The Warm Winds of Change: Globalisation in Contemporary Samoa

Description

What leads a Samoan villager to buy a Chinese polypropylene mat rather than making a pandanus mat? When do Pacific emigrants stop sending back money to their home village? Do villagers stop giving away fish when they have a refrigerator to store it in? In their new book, Warm Winds of Change, Cluny and La'avasa Macpherson look at ordinary lives in a Pacific village in order to provide an accessible introduction to the ways in which Pacific societies are being transformed by the forces of globalisation. Global culture has had a powerful impact on the flora and fauna, the people, languages and cultures of the Pacific for many centuries. But these earlier changes were largely controlled and managed by Pacific societies as new people, ideas, and things were incorporated into traditional chiefly culture. But, the Macphersons suggest, recent changes are delivering a more profound challenge to tradition. Society is shifting from baskets to buckets, from chiefly and religious authority to a questioning democracy, from in-kind work to a cash economy. Every day in Western news media report on the key forces of globalisation - free flows of capital, people and ideas, the impact of big cultures and economies on small nations, the falling costs of distance. Here the Macphersons make those forces tangible by showing us how globalisation is transforming daily life in an ordinary Pacific village.

Cluny Macpherson is a professor of sociology in the school of social and cultural studies at Massey University, Albany. He has longstanding teaching and research interests in Oceania including social and economic development in Pacific states; relations between large and small states in the Pacific region; the social and economic consequences of migration in the Pacific region; health and ethnic identity of Pacific people in Aotearoa. He has particular interests in Samoa and the Cook Islands and Fiji. La'avasa Macpherson is a trained nurse, researcher and translator with interests in social transformation in the Pacific and special expertise in medicine across cultures developed from her childhood experiences of assisting with her grandmother with her traditional Samoan practice and, more recently, from her direct observations as a nurse of the overlap between two systems of practice in migrant communities in South Auckland. Now a researcher at Massey University, she has written on migration and settlement and the Samoan Diaspora and is the co-author, with Cluny Macpherson, of Samoan Medical Belief and Practice (Auckland University Press, 1990; 2006).

"A 'must-read' not only for students of Samoa, but also for anyone who would understand the complexities and paradoxes faced by contemporary Pacific Islanders." --"SITES: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies"