Family Violence and Social Change in the Pacific Islands

The Pacific Islands have some of the highest rates of family violence in the world. Addressing the contemporary mutations of Pacific Island families and the shifting understandings of violence in the context of rapid social change, this book investigates the conflict dynamics generated by these transformations.

The contributors draw from detailed case studies in a range of Pacific territories to examine family violence in relation to the social, economic and political situation of native populations as well as individual, collective and institutional responses to the development of violence within and upon the family. They focus on vernacular understandings, conflicting social norms, the emergence of different types of violent patterns, the impact of violence on individuals and communities, and local attempts at mitigating or combating it. Combining ethnographic expertise with engaged scholarship, this volume offers a vivid account of ongoing social change in Pacific Island societies and a crucial contribution to the understanding of family violence as a social process, cultural construct, and political issue.

This book will appeal to scholars with interests in the sociology of violence and the family, Pacific studies, development studies, and the social and cultural anthropology of Oceania.

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).