brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

VILLAGE life lies at the heart of Solomon Islands. So its future fate has profound implications to the continued existence of the nation.

For the village is not simply a people’s residential site but it is shorthand for a completely different way of living than found in more developed parts of the world; a symbol of and a code word for the reality in which the overwhelming majority of our people choose to live.

The Solomons is most profoundly a nation of villages! 84%+ of our people live, work and exist in these settlements which are much more than dormitory sites. Children are born in, grow up and dwell in a particular village because it’s very location attests to the presence of life’s essential resource base.

It is the place of food production, house materials, water for drinking, cooking and washing, medicine, fuel supply, real estate, recreation, etc. etc. These are the material side of life.

But culture, politics, economics, life education, security, world view, etc. are an essential part of the reality of the village as well. All the stuff a person needs for basic living is found in the village.

Many in modern society, however, can and do move around to different parts of their country, choosing to live closer to work commitment or to enjoy better weather conditions or whatever.

For the Melanesian, leaving the ancestral land base, at least mentally, is often seen as but a temporary departure, with a strong intention, although not always followed through, of returning one day to one’s roots. Hence, in the Melanesian mind the village is not a temporary stop along life’s road but a permanent life structure.

However, the outsider, those born and raised in different societies, especially those living the cash economy, assume that Solomon Islands is evolving, slowly of course, towards a miniature version of the capitalist West. Hence to prepare for this kind of future requires an economic system, legal framework and political life reflective of those in advanced Western democracies.

The question, however, must be; is this an accurate assumption? Are the Solomons inevitably headed in that direction or is the nation trying to carve out for itself a different kind of nation. If in truth it is traveling towards a predominate cash economy, how long will this journey take?

The 1976 national census found that the Solomons urban population–Honiara, Gizo, Auki, Kira Kira, etc. etc.–worked out to be 12% of the population.

More over, it was widely accepted by many that by the turn of the century, almost 30% of Solomons’ population would have already flooded into the nation’s urban and peri-urban areas. Yet, the 1999 national census found something different. It established that only 16% of our people had taken up urban residence.

In a real sense Solomon Islanders were bucking a global trend whereby the bulk of rural people in other countries were drifting towards bigger and bigger urban centres. Some of the largest cities–Shanghai, Delhi, Jakarta, etc.–had more than 10,000,000 people and were growing by leaps and bounds yearly.

Over a 23 year period, then, Solomons urban growth had been a modest 4% rise much less than what had been predicted. The bulk of our people, contrary to expert predictions, had remained in the country side.

The present government as well as the previous Sogovare one both recognized this basic truth and built up national development plans emphasizing Rural Advancement and the Bottom Up Approach.

Each December, for instance, the nation witnesses a mass exodus of city people out of Honiara back to the village. The city noticeably thins out when its citizens head for different provinces but knowing full well that their home villages have little piped water, proper toilet facilities and a diet, for the most part, bland.

What is it then that continues to attract so many of them back to village life even if only for a few short weeks?

Some say that returning to village life, even for a short period, is a way or recharging internal batteries for the rest of the year of town living. I go a step further! Returning to village life is a re-confirmation of the Melanesian world view: they do not own the land but the land owns them!

Will the village disappear? No, far from it! Solomon Islands’ village life will not only not disappear but will grow stronger during the 21st century. In proof let the Social Unrest years speak out!

This 1998-2003 period witnessed a state seriously failing in its obligations to its citizens. It was the village alone that kept the nation together, not the government.

What lessons should RAMSI be learning from the idea that the village and all it stands for will strengthen? A strong case can be made that the Social Unrest years are fundamentally a cry for a different kind of Solomon Islands and not one which is a pale imitation of metropolitan nations.

A nation that understands and incorporates the villagers’ world view rather than one that imposes a new world vision.

The Trobriand Islands are an archipelago of coral atolls off the eastern coast of New Guinea. Most of the population lives on the main island of Kiriwina. The people of the area are mostly subsistence horticulturalists who live in traditional settlements. The social structure is based on matrilineal clans who control land and resources. People participate in the regional circuit of exchange of shells called kula, sailing to visit trade partners on sea-going canoes.

Although an understanding of reproduction and modern medicine is widespread in Trobriand Society, their traditional beliefs have been remarkably resilient, and the idea that in order to become pregnant women must be infused with spirits from the nearby island of Tuma, where people’s spirits go after they die, is still a part of the Trobriand worldview. In the past, many held this traditional belief because the yam, a major food of the island, included chemicals whose effects are contraceptive, so the practical link between sex and pregnancy was not evident.

Particularly interesting and unique to the Trobriand Islands are the linguistic aspect of the indigenous language, Kilivila. In such a linguistic system, the concept of linear progress of time, geometric shapes, and even conventional methods of description are lost altogether or altered. In the example of a specific indigenous yam, when the yam moves from a state of sprouting to ripeness to over ripeness, the name for each object in a specific state changes entirely. This is because the description of the object at different states of development are perceived as wholly different objects. Ripeness is considered a defining ingredient and thus once it becomes over ripe, it is a new object altogether. The same perception pertains to time and geometric shapes.

Our arrangement of history is mainly linear. My great grandfather read by kerosene lamp, my grandfather studied by gaslight, my father read by an electric light, and I study by fluorescent lighting. To us, this is linearity. This is the meaningful sequence.

To the Trobriander, linearity in history is abominable, a denial of all good, since it would imply not only the presence of change, but also that change increases the good. But to the Trobriander value lies in sameness, in repeated pattern, in the incorporation of all time within the same point. What is good in life is exact identity with all past experience and all mythical experience. There is no boundary between past Trobriand existence and the present. It can be indicated that an action is completed, but this does not mean that the action is past.

Where we would say “Many years ago” and use the past tense, the Trobriander will say, “In my father’s childhood” and use non temporal verbs. They place the event situationally, not temporally. Past, present, and future are presented linguistically as the same, are present in existence, and sameness with what we call the past and with myth represents value to the Trobriander.

Where we see a developmental line, the Trobriander sees a point, sometimes increasing in value. Where we find pleasure and satisfaction in moving away from that point, in change as variety or progress, the Trobriander finds it in the repetition of the known, in maintaining the point, or what we call monotony. Esthetic validity, dignity, and value come to them not through arrangement into a linear line, but rather in the undisturbed events within the original, nonlineal order.

The only history which has meaning for the Trobriander is that which evokes the value of the point, or which in the repetition increases the value of the point. For example, every occasion in which a kula object participates becomes an ingredient of its being and increases its value. All these occasions are enumerated with great satisfaction, but the linear course of the traveling kula object is not important.

A Papua New Guinea corruption watchdog has warned that civil discontent over alleged government corruption is growing.

The group say there could be a violent public backlash because of the ever increasing number of corrupt dealings in the Government.

Transparency International’s PNG boss Mike Manning says the breakdown of law and order is getting worse.

“We don’t have any answers immediately as to how we fix a single part of the breakdown of the system of law and order and the breakdown of the systems which would control corruption,” he said.

“But we do know that we’re reading about them day after day after day and that they’re getting worse.”

Transparency International PNG has also criticised government agencies like the Ombudsman Commission for not following through with investigations into leadership issues.

Failed State definition:

A state could be said to “succeed” if it maintains, a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within its borders. When this is broken (e.g., through the dominant presence of warlords, militias, or terrorism), the very existence of the state becomes dubious, and the state becomes a failed state.