In May 2022, then Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, appeared on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert in the US to announce the re-opening of the New Zealand border in the wake of Covid-19 restrictions. During the discussion, she said: “Welcoming guests to New Zealand is so much a part of who we are. Hospitality is part of our identity; we call it manaakitanga. So, please come back and make us whole again.” A year earlier, Amnesty International released a report titled “Please Take Me to a Safe Place” that outlined the detainment of asylum seekers without charge in New Zealand prisons. How can these two scenes of (in)hospitality co-exist? By drawing on Jacques Derrida’s late work on hospitality, this paper examines the political contradictions at play in the examples above, as well as the challenges of hospitality as a theoretical concept in the context of contemporary border regimes. The paper asks two broad questions. First, where does hospitality begin and end—where are its borders? Second, in what ways do borders facilitate and restrict hospitality? The paper finishes by reconstructing a theory of hospitality in the face of increasingly violent border regimes, one in which manaakitanga is not appropriated for political ends but is instead privileged in an ethics of common care.
Patrick Vakaoti and Tui Rakuita A Sociology of ‘Our Sea of Islands’
The late Tongan scholar Professor Epeli Hau’ofa popularised the phrase ‘our seas of islands’. This acknowledged relationality and holism in the Pacific as opposed to ‘islands in the far sea’ connoting the Pacific as small islands dotted across a vast ocean. Historically, the latter view reduces the Pacific as of object of study and it’s underdeveloped people and traditions needing to ‘progress’. Sociology has been complicit in this project. As sociologists we see the value of the discipline in the Pacific. This paper is our attempt to present a case for a sociology of ‘our sea of islands’; a sociology that is relevant for the Pacific. In doing so we wish to do three things. First, we draw on our sojourns as former students and teachers of sociology at the University of the South Pacific. Second, to identity the parameteres of possibilities that the sociological tradition has for our sea of islands and thirdly admumtrate on a few themes that need to be incoporated into a sociological discourse on and about the Pacific. Our intention is to initiate a sociology for Oceania that reflects our contemporary realities.
