BACKGROUND AND DEVELOPMENT

Oceania – the islands of the Pacific Ocean including New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia – constitutes one of anthropology’s classic ethnographic regions. Early ground-breaking fieldwork by scholars such as W.H.R. Rivers, A.M. Hocart, Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead marked the beginnings of a number of key theoretical debates in anthropology concerning kinship, gender, exchange and religion. The Department of Social Anthropology at Bergen has always highlighted this role of Oceania in the undergraduate courses given on world ethnography, where also each region’s bearings on the history of anthropology is highlighted. In the anthropology of recent decades, Oceania has emerged again as an influential region for new developments in social and cultural theory, as demonstrated in important work by scholars such as Marshall Sahlins, Marilyn Strathern, and Roy Wagner.  Furthermore, the Pacific Islands region is presently notable for a range of very distinct and analytically challenging responses to processes of globalization/localization.

Fredrik Barth’s seminal work in the late 1960s among the Baktaman of New Guinea established Oceania as a research region for the Department of Social Anthropology at Bergen. The region was not developed further as a research focus, however, until Edvard Hviding joined the Department’s academic staff in 1993 with a PhD based on work on maritime practice, ecology, political economy and globalization in Solomon Islands. Under Hviding’s supervision a growing group of research students have since carried out fieldwork in Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Samoa, New Zealand and Australia with more localities soon to follow. Topics addressed by this group include: the transformation from ceremonial exchange into monetary economy; urbanisation and nationalism; changing family structures; new organizational forms at the interface of religion and politics; nature and society; and local-global relations in projects of nature conservation and economic development projects. Recent research has also focussed on the prominent Pacific topic of navigation. Several of these projects have developed long-term relationships with the field localities through which expressed needs in the fields of education and cultural heritage have been met by the scholar producing, publishing and distributing relevant materials in local languages. Concurrently, the Department’s research in Oceania has maintained a comparative ethnographic focus on more classical themes associated with the region, such as kinship, gender, exchange and material culture, the latter boosted by the Bergen University Museum’s remarkable collection of old artefacts from the Pacific (as documented in published form by Group member Dr Knut Rio [see list of publications below])

The major project Islands Connected: Making Pacific Worlds, based at the Department from 2000 and led by Edvard Hviding and Jonathan Friedman of the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, has sought to develop new approaches to regional studies through multi-disciplinary research; the participating network of international scholars considers relations among the various island groups of the Pacific in the context of long-term cultural history and from a view of the Pacific region’s very distinctive local responses to globalization. Several edited books are forthcoming from this project. On another axis, the expansion of Pacific studies in Bergen has strengthened cooperation between the Department and the Bergen University Museum’s anthropology section, as scholars from both units have curated exhibitions, analyzed ethnographic collections and produced anthropological films, all with reference to Oceania (currently, Group member Knut Rio is head of the division of anthropology at the Bergen Museum). On a more general level, the regional comparative perspective of the Department links the Pacific research group – through the overarching view of Austronesian cultural history – with other regions studies by scholars in the Department, particularly Island Southeast Asia and Madagascar. The research group’s international institutional linkages are also considerable, also beyond anthropology.

With considerable success in securing external project funding and in competing for university funds for doctoral studies, Pacific Studies in the Department of Social Anthropology has by 2005 grown in scope and in number of scholars so as to constitute a significant and productive research group, reflecting not only the Department’s current priorities but also the University of Bergen’s overall strategic focus on development-related research and education with global coverage. In the latter sense Pacific Studies represents an often interesting corrective to lessons learned from research in Africa and Asia and adds to the scope of global comparison. As of late 2005 the Bergen Research Group in Pacific Studies consists of one full professor (Dr Edvard Hviding, Group Leader), one associate professor (Dr Knut Rio, Bergen University Museum), one postdoctoral fellow (Dr Annelin Eriksen), two doctoral candidates (Cato Berg and Rolf Scott), and several master’s students.