5 - Enemy Friends in Cultural Programmes

Summary

This chapter is set within the activities the boarding schools used to draw explicit attention to cultural difference among students. This is a remarkable context from the point of view of international comparative literature, which shows strong links between schooling and the outbreak and recurrence of conflict (Smith, 2010; King, 2014; Bellino and Williams, 2017, p 3). Group identities, like those I discuss here, often appear to be threats to peace because protagonists on both sides consider their identities fundamentally antagonistic and their differences insurmountable, making the conflicts between them intractable (Tint, 2010; E. Cole and Murphy, 2011, p 338). Nor is there much evidence in the comparative literature to suggest that schooling can cut through those divisions to promote peace (Harber, 2019). As a teacher of an integrated classroom in Bosnia-Herzegovina told Briony Jones (2012, p 145), the teacher's classroom was ‘a bomb of hatred which is about to explode.’

Even from a Bougainville and Solomon Islands centric perspective drawing attention to difference entailed some risk. As I show, it forced students into dialogue about three topics of frequent debate, controversy and even conflict in wider society. The first of these topics is wantokism. Wantok literally means ‘one talk’ and thus to call somebody a wantok is to recognise a measure of solidarity and obligation to them based on common language. One's wantoks are context dependent; wantok can refer to a person's immediate kin when they are in a village, to people of the same language or island when in multicultural urban areas, or other nationals as people travel abroad (Brigg, 2009, p 153). People thus use wantokism to build society and social support in unfamiliar surroundings (Schram, 2015, p 6). As I will describe, when that support revolves around island, region or province of origin it can lead to the reification of others around stereotypes of other groups (see Schram, 2015, pp 16–7). In these contexts wantokism has become the source of accusations of favouritism and corruption. On the other hand, however, wantokism is also a contemporary social institution with traces of the willingness and enthusiasm of people to create relationships and social obligations to each other through ordinary practices of sharing and exchange (Schram, 2015, p 4; see Chapter 2).