Established in the 1830s to categorise the population of the Pacific, the labels ‘Polynesian’, ‘Micronesian’ and ‘Melanesian’ persist until today. They are arbitrary “racial and cultural typologies … patently predicated on a presumption of the superiority of European races and cultures” (Jolly 2007: 516), which ranked Pacific islanders from ‘more European-like’ and civilised to ‘less European-like’ and thus more savage. This categorisation has affected descriptions of temper, with Polynesians being the most peaceful and Melanesians the most violent groups, resulting in a focus on representations of violence (cf. Besteman) in the inter- and intra-national public discourse on some communities, most notably Papua New Guinea (PNG) in Melanesia, and the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM).
This paper addresses two issues. Firstly, we discuss the way that these European colonial stereotypes are appropriated and perpetuated in self-representations of PNG and FSM. Secondly, we closely examine how these stereotypes are projected upon others within these communities (e.g. Sepik people in PNG or Chuukese in FSM), in a process we could describe as a form of fractal recursivity (Irvine and Gal 2000).
Starting with an analysis of how PNG and the FSM are represented in Western media today, we explore to what extent images are reproduced in discourses on stigmatised social groups within these states. The data are yielded from TV documentaries, newspaper articles, as well as field notes and sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Australia, PNG and FSM. Using Reisigl and Wodak’s (2016) Discourse-Historical Approach, we analyse the ideological construction of the communities in question through nomination, predication and argumentation strategies.
References
Besteman, Catherine (1996). Representing Violence and ‘Othering’ Somalia. Cultural Anthropology, 11.1, 120-133.
Irvine, Judith and Susan Gal (2000). Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation. In Kroskrity, Paul V. (ed.), Regimes of Language. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 35-83.
Jolly, Margaret (2007). Imagining Oceania: Indigenous and Foreign Representations of a Sea of Islands. The Contemporary Pacific, 19.2, 508-545.
Reisigl, Martin and Ruth Wodak (2016). The discourse-historical approach (DHA). In Wodak, Ruth and Michael Meyer (eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, 3rd ed. London: Sage Publications, 23-61.
