Culturecide in changing Micronesian climates? About the unintenionality of climate change

International Journal of Human Rights

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 2014, Pages 336-349

  Hofmann, Rebecca ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH   (Germany)

Author keywords

climate change; cultural genocide; cultural heritage; Micronesia

Indexed keywords

EID: 84903318747     PISSN: 13642987     EISSN: 1744053X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13642987.2014.914707     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. For a detailed and recent report on the US affiliated islands see PIRCA, Climate Change and Pacific Islands (ANU Newsroom, 2008).
2. See, for example, "Climate Change Has Sealed our Fate" in Kiribati. http://news.anu.edu.au/2008/06/25climate-change-has-sealed-our-fate-kiribati-president/ (accessed 17 April 2013).
3. Cooney Campbell, Bougainville Works to Relocate Climate Refugees (Australia: ABC News Online). http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-02-13/bougainville-works-to-relocate-climate-refugees/295182 (accessed 12 June 2013).
4. Danielle Conway, Indigenizing Intellectual Property Law: Customary Law, Legal Pluralism, and the Protection of Indigenous Peoples Rights, Identity, and Resources, Texas Wesleyan Law Review 15 (2009): 207.
5. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
6. James Clifford, Traditional Futures, in Questions of Tradition, ed. Mark Salber Phillips and Gordon Joel Schochet (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 152-168.
7. Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, Raphael Lemkin "On Genocides", in their guest edited issue of the Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (2005).
8. Damien Short, Australia: A Continuing Genocide? Journal of Genocide Research 12, no. 1 (2010): 47.
9. It is interesting to note the simultaneous development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly the overlap of eliminating cultural genocide from the former and minority rights from the latter.
10. Johannes Morsink, Cultural Genocide, the Universal Declaration, and Minority Rights, Human Rights Quarterly 21 (1999): 1022).
11. Leaving behind a gap in the protection of minorities and cultural identity, nominally covered by arguments that other future and existing regulations will serve better to the task.
12. Short, Australia: A Continuing Genocide?, 52.
13. Sabine Hess, Person and Place. Ideas, Ideals and the Practice of Sociality on Vanua Lava, Vanuatu (New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009).
14. Claudia Card, Genocide and Social Death, Hypathia 18, no. 1 (2003): 63-79.
15. Short, Australia: A Continuing Genocide?, 62.
16. The islands that are home to approximately 110,000 inhabitants are spread over seven million square kilometres with large bodies of water in between. Yet, the water might be separating the islands and inhabitants as much as it is connecting them; Micronesia is thus a recognised cultural area amongst anthropologists and other scientists.
17. Manuel Rauchholz, Towards an Understanding of Adoption, Person, and Emotion. The Ideal Norm and Reality of Life Amongst the Chuukese in Micronesia (unpublished PhD diss., University of Heidelberg, 2009), 150.
18. See works by Joakim Peter for Chuuk, SailiemanuLilomaiava-Doktor for Samoans and Epeli-Hauofa for emic views on spatiality. Much has also been written by Western scholars; see, for example, the monograph series edited by.
19. Jürg Wassmann and Katharina Stockhaus-White, Person, Space and Memory in the Contemporary Pacific (New York; Oxford: Berghahn, 2007).
20. In 2011-2012, the author spent 11 months in Chuuk, one of the four states of the Federated States of Micronesia, teaching at a local college and doing anthropological research (including interviews, informal conversations and participant observation) on questions regarding human- nature relationships in changing climates. All data and quotes, when not indicated otherwise, stem from the authors fieldwork and are her sole responsibility.
21. Francis Hezel, The New Shape of Old Island Cultures - A Half Century of Social Change in Micronesia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 34-35.
22. Patricia Parker, Land Tenure in Trukese Society, 1850-1980. (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1985).
23. For examples of forced relocation and the high psychological stress involved, for example in the case of Marshall Islanders who had to leave their home islands due to US nuclear testing, see.
24. Michael Lieber, ed., Exiles and Migrants in Oceania (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1977).
25. Card, Genocide and Social Death, 63.
26. Conway, Indigenizing Intellectual Property Law, 207-256.
27. Damien Short, Cultural Genocide and Indigenous Peoples: A Sociological Approach, The International Journal of Human Rights 14, no. 6 (2010): 831-46.
28. Short, Cultural Genocide and Indigenous Peoples, 836.
29. See, for example, the argument between Short and Dirk Moses in Short, Australia: A Continuing Genocide? Note
30. For a discussion on the relation between climate change and ecocide, see the contribution by Martin Crook and Damien Short in this issue.
31. Martin Crook and Damien Short, Marx, Lemkin and the Genocide-Ecocide Nexus, International Journal of Human Rights 18, no. 3 (2014): 298-319.
32. Toon van Meijl, Pacific Discourses About Cultural Heritage and Its Protection: An Introduction, International Journal of Cultural Property 16 (2009): 222.
33. This threat became reality for so-called lost generations, who underwent intensive Western education and alteration and lost all connection to their native culture, i.e. Australias stolen generation or Micronesias youth growing up in Americas Navy and later Trust Territory regimes where store-food became abundant and formal school education compulsory, rendering the students without any knowledge of traditional food preparations and little material culture.
34. Van Meijl, Pacific Discourses, 224.
35. UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage 1972; UNESCO and WIPO 1982: Model Provisions for National Laws on the Protection of Expressions of Folklore against Illicit and Other Prejudicial Actions; UNESCO 1989: Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore; Living Human Treasures 1993; Proclamation of Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage (UNESCO 1997, which, for example, listed the Vanuatu Sand Drawings that are by their proper nature easy prey for higher sea levels).
36. 155 EX/Decision 3.5.5. Annex Regulation (c) as cited in.
37. Noriko Aikawa, An Historical Overview of the Preparation of the UNESCO International Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, Museum International 56, no. 12 (2004): 141.
38. Art. 1 proclaims that as a source of exchange, innovation and creativity, cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature.
39. Francesco Francioni, Beyond State Sovereignty: The Protection of Cultural Heritage as a Shared Interest of Humanity, Michigan Journal of International Law 25 (2004): 18.
40. Philippe Descola, Jenseits von Natur und Kultur (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011).
41. Michael Goldsmith, Who Owns Native Nature? Discourses of Rights to Land, Culture, and Knowledge in New Zealand, International Journal of Cultural Property 16(2009): 325-339.
42. Who states that land and culture for the New Zealand Ma-ori are inalienable.
43. Marilyn Strathern, The Patent and the Malanggan, Theory, Culture and Society 18, no. 4, (2001): 1-26.
44. who argues for including land in intellectual property in Melanesia.
45. Joakim Peter, Uleletiw: Imaging of My Paradise, in Pacific Places, Pacific Histories. Essays in Honor of Robert C. Kiste, ed. Brij Lal (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 261.
46. To the authors best knowledge, this point has so far not been analysed in regard to its possible applicability to the otherwise broadly conducted debates on climate change-related movement, whose actors are usually labelled as climate refugees.
47. UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination; Declaration on Cultural Diversity.
48. Carl Heine, Micronesia at the Crossroads - A Reappraisal of the Micronesian Political Dilemma (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1974), 3.
49. John Connell, Losing Ground? Tuvalu, the Greenhouse Effect and the Garbage Can, Asia Pacific Viewpoint 44, no. 2 (2003): 90.
50. In 1989, the First South Pacific Regional Environment Programme Meeting on Climate Change and Sea Level Rise took place in the Marshall Islands. One year later, after the World Climate Conference, the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS) was formed. However, as predicted catastrophes had not yet taken place, AOSIS lost interest in its lobbying business in the mid-90s (Connell, Losing Ground?, 90). The failure to see the connection between current environmental changes and global warming continues to create uncertainty and hinders the initiation of preventive measures.
51. Jerry Jacka, Global Averages, Local Extremes: The Subtleties and Complexities of Climate Change in Papua New Guinea, in Anthropology and Climate Change. From Encounters to Actions, ed. Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2009), 207.
52. Markus Vogt, Climate Justice from a Christian Point of View: Challenges for a New Definition of Wealth (talk, Religion in Global Environmental and Climate Change: Sufferings, Values, Lifestyles Workshop, Potsdam, 11-13 January 2010).
53. Hezel, The New Shape of Old Island Cultures.
54. As later confirmed to the author, pronounced La Niña effects caused these events. If the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is intensified by climate change as predicted, people will have to deal with floods and droughts much more often in the years to come.
55. However, most households do not dispose of washing machines as only the main island, Wéénéé, is electrified, while few villages have solar power and most run diesel generators during evening hours.
56. Before Christianity, sea burials were also common practice as well as keeping body parts of the deceased within or underneath the house.
57. Anthony Oliver-Smith, Climate Change and Population Displacement: Disasters and Dia-sporas in the Twenty-First Century, in Anthropology and Climate Change. From Encounters to Actions, ed. Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2009), 123.
58. Erika R. Apfelbaum, And Now What, After Such Tribulations? Memory and Dislocation in the Era of Uprooting, American Psychologist 55, no. 9 (2000): 1009.
59. Carla Roncoli, Todd Crane and Ben Orlove, Fielding Climate Change in Cultural Anthropology, in Anthropology and Climate Change. From Encounters to Actions, ed. Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2009), 87.
60. The literature on climate induced migration has grown considerably throughout the last couple of years and so has the number of scholars who look at the topic from various angles. Western discourses are nevertheless still prevailing. Here are some few examples.
61. Frank Biermann and Ingrid Boas, Preparing for a Warmer World, Global Environmental Politics 10, no. 1 (2010): 60-88.
62. Maxine Burkett, In Search of Refuge: Pacific Islands, Climate-Induced Migration, and the Legal Frontier, Asia Pacific Issues, no. 98 (2011): 1-8.
63. Betsy Hartmann, Rethinking Climate Refugees and Climate Conflict: Rhetoric, Reality and the Politics of Policy Discourse, Journal of International Development 22, no. 2 (2010): 233-246.
64. Francis Hezel, Loss of Culture. How Real Is the Threat?, Micronesian Counselor 56 (2005): 9.
65. James Nason and Joakim Peter, Keeping Rong from Wrong: The Identification and Protection of Traditional Intellectual Property in Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia, International Journal of Cultural Property, 16, Special Issue Number 3 (2009): 273-290.
66. Rosita Henry and William Jeffery, Waterworld: The Heritage Dimensions of "Climate Change" in the Pacific, Historic Environment 21, no. 1 (2008): 12-18.
67. Glenn Petersen, Nan Madols Contested Landscape: Topography and Tradition in the Eastern Caroline Islands, Isla -A Journal of Micronesian Studies 3, no. 1 (1995): 106.
68. Thomas King, How Micronesia Changed the U.S. Historic Preservation Program and the Importance of Keeping It From Changing Back, Micronesian Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 5, nos 1-2 (2006): 511.
69. Hezel, Loss of Culture, 2.
70. John Docker, Raphael Lemkins History of Genocide and Colonialism (paper for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Washington, DC, 2004), 14-15.
71. Using the example of American Indians, he sees cultural change as gradual adaption to outside influences while cultural genocide refers to the complete and irreversible change, thus the destruction of a culture.
72. Oliver-Smith, Climate Change and Population Displacement, 123.
73. Card, Genocide and Social Death, 63-79.
74. Rauchholz, Towards an Understanding of Adoption, Person, and Emotion.
75. Roncoli, Crane and Orlove, Fielding Climate Change in Cultural Anthropology, 87.
76. Francioni, Beyond State Sovereignty, 4.
77. Oliver-Smith, Climate Change and Population Displacement, 123.
78. Two good introductory readings on the debate of environmental and climate refugees are.
79. Richard Black, Environmental Refugees: Myth or Reality?, New Issues in Refugee Research, no. 34 (2001): 1-19.
80. Etienne Piguet, From "Primitive Migration" to "Climate Refugees": The Curious Fate of the Natural Environment in Migration Studies, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103, no. 1 (2013): 148-162.