historical worlds of the Pacific Islands through its focus on the musical negotiation of relationships between past and present, and island localities and their global connections.

The book is part of the Global Music Series of introductory case-study volumes, linked with series editors Bonnie Wade’s Thinking Musically (Oxford, 2004) and Patricia Sheehan Campbell’s Teaching Music Globally (Oxford, 2004). Together, Brian Diettrich, Jane Freeman Moulin, and Michael Webb present ‘a series of specific cultural snapshots’ (p. 4) of musical life in three different areas of the Pacific. Aimed at students with little or no knowledge of the region and its music, Moulin’s Polynesian case study focuses on French Polynesia and especially Tahiti, Diettrich’s Micronesian case study on Chuuk, and Webb’s Melanesian case study on communities in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. Hawaiian music and dance, and the music and dance of the Chuuk diaspora in Hawai’i, also make significant appearances in the sections on Polynesia and Micronesia, as both Moulin and Diettrich have spent significant amounts of their careers in Hawai’i. Each author is responsible for sections on their particular regions of expertise. The text is supplemented by an audio CD and lists of further resources, and by online instructional materials.

This short introduction to the importance of music in Pacific Island cultures packs in a great deal of discussion on a wide range of issues. The authors follow conventions in dividing the Pacific Islands into Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia, voicing their discomfort with the racist origins of some of these names, but acknowledging their continued use among islanders as well as outsiders. Australia is not part of this book, as the authors wisely decided that ‘so large a continent with its own multiple, complex, and fascinating aboriginal cultures deserves its own separate, in-depth work’ and that ‘such a volume would be of interest and pride to aboriginal communities’ (p. 6). The same could be said about any of these Pacific regions, and no doubt the authors themselves would be the first to acknowledge this. But the ‘snapshot’ approach, key to the entire Global Music series, allows them to go into some regional depth while exploring cross-regional ‘Pacific-ness’ and unifying topical themes. Even so, depth is relative in a book this short covering an area this large. A significant amount of the music of the case-study areas simply goes unaddressed, and one is left wanting more about each briefly described musical example or issue. Yet, if the goal of an introductory textbook is to give the student reader a taste of the musical world of a broad geographical area and leave them wanting more, then this book has generally succeeded in achieving that fine balance between providing too much and too little information.

The first chapter introduces the Pacific Islands, the three regions and the contested history of their division as such, and their immense cultural and musical diversity, while outlining the...