Pacific islands artifacts and imageries have had a strong appeal to the popular imagination of the West over the years. However, in recent years the question of ownership of intellectual property rights has emerged as many indigenous groups around the world call for the repatriation of their cultural objects taken away, with or without their...

Agricultural development is intimately tied to the environment and cultural practices, specifically socio-political change. Nowhere are these relationships more clear than on Polynesian islands. Many sequences of agricultural change have now been documented in the region, and their relationships with the environment and cultural change assessed. Most, if not all, of these identified sequences have...

Background: Following the mass migration in the 1970’s a young urbanised Pacific population has emerged in New Zealand (NZ), with Pacific people now an integral part of the cultural fabric. Teenage pregnancy (births, terminations and miscarriages of women

Over the last few decades, the number of disasters in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) has been constantly increasing. While usually portrayed as weak and passive victims in the face of disasters, the inhabitants of these countries have always demonstrated abilities to deal with such events. Remittances, the money and goods sent by migrants back...

Urbanisation in Papua New Guinea (PNG) is increasingly characterised by the sale of customary land to migrants from other provinces. As the borders of towns transform through this process, I ask: what does selling customary land in PNG mean, and what implications do sales have for Papua New Guinean sociality? I address these questions by...