1 - Conflict and Connection in Bougainville and Solomon Islands

Summary

One of many gifts Epeli Hau’ofa gave Pacific Studies was his 1994 essay ‘Our Sea of Islands’. He wrote ‘There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as “islands in a far sea” and as “a sea of islands” ‘ (p 152). The former was a vision applied to the peoples of the Pacific, including the southwestern Pacific. The latter was a vision of Pacific peoples as intimately connected to each other by seas that were pathways, not barriers. These connections complement, and are enabled by, deep and intense attachments to land and ancestors (Spann, 2018; Diaz, 2019, p 2).

Bougainville and Solomon Islands sit side by side in an archipelago within this sea of islands (see Figure 1.1). Like the southwestern Pacific more generally, they are extraordinarily diverse linguistically and culturally. More than 20 Indigenous languages (Tryon, 2005) are spoken among Bougainville's population of under 400,000 and at least 64 languages (Jourdan, 2013, p 271) are spoken among around 700,000 Solomon Islanders. There is evidence of intimate contact between language groups deep into the past even while cultural practices can vary considerably among speakers of the same language.

New people and ideas have thus been easy to encounter, making it perhaps unsurprising that for the peoples of the region there has been ‘something traditional about novelty’ (Jorgensen, 1994, p 130; cited in Golub, 2014, p 190). Simon Harrison observed that the southwestern Pacific is a region ‘whose peoples have been described as culturally highly acquisitive, actively seeking exotic and novel items of culture as valued and prestigious enhancements of the group or person’ (2007, p 39). The acquisitiveness is visible in exchange relationships and the trans-local systems through which they are enacted (Timmer, 2019, p 128). Cultural knowledge embedded in political and religious life has also been exchanged widely (Harrison, 1993b). Other links through marriage and warfare combined with exchange relations to make hamlets and villages places bursting with the trans-local connections essential to social life (Golub, 2014, pp 188–94; McDougall, 2016). The overwhelming weight of evidence from this region dispels any suggestion that its peoples and cultures have seen themselves as bounded entities with inherently antagonistic relationships towards others (Brigg, 2009).