In examining affective motivations and meanings associated with kin-based tattooing, this article proposes a practice of 's/kinship': the tangible inscription of relational personhood on the body. While research on the practice of Western tattooing has long been drawn into discourses of deviance and individual identity, little attention has been paid to the tattooing of social relations. Drawing on surveys and interview data, this article highlights the significance of kinship and other forms of relationality in tattooing, bringing attention to how these are manifested through the skin as expressions of social proximity, permanence, and porosity. In doing so an analytic approach to s/kinship is developed to foreground the practice of tattooing as an expression of relational personhood, one that highlights the permeability of personhood as a salient ontological feature in the social life of tattoos and the tattooed.

This article explores the processes involved in developing international, cross-cultural research teams. Scholarship on Indigenous and Pacific Methodologies demonstrate the importance of employing methodologies that center Indigenous approaches to research and relationships. This article explores using these methodologies within research teams as a preliminary step in developing sustainable and impactful international, cross-cultural research teams. Although this is not a formal study, the article reports that the importance of building trust within research teams as an essential step in addition to building trust with communities.

How are the historically fraught contexts of alterity that define postcolonial settings generated and negotiated in the context of medical uncertainty? What role does narrative play in the lived experience of such uncertainty and alterity? Focusing on a single “diagnostic odyssey” of childhood illness, this article examines the relationship between chronic uncertainty, alterity, and narrative sensemaking in the highly dynamic and pluralistic healthcare setting of Vanuatu. It demonstrates how close examination of cultural metaphors relating to sickness can reveal deep insights into the lived experience of illness, health seeking, and caregiving. In doing so, it highlights the role of narrative in rendering otherwise unfathomable circumstances sensible on cultural and existential terms, including by engendering a sense of intersubjective stability in the face of trauma.

An international campaign launched in 2019 encourages tourists to visit Fiji, where the locals may not be wealthy yet are ‘rich in happiness.’ Drawing on critical discourse analysis, this paper investigates the history and implications of commodifying economic assumptions about indigenous happiness and wellbeing. Invoking contemporary neoliberal approaches to ‘positive psychology’, the campaign repackages historically-entrenched colonial stereotypes about the ‘happy native’ while ostensibly inviting reflexivity about the negative impacts of Western capitalism on human wellbeing. In doing so, it problematically romanticises poverty and rationalises continued labour exploitation in tourism. We argue that commodifying anti-monetary logics about subjective wellbeing in the Global South paradoxically serves to justify and further entrench objective economic inequalities.

Health promotion is a core component of the Pacific region's response to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) prevention and control. However, while health promotion should build on and be informed by contextually specific norms and social discourse, there remains a paucity in research that seeks to understand how people in the Pacific region comprehend chronic conditions and their determinants. Based in peri-urban Vanuatu, this codesigned study utilized an open-ended survey to investigate community perceptions of factors contributing to the development of type 2 diabetes. Results demonstrate a complex picture of diabetes-specific health literacy, with 22 distinct causes identified by 308 respondents. Dietary factors were commonly acknowledged; however, dietary complexity was not well understood. Limited recognition of the role of tobacco and alcohol consumption in disease development was also noted. Overall, findings demonstrate mixed successes in NCD-related health promotion. Moving away from more universalized approaches commonly advocated by donors, this research identifies the need for locally designed and driven health promotion that focuses on more nuanced, culturally sensitive, and contextually grounded messaging.

What makes news patriotic? How is photojournalism used in wartime? In a national crisis, the press operates under various forms of censorship. Within these constraints, it continues to produce news in line with what is considered newsworthy. Everyday ‘human interest’ photographs and stories, which tell of bizarre, comic or tragic events, are turned to patriotic ends. The subject of death is transformed by its use in saving the nation; it is accompanied and displaced by more comforting ideas. Originally published in 1991, with the help of full-page illustrations from newspapers and journals, John Taylor looks at the special truth of war news, how it is built on established ways of storytelling, and how photography is used to make it seem real. Taking examples from the First and Second World Wars, the Falklands campaign and present-day accounts of terrorism and crime within the United Kingdom, Taylor shows that aside from legal controls, the press’s own methods bring it close to the official perspective. Drawing on history, sociology and photo-history, War Photography is a well-illustrated account of the place of photojournalism in the news industry and the use of news in creating national identity.

In recent decades, the term ‘mobility’ has emerged as a defining paradigm within the humanities. For scholars engaged in the multidisciplinary topics and perspectives now often embraced by the term Pacific Studies it has been a much more longstanding and persistent concern. Even so, specific questions regarding ‘mobilities of return’—that is, the movement of people ‘back’ to places that are designated, however ambiguously or ambivalently, as ‘home’—have tended to take a back seat within more recent discussions of mobility, transnationalism and migration. Situating return mobility as a starting point for social inquiry gives rise to important questions regarding the broader context and experience of human mobility, community and identity. This represents an important contribution to emerging perspectives that seek to move beyond binary optics of domestic or translocal versus international migration, local versus foreign identity, and indeed of stasis versus mobility itself. This introductory chapter foregrounds the ways in which the volume as a whole demonstrates the extent to which the prospect and practice of returning home, or of navigating returns between multiple homes, is a central rather than peripheral component of contemporary Pacific Islander mobilities

This paper examines aspects of gendered discourse around mobile phones in Vanuatu, focusing especially on the talk of high-ranking men from the northern Raga-speaking region of Pentecost Island. Rather than being restricted to the technologies or their direct capacities alone, it is argued that the local reception of new technologies such as mobile phones should be contextualised in terms of broader dialogues of change, and should also take into account the visual and discursive expressions of culture that accompanies them, including in the form of marketing. Examination of the 'impact' of such new technologies should also include taking account of broader local meanings and messages that become associated with them. As the ethnography presented here suggests, while mobile phones themselves certainly provide a useful tool for furthering positive social change, such as in the empowerment of women, the meanings and narratives that surround them may by marked contrast entail more negative entrenchments of unequal relations of power.

Tourism advertising for Vanuatu has in recent years become saturated with images of children.Brochures, in-flight magazines and digital media productions are repeatedly adorned with photographs of ni-Vanuatu 'pikininis' frollicking on the shorelines of sun-drenched beaches or colourfully dressed up in 'native' costumes.In these images, barefoot island fantasies are infused with an alluring innocence and spontaneity, a narrative conjunction that doubly reinscribes the touristic trope of 'escape' from modern adult life.What is more, cruise ship tourists to Vanuatu may purchase souvenir versions of this fantasy 'child native' at the market stalls that greet them, in the form of colourfully adorned plastic baby dolls.They may also consume real life 'pikinini in paradise' in the form of ni-Vanuatu children who are exhorted by their parents to play dress-up, strike smiling poses, and trade photographic opportunities for 'donations'.As this chapter explores, far from representing a simple replication or circulation of imagery, such performances reflect the ambiguities and ambivalences that may occur when touristic images of ethnicity become miniaturised in the production of souvenirs and enacted by locals for photographic consumption by visiting tourists.By obscuring rather 1

an international group of scholars, representatives of indigenous organisations and government personnel from the CANZUS group of Anglo-settler democracies-Canada, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand

They talk about the second coming—Jesus will come, yes, and all of this kind of thing, and we have to be ready—but they never say you must prepare by discarding any black magic or power that you have. This has not come out clearly. It’s like they say, “you wear two baskets: one basket for your bible, and one basket for all your stones.” Municipal Health Officer1 interview recorded Luganville, 2007, translated from Bislama by the author

This introduction contextualises the nine papers that make up the special issue Gender andPerson inOceania. Gender and personhood represent core orienting concepts within Pacific anthropology, from the pioneering work of Marilyn Strathern's Gender of theGift to more recent scholarly attention to the impact of Christianity and modernity. The papers in this volume offer a comparative and critical perspective on long-standing ideas of relational' and individual' personhood across multiple sites in Oceania, highlighting several key insights, including the importance of situated and relational understandings of agency and the centrality of those things' typically seen as non-agentive to the formation of personhood. Most importantly, while re-establishing the inseparable articulation of personhood with gendered dynamics, the contributors to this volume also highlight the differential, transforming, and shifting nature of engendered personhood, revealed through close attention to local knowledge, conditions, and practices.