17/01/2023
For centuries, the Pacific Ocean has been home to the most accomplished builders of seagoing vessels and the world’s finest navigators. When Europeans began venturing into the Pacific from the 16th century, they did not find a single archipelago that was not already inhabited or had been visited before them. But wherever Europeans began to settle, Oceanian ancestral traditions were put in jeopardy. The so-called 'civilising' mission, settler colonialism, and imperial capitalism displaced Oceanian craftsmanship and wayfinding knowledge.
In recent decades, projects in Oceania have attempted to reconnect with ancestral traditions, reactivate the knowledge of constructing sea-going vessels, and study the arts of wayfinding and navigation. These projects have successfully countered many prejudices of Eurocentric scholarship. They are also part of a future-oriented politics seeking to re-establish voyaging networks independent of imperial powers in the region and ecologically sustainable.
However, colonial disruption has been thoroughgoing and access to past knowledge is often difficult. The voyaging renaissance therefore ironically relies on living traditions while re-engaging with the colonial archive: construction plans of vessels, colonial records of voyaging knowledge, and the material archive of Western ethnographic museums–a problematic legacy.
The two-day Te Ara Vaka Moana conference is built around the invitation to Berlin extended by a team of researchers at the University of Potsdam to a delegation of Oceanian scholars and practitioners engaged in the voyaging revival. The delegation from Taumako in the Santa Cruz Group of the Solomon Islands, from Polowat and Saipan in Micronesia, from Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Hawai‘i will visit and study the Oceania collections of the Humboldt Forum and Ethnologisches Museum. These studies will feed into the conference hosted in collaboration with the Humboldt Forum and Ethnologisches Museum. In presentations, panel discussion and film screenings, the event aims to foreground and set into conversation traditions and projects that are otherwise not given a lot of prominence in current debates.
