Reimagining Oceania through Critical Junctures—Introduction

Abstract

The introduction to this special issue draws attention to the conscious, creative and innovative actions of people when encountering new ideas, material objects or events like changes in the environment. The main argument is that critical situations and crisis make people reimagine their worlds, and how and when this is done is at the core of this volume. For this purpose, the concept of critical juncture is introduced since it allows for a fresh perspective by zooming in on individual, imaginative qualities and broader, often unexpected, transformations which are a result of both historical processes and cultural actors' creativity on different scales. The introduction suggests that the concept of critical juncture can be applied as a theoretical framework for a wide range of changes in Oceania, of which climate change is a particularly relevant example.

From Contentious to Contended: An ‘Event’‐ful Account of Karavaran History

“…By 2019, neither event remained active as a ‘critical juncture’, to refer once again to the discussion of Schorch and Pascht (). No longer was there that much to get fired up about: Europeans were mostly gone; the Kaun had dissolved; churches had proliferated; religious practices had converged.…”

“…The dynamics of many such events – such encounters – are usefully elaborated in Philipp Schorch's and Arno Pascht's discussion of ‘critical junctures’. These occur when there is: ‘first, a crisis or critical moment, which can be of short or lengthy duration; second, ideational change resulting from the crisis or moment; and third, policy change resulting from the ideational change that realigns the direction in which the society or polity is heading’ (:116). Of special interest to Schorch and Pascht is the creative force of the individual and of that person's acts of imagination that are elicited under these circumstances.…”

Climate change reception studies in anthropology

“…The “hermeneutical problem” of reception in climate anthropology may consist of the inherent tension between “maintaining fidelity to science and expanding beyond it” (Callison, 2014, p. 5), or finding the potential for “more‐than‐scientific yet not anti‐scientific responses that are locally meaningful and morally compelling” (Fair, 2018, p. 119). On the face of it, “reception” has a somewhat passive and dualistic undertone (Kirsch, 2020; Schorch & Pascht, 2017, p. 110); we speculate that this has resulted in criticism that belies the field's more complex generative shifts. Interpretation occurs through hermeneutic circulation between text and reader, implying a double transformation, as “lay audiences” discover new significances.…”

Letter from the Editors: Engaging with Oceania: Some Background about the Region – and Why It Matters for IB Research

“…Yet, in terms of "mental maps" and the geographical scope of IB research, the Pacific rarely features as a holistic entity in IB research (Thomas, Shenkar, & Clarke, 1994). Instead, we continue to draw on a physical geography-informed epistemology and pursue nation-state-centric research, as opposed to reimagining such a region as an idea-scape or a space for exploring various types of critical junctures of tradition and modernity, the physical and the metaphysical, or the global and the local (Schorch & Pascht, 2017). For example, the Federated States of Micronesia, located northeast of New Guinea and east of the Philippines, comprise some 600 islands and have a population of just over 104,000 people.…”