THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC· FALL 1993

On the Margins ofHistory: From thePunjab to Fiji, by Oskar Spate. Historyof Development Studies 3. Canberra:National Center for DevelopmentStudies, Research School of PacificStudies, Australian National Univer­sity, 1991. ISBN 0-7315-0914-5, viii +142 pp, maps, photographs, appendix,notes, bibliography. A$20.

Historians will know Oskar Spate thehistorian for his three-volume tour deforce on the Pacific since Magellan(The Spanish Lake, 1979; Monopolistsand Freebooters, 1983; and ParadiseFound and Lost, 1989). Oskar Spatethe geographer has enjoyed world famesince the publication in 1954 of Indiaand Pakistan, still recognized as one ofthe finest examples of regional geogra­phy in the English language (andtranslated into Russian in 1957). Thedelightful, lithely written small bookunder review reminds us again ofSpate's further strengths in economicsand anthropology and of his wisdom,humanity, and humor. His own wordsfrom the preface best illuminate thesubject of the book as "slices of a lifemuch of which has been spent on themargins of history in Burma, India,Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, andFiji"; it is these countries (each ofwhich is treated specifically in at leastone chapter) that provide the geo­graphic setting of On the Margins ofHistory.

The book is the third in a series,History of Development Studies, issuedby the National Centre for Develop­ment Studies at the AustralianNational University. Spate was pre­ceded in the series by Heinz Arndt andBen Higgins and will be followed by

E. K. Fisk-all four men having beenleading figures for many decades inresearch and writing related to devel­opment in various parts of southernand southeastern Asia and the PacificIslands. The purpose of the series is toallow such scholars to reflect infor­mally on their past work and its mean­ing. Oskar Spate makes the most of theopportunity and of his aim to show"how it felt at the time."

Tying together his own day-to-dayexperiences and acute observationswith grand events and larger processes,he creates in the first four chapters ofthe book vivid and memorable picturesof colonial life in Burma before WorldWar II, of the political and economicworkings of imperialism there and inIndia, of the end of British dominationin South and Southeast Asia, and ofsuch momentous events as the birth ofPakistan in 1947, a political happeningwhich he admits to be "big history" andin which he played a role as an appliedgeographer working out how, mostlegitimately, the Punjab might havebeen partitioned between India andPakistan. In the final two chapters ofpart I, which is devoted to South andSoutheast Asia, he recounts a revisit toIndia in 1956 and one to Burma in 1967.

Spate revisited India while preparinga second edition of India and Pakistanand tellingly notes changes since beingthere ten years before, examining,among much else, the shift in emphasisfrom agriculture in the first Five YearPlan toward industry in the second: "Itcould be plausibly argued that indus­trial development . . . was badlyneeded to provide new inputs for agri­culture.... But there was a dilemmahere: even more of the rural population

'II ",l. !!MK -_. _.,

BOOK REVIEWS

would become surplus if agriculturewere organized with maximum labor­saving efficiency: yet another of theinterlocking vicious circles whichentangled the rural economy like rollsof barbed or concertina wire" (71).Similarly, Spate's return to Burma in1967 evokes a sharp but compassionateprobing from many sides that clarifiesthe country's sad fate today.

In part 2, attention is turned to thePacific, which Spate began to study in1951, when he left London to take upthe Foundation Chair of Geography inthe new Research School of PacificStudies at the Australian NationalUniversity, a position he held until1967, when he became the school'ssecond director. Chapter 7 covers hisvisits to Papua New Guinea in the early1950S. The first trip, in the company ofJim Davidson and Raymond Firth,"was an occasion to spy out the landand identify likely research possibili­ties" (87), for a major factor in thefoundation of the Research School ofPacific Studies was the need for firmerand deeper knowledge of Papua NewGuinea.

By his second visit, Spate wasalready putting his knowledge toapplied purpose, serving as convener ofa small working party, which alsoincluded economist Trevor Swan andanthropologist Cyril Belshaw, to advisethe Australian minister for territorieson the direction that economic devel­opment policy should take. Pungentlyrejecting then prevalent fallacies aboutthe nature of Papua New Guinea's landand its availability for settlement,Spate's report came down strongly infavor of fostering indigenous involve­ment in the market economy rather

439

than following the then common talkof extending plantations and encourag­ing small-scale white farming settle­ment. Whatever the tensions of PapuaNew Guinea today, think of the alter­native had Spate's recommended policynot been effected.

Chapter 9 continues the PNG storyinto the 1960s and beyond, detailingSpate's significant role in the founda­tion and development of the Universityof Papua New Guinea and giving asparkling interpretation of the pur­poses of education and the develop­ment of a people's identity. But it ischapter 8 "The Fijian People 1958" thattells the story-set graphically asalways in the geographic and socioeco­nomic milieu of the day-of Spate'sgreatest contribution to applied socialscience in the Pacific: how, as a govern­ment-appointed one-man commissionof enquiry into the economic problemsfacing the (ethnic) Fijian people, hecame to write The Fijian People: Eco­nomic Problems and Prospects (1959).

His diagnosis and prescription, stillcommonly spoken of in Fiji as "theSpate report," was based on village­level consultations uniquely wide for avisiting expert, and greatly aided, as hefirmly acknowledges, by Fijian anthro­pologist Rusiate Nayacakalou, whoserved as "a truly excellent interpreter"(101). The report contrasted thestrongly communal traditional Fijianway of life, vaka Viti, with individual­ism and established a new model ofFijian rural development that led thecolonial government to relax the FijianRegulations and to favor more overtlythe independent farmers (galala).Issues that Spate wrote of more thanthree decades ago remain wholly alive

., I .1~ ,

When a distinguished British socialanthropologist writes a book on emo­tion, that's news. A. L. Epstein, pro­fessor emeritus at the University ofSussex, well known for his writing on

In the Midst ofLife: Affect and Idea­tion in the World of the Tolai, byA. L. Epstein. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1992. ISBN 0-520­°7562-5, x + 317 pp, figures, notes,bibliography, index. US$45.

in Fiji today, and this chapter, which inlooking back provides an admirablesummary of the 1959 report, as well asthe uncommonly prescient report itself,provides much clear understanding ofthe complex and confused conflicts inFiji's recent history.

To conclude the book, Spate rein­troduces his serious but not solemnessay "On Being an Expert," which waswritten after his Fiji experience andfirst published in 1961. He observesthat much has changed, some thingsfor the better, during his more thanhalf a century of scholarship and par­ticipation on the margins of history (orits center). Yet, "the modern world is aremorseless beast; once you getinvolved in the machine of moderniza­tion you must follow it through regard­less" (132). In studying or advisingabout this matter, there are few betterexamples than Oskar Spate's lifelongattempt, well displayed in this book, togive "all that one has both of intellec­tual passion and of human feeling­and yet these two must be disciplinedinto strict balance" (138-139).

WILLIAM C. CLARK

Eumundi, QLD, Australia

44°

::. ::.

THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC· FALL 1993

political and legal issues in CentralAfrica and Melanesia, has done justthat.

In the last two decades, anthropolo­gists have paid increasingly more atten­tion to the role of emotion in humanbehavior. There have been manyimportant contributions toward under­standing how culture shapes emotion,as well as some progress toward sort­ing out the mix of pan-cultural andculture-specific in emotion behavior.Most of these studies have emergedfrom dissertation research by youngerscholars. It was little more than twentyyears ago that emotion emerged almostby accident as a focus of research (eg,Jean Briggs's Inuit study), but morerecent research has been specificallydesigned to investigate emotions (eg,Catherine Lutz's Haluk study.)

Epstein comes to emotion through avery different route. He had alreadydone extensive ethnographic work, butcame to feel that for some questions,the current concepts of social anthro­pology were inadequate. While tryingto understand a political crisis overfederation in Central Africa, he foundhimself pushed to draw on psychoana­lytic ideas about emotion to explain thevery different reactions of differentpopulations. As Epstein developed histhinking about emotion he drew espe­cially from psychologists like SylvanTomkins (whom he praises), anthro­pologists like Catherine Lutz (whom hecriticizes), and most ingeniously andinterestingly, from the 1979 novel,Aimbe the Pastor, written in English byPaulias Matane, a Tolai.

For a decade now, Epstein has beenwriting short pieces on emotion, sharp­ening his pen, as it were. Perhaps themost notable of these was his 1984