Lectures, talks and seminars

Room 102, 6 Kelburn Parade (6KP/102)

Presented by


Description

Over the past two decades there has been a renewed interest in coconut oil consumption in Western countries. This presents an opportunity for Pacific Studies research, as Pacific Islands and Islanders are implicated in marketing material. Literature gestures to purported native Pacific Islanders’ wellbeing as evidence of the health benefits of coconut oil. However, there is no research that compares Pacific Islander and Western consumers’ uses of coconut oil. Adding complexity to this topic are past and ongoing migrations of Pacific Islanders to metropolitan Pacific Rim nations. These migrations, many scholars believe, have expanded the cultural realm of Oceania and rearticulated Pacific identity.

This project is interested in the meanings made of coconut oil by consumers in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Wellington Region. It focuses on possible links between consumption of coconut oil and consumers’ understandings of ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ Pacific places, peoples, and practices. This project will offer nuanced findings regarding how both Western and diasporic Pacific peoples may link their understandings of indigeneity —whether the indigenous ‘other’ or the indigenous ‘self’— to practices of consumption. This work will contribute to understandings of commodity fetishism, articulations of indigeneity, and cultural maintenance in diaspora.


Speaker Bios

Nate Rigler is a PhD candidate in Pacific Studies. Nate was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area in California and is a second generation diasporic Chamorro Pacific Islander. Nate holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley with a major in Anthropology and minor in Forestry and Natural Resources. He now lives and conducts research in Wellington, New Zealand and the San Francisco Bay Area, California. He aims to submit his dissertation in December, 2020.


For more information contact: Va'aomanū Pasifika Seminar Convenor - Dr Emalani Case

emalani.case@vuw.ac.nz 04 463 5110