25 JUNE 1999
LEIDEN, THE NETHERLANDS
Asia in the Pacific
On 25 June 1999 Jan Pouwer addressed the Fourth Conference of the European Society for Oceanists. Analysing the theme of the conference, 'Asia in the Pacific', Pouwer raised three interrelated points: the geo-genesis, socio-genesis, and globalization of the region. He focused on three epistemological shifts, Sunda, Sahul, and Circum Pacific, that elevated these 'spimes' (contraction of 'space' and 'time') from receptive peripheries to active and creative centres of their own. An edited version of Jan Pouwer's fifteen-minutes' address.
By JAN POUWER
Let us skip the ceremonial claptrap and get straight to business: Asia and the Pacific. Needless to say, 'Asia' and 'Pacific' are scientific or (geo) political constructs. 'Asia in the Pacific' is thus a construct in a construct, like a model of a Pacific Clipper within a glass bottle. What does 'Asia' and what does 'Pacific' and what does 'in' for that matter stand for in our discourse and practice? My viewpoint is couched in terms of becoming, process rather than being, or a state of affairs. My instant sermon, as any sermon in a conventional Pacific pulpit, will raise three interrelated points: geo-genesis, socio-genesis, and globalization, but will concentrate on epistemological issues. Tying in with and expanding on Peter Bellwood's inspiring paper on long-term structures and trends in Indo-Pacific prehistory, presented in Leiden at the Bird's Head Conference in 1997, I urge you to think big, or as Bellwood puts it: to raise macro-questions. To which I would add: give detailed micro-answers to macro-questions.
The geo-genesis of the Pacific Basin, the Pacific Rim is, as you know, a rocky affair, part of a giant global process. Over a length of some 70,000 kilometers in the middle of the ocean, there emerged a system of submarine mountain ridges as a consequence of solidifying magma. A continuous renovating lithosphere literally lies at the bottom of continental drift and ensuing intercontinental shifts and collisions. The NNW drifting Australian continent broke up at its northern and eastern edges into a wide arc of islands, constituting the continental island of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world, almost a continent itself, and the continental islands of New Zealand, New Caledonia, Fiji, Vanuatu, the Solomons, and the Bismarck Archipelago: together constituting the first zone or ring. East of this ring a second one emerged from the bottom of the sea: the non-continental islands such as the Marianas, Tonga, and Kermadec. Further to the east, and separated from the second ring by oceanic trenches with a depth of 5,000 meter, emerged the third zone, the oceanic islands of Micronesia and Polynesia. The three zones are separated in the west from Island Southeast Asia by the equally deep trenches of the so called Wallace line. About 7,500 islands are scattered like confetti in the biggest ocean of the world with, ironically, the smallest total acreage of land. Here is a link with the former, traditional preference of anthropology for the construction of primitive isolates.
The geo-genesis of the pacific has a bearing on its socio-genesis: to some extent in line with the three rings of geological genesis, we may discern three areas of social genesis or 'spimes', a handy American contraction of 'space' and 'time'. Firstly the spime of the Sahul plate, mainly including Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea, which were initially not separated by sea. Secondly the spime of the Austronesian voyaging corridor, ranging very widely from Taiwan and the Northern Philippines through Eastern Indonesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia to New Zealand. Thirdly the much more limited yet important spime of Western Melanesia, including the continental islands of the Solomons, the Bismarck Archipelago, New Caledonia, and Fiji. The third spime both intersects with and mediates between spimes 1 and 2.
There is no time to discuss the wealth of evidence to support the suggestion of the three spimes. It is sufficient to refer to Solheim, Bellwood, and White, amongst others. What I do wish to draw your attention to are the perhaps not so sufficiently noticed epistemological-ideological shifts underlying the construction of these spimes. One could almost say that these shifts function as a metaphoric lithosphere. They were brought about by an accumulation of data in a dialectical interaction with basic ideas and ideologies. In the course of this process the periphery of an earlier discourse became the centre of the next one. We may discern three shifts: the Sunda, Sahul, and Circum Pacific shift. Sunda, is the name given to a shelf which was part of the Southeast Asian continent during the Pleistocene. It included Sumatra, Java, Lombok, Kalimantan, Palawan, and western Mindanao. The shift elevates its early inhabitants to creative and inventive actors and seafarers, no longer to be considered as passive recipients and borrowers from an active centre of superior continental Asian civilizations, as Heine-Geldern (1932) would have us believe.
Heine-Geldern's essentially racist distinctions applied even more strongly to the Australian Aborigines, Papuans, and Melanesians. This in spite of the fact that their early ancestors departed from Sunda-land, somehow or other succeeding in crossing the deep trough at the Wallace Line at least 40,000 years ago, no minor feat. There was no landbridge. This takes us to the second shift, which I call the Sahul one. It elevates in its turn Australia, New Guinea, and Western Melanesia from a receptive periphery of Island Southeast Asia to an active and creative centre of its own. Striking evidence shows that in Sahul land, affluent, large-scale hunting and gathering, tree cultivation and tree-cropping, fire-stickfarming and even complex agricultural activities, including drainage did go with undifferentiated stone tools. This gives the lie to a European centred differentiation of stone artefacts as a universal yardstick of socio-economic progress. Questions should be asked as to why agriculture and ensuing dense populations in the New Guinea Highlands of about 9,000 years ago preceded agriculture west of that island by at least 3,000 years. Part of the answer no doubt lies in the special geographical, environmental, and climatological nature of New Guinea, closely related to its geo-genesis. It shares this exceptional position only with the Malaysian Peninsula, as Bellwood points out. New Guinea is five times as large as all the rest of Melanesia, and its prehistory stretches back to ten times the duration of any human history to the east of it (White 1984:99). In the light of the present archaeological, prehistoric, and massive social anthropological evidence one can really understand why Austronesian settlement in Australia, New Guinea, and Western Melanesia was literally and figuratively peripheral. Again, a fruitful dialectic between massive accumulation of data on the one hand, and basic ideas and practices plus an Australian and Melanesian centred ideology on the other, are responsible for the shift. However, one should not take the merits of ideology too far. Bellwood is right when he attributes rejection of an Island Southeast Asia-based migration through a voyaging corridor ranging from China and Taiwan to New Zealand, in favour of a Melanesian-centred model, to misguided ideology (my italics). Instead, Western Melanesia, our third and mediating spime, begs the question to what extent early innovative Melanesian cultures of Holocene origin interacted with a much more recent and recognizable Austronesian dispersal from Taiwan and Island Southeast Asia to as far as New Zealand (Bellwood 1998:964).
This takes us to our third epistemological shift, a shift from the Sahul plate to the Circum Pacific Rim. It concerns the interpretation and re-interpretation of two major processes: the relatively recent Austronesian colonization of the Pacific, and at least on an archaeological time scale the contemporary modern Western colonization, decolonization, and so-called globalization. In the case of the Austronesian colonization it is sufficient to refer to a number of conclusions drawn by Bellwood: the Austronesian colonization was the result of a rapid and identifiable spread of people from Island Southeast Asia (and ultimately from China and Taiwan) to Samoa in a period between 4,000 and 3,000 BP, rather than the outcome of a process of Melanesian-Austronesian interaction in the vicinity of New Guinea. It follows that 'Oceania' and 'Island Southeast Asia' are purely geographical-political constructions which do not correlate with any sharply defined cultural or linguistic entities in prehistory (1998:969).
As to the most recent Western (de)colonization and globalization just a few comments: the transformation of formerly dependent colonial territories into about 24 politically independent, modern nation states tends to mask an ever increasing dependency on global and national political economy, not merely on market economy. Hence an aggravation of external and internal politically induced socio-economic inequality and corruption. In this respect a word of warning seems to be in order: the present massive interest of participants and observers alike in social identity, ethnicity, and reinvention of tradition for political purposes tends to distract our attention away from the evil effects of a rise to modern power and wealth by a defunct traditional elite or by a new elite in a dubious traditional guise. In such a situation, educated and non-educated, often radical youngsters and a silent majority or minority of women may lose out or be left out inside, but also outside, urban centres. They join or are ascribed to a non-descript underclass or layer of have-nots. They suffer from a loss of any type of identity of any description.
I believe that the second and third epistemological shifts have been brought about in a sort of pincer trap movement between massive accumulation of archaeological, historical, linguistic, and social anthropological data on the one hand and decolonization of the Pacific and a rapid emancipation of the former 'Down South' nation states Australia and New Zealand on the other. This even amounted to an epistemic break with the conventional wisdom and social status of Mother England and Auntie Europe. Academic departments, institutions, and research in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific acquired an independent status, a new élan and a new, far less class-ridden, more informal, and inspiring style. Their scope expanded from introspective to Pacific-wide and is at present clearly Circum Pacific oriented. I am confident that we are heading for a prosperous new millennium. *
*
'Oceania' and
'Island Southeast Asia' are purely geographical-political constructions which do not correlate with any sharply defined cultural or linguistic entities in prehistory'
*
References
Ballard, C.
Stimulating Minds To Fantasy?
A Critical Etymology For Sahul
In: M.A. Smith, M. Spriggs, and B. Fankhauser (eds), Sahul in Review, Canberra: Australian National University, Occasional Papers in Prehistory, Nr 24, 1993
Bellwood, P.
From Bird's Head To Bird's Eye View
Long Term Structures And Trends
In Indo-pacific Prehistory
In: J. Miedema, C. Odé, and R.A.C. Dam (eds), Perspectives on the Bird's Head of Irian Jaya, Indonesia, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998
Heine-Geldern, R
Urheimat Und Frühesten Wanderungen Der Austronesier
Anthropos, 27: 543-619, 1932
Solheim II, W.C.
Reflections On The New Data Of Southeast Prehistory
Austronesian Origin And Consequences
In: P. van de Velde (ed.), Prehistoric Indonesia: A Reader, pp. 33-49, Dordrecht: Foris, Verhandelingen Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Nr 104, 1984
White, J.P.
Melanesia
In: P. van de Velde (ed.), Prehistoric Indonesia: A Reader, pp. 93-121
Dr Jan Pouwer is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology. His specialization is Oceania. He can be contacted through the Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Nijmegen.