We are glad to be able to report that our ESfO conference was a roaring success. Staff and research students in the St Andrews Centre for Pacific Studies gave an enthusiastic welcome to 180-plus delegates to the 8th Conference of the European Society for Oceanists, held on 5th-8th July, 2010. For a brief report, see news and events.
About the Centre
'Pacific Connections' High Level Panel
The 'Pacific Connections' High Level Panel at the European Development Days event in Warsaw, December 2011, was co-organized by the Centre for Pacific Studies, and the Pacific Division of the European Commission's European External Action Services. Pacific Connections was the first ever EDD High Level Panel organized by academic researchers, and the first ever EDD event open to the public.
Scholarship in Social Anthropology at the Centre for Pacific Studies
The St Andrews Centre for Pacific Studies invites applications from candidates with a doctoral research project in any field of Social Anthropology, with a regional focus on the Pacific. This fee waiver doctoral scholarship will start in September 2011 and cover tuition fees at the UK/EU rate (currently £3,732 per annum) for three years.
The peoples and cultures of the Pacific and Melanesia regions have had a truly remarkable impact on the history of social anthropology from its origins, an impact that continues into the present day. The primary method for fieldwork, participant observation, first came into its own here. Participant observation means long-term, close encounters and day-to-day living together, learning the lived realities of life among the people with whom you're working.
Early participant observer studies informed the development of key anthropological ideas for understanding kinship, gender, varieties of knowledge, politics, and economies based in gift exchange. Many ground-breaking ethnographic studies found their inspiration here – Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific being probably the most famous.
The creativity of Pacific people's engagement with global forms such as colonialism, Christianity, capitalism and development ensured a continuing impact on the discipline. Today these engagements and encounters are an acknowledged source of theoretical creativity in anthropological theory worldwide. In contemporary anthropology, then, the region continues to offer extraordinary opportunities for research in every domain.
Objective of the CPS
Our objective at the Centre for Pacific studies is to encourage study of the region. Our emphasis is on anthropological research, broadly understood. We are interested in all things Pacific – the region's wonderful historical variation, its religions, languages, the politics of its states, cities, towns and villages, literature, art, public and domestic ritual, kinship and household organisation, law – in short every aspect of social relations to be found there.