Family Violence and Social Change in the Pacific Islands

Loïs Bastide is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of French Polynesia, where he is a member of the Équipe d'accueil Sociétés Traditionnelles Contemporaines en Océanie (EASTCO) research team. He is also an Associate Researcher at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme du Pacifique (MSH-P) and at the Institute of Sociological Research at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. His research interests include transnational migrations in Southeast Asia, the management of pandemics, public health crises, and natural disasters, and violence in the family. He is currently coordinating a wide-ranging research program on social change in French Polynesia at the MSH-P. He is author of Habiter le transnational: Migrations et travail entre Java, Kuala Lumpur et Singapour (ENS, 2015). Denis Regnier is Head of Humanities and Social Sciences and Assistant Professor at the University of Global Health Equity, Rwanda. He holds a PhD in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and has previously taught at the University of French Polynesia, where he is a member of the Équipe d'accueil Sociétés Traditionnelles Contemporaines en Océanie (EASTCO) and an Associate Researcher at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme du Pacifique (MSH-P). His research interests include the legacies of slavery in the Indian Ocean, the development of social essentialism in Madagascar, and social and public health issues in Africa and the South Pacific. He is author of Slavery and Essentialism in Highland Madagascar: Ethnography, History, Cognition (Routledge, 2020).

Introduction - Family violence, and social change in the Pacific Islands 1. Settler violence, family, and whānau violence in Aotearoa, New Zealand 2. Placing the children: fostering Native Hawaiian children in an American state 3. Transferred children and the production of family violence in French Polynesia: social change and the adaptations of fa’a’amura’a 4. Familialism and gender violence in New Caledonian families 5. Naming violence: forms of economic violence in highland Papua New Guinea 6. Culture-based counselling at the domestic violence shelter of the Sisters of the Anglican Church of Melanesia in the Solomon Islands 7. Women-only households in Port Vila, Vanuatu: sites of social resistance 8. From structural violence to family violence: Insights into perpetrators’ experiences in French Polynesia today 9. ‘This is not Vaelens!’: naming and reacting to physical abuse in a Vanuatu school 10. Quarrels, corporal punishment, and magical attacks: What is ‘family violence’ in Kiriwina? 11. Contexts and levels of community violence in highlands Papua New Guinea Postface - Analysing violence: lessons from a collective reflection