Island Studies Journal, 16(1), Book Reviews

Building on the heuristic lenses of resilience and resistance, Pacific Realities sheds light on the lives of contemporary Pacific Islanders and, to a lesser extent, indigenous Australians, with particular focus on the implications of globalization for their sociocultural and ecological context.In their detailed introduction, Laurent Dousset and Mlissa Nayral set the tone for the six chapters and afterword of the edited volume.Unsurprisingly, they begin by debunking the limitations of theories that relegate the people of Oceania to victims of dominant global forces (e.g.capitalism and neoliberalism) to which they are exposed.The authors' intention is to pursue a more inclusive theoretical approach that builds on, but nevertheless expands and complements existing "glocalization" debates.They pay particular attention to the manifold ways Pacific Islanders (and indigenous Australians) draw on their individual and collective agency to "achieve, pursue and reproduce their material and immaterial conditions of existence, in particular through what could be called forms of resistance and resilience which either cross the local-global divide or resourcefully reinterpret it for their own and purportedly local benefits" (p.2).For the purpose of developing their theoretical framework, Dousset and Nayral go to great length to weave together two concepts which appear to serve diametrically opposed functions at the outset.Whereas resistance "implies individual practices aimed against an existing 'system' [and] drives for change", resilience commonly refers to "sets of complex relationships which attempt to reproduce the system or regain some kind of stability [and] attempts to counterbalance change" (p.9).Yet, they reason that one could contemplate "forms of resistance that are resilient [and] processes of resilience that are also an expression of resistance" (p.9) and argue that this dialectic potentially offers scholars a fruitful way to investigate how Pacific Islanders (and indigenous Australians) navigate the various challenges they encounter.Dousset and Nayral conclude that pondering how resilience and resistance potentially or de facto interrelate is always a matter "of context and scale of reference, of level of practices, and of the rationale of motives and their potential consequences" (p.9).Building on this conceptual framework, the contribution to Pacific Realities offers rich ethnographic case studies that showcase the particular ways in which resistance and/or resilience materialize in various parts of island Oceania and Australia.Yasmine Musharbash reveals how Warlpiri (Aboriginal Australian) people responded to erected signs which announced oppressive state policies by altering them through graffiti, erecting their own satirical signs or requesting sacred sight signs from the government to counter nonindigenous claims to their territory.In doing so, Warlpiri people attempted to resist the state by "speaking the language the government speaks" (p.37).Christian Ghasarian takes his readers to Rapa in French Polynesia, a place extremely remote even by Pacific standards.Drawing on insights deriving from long-term fieldwork and focusing on local land management and tenure policies, he makes a convincing case that the people of Rapa make use of their neo-traditional Council of Elders, i.e. a colonial institution, to counter exogenous global forces.Sina Emde discusses the role of the Fiji Women's Rights Movement in the context of Fiji's 2000 attempted civilian coup d'tat.She describes her interlocutors as navigating "vulnerability, resilience and resistances" (p.67) and employs an intersectional analysis of ethnicity, class and gender to reveal how the women political activists she worked with, opposed political ethnonationalism.Mlissa Nayral is equally concerned with gender and politics, which she analyses with a focus on the effects of the French parity law on rural Kanak sociality in the French overseas territory of Ouvea (New Caledonia).She describes why and how women councillors (as members of state institutions) have to respond to various obstacles, given their customary-based absence from public politics in Kanak society.Laurent Dousset focuses on a kind of seemingly surreal and certainly

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