Conclusion

Summary

Bougainvilleans and Solomon Islanders have convinced me that the combination of place-based justice, the everyday and cultural production are useful tools for transitional justice. Together, these concepts have helped me understand what justice looks like to the people concerned, how it is enacted in the habits and routines of daily life, and to appreciate the meanings attached to those seemingly banal practices. In the introduction to this book I wrote about travelling to a graduation ceremony at Weather Coast Primary School and how differently my friend Dominic and I interpreted the celebration; whereas I had paid attention to the laughter and happiness, he focused on what he thought had been missing since the Tension.

The conceptual tools have helped me make sense of what we saw. For a start I can see the significance to people of coming together for graduation feasts. Indeed, sometimes even disentangling practices can be a success simply because coming together recognises the relationship between the parties (White and Watson Gegeo, 1990, p 10). At the schools, the assembly of different people and the resources they used to prepare feasts were acknowledgements of existing relationships, and the school and the education of their children were the reasons for communities to gather. Similarly, when I returned to Tenaru from Avuavu Provincial Secondary School close to the end of the school year, I simply lost track of the farewell parties going on around me: seemingly every team or club held one as the school wound down. In fact, in Bougainville even the staff and students of Mabiri High School in 2015, the year before my arrival, held a graduation feast in spite of the fact that the school had completely fractured into camps that supported one of two conflicting individuals. The conflict had seemingly prevented the school from functioning. By the time I arrived the incident had been resolved administratively; the Marist Brothers order had removed one of the men and the faction that supported him. But teachers and students were near unanimous in the view that reconciliation must happen, and the Catholic Education Office had been mediating.