Miyazaki, Hirokazu

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Miyazaki, Hirokazu

PERSONAL:

Male.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Anthropology Department, Cornell University, 261 McGraw Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, assistant professor of anthropology, Center for the Study of Economy & Society, fellow. Also associated with Cornell's Graduate Field of Asian Studies and East Asia Program.

WRITINGS:

The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 2004.

Contributor of chapters and articles to books, including Law and Empire in the Pacific: Fiji and Hawaii, edited by Sally Merry and Donald Brenneis, School of American Research Press (Santa Fe, NM), 2004; Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2005; Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2005; Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge, edited by Annelise Riles, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2006. Contributor to periodicals, including Cultural Anthropology, Antropologicheskii forum/Forum for Anthropology and Culture, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, and People and Culture in Oceania.

SIDELIGHTS:

According to Hirokazu Miyazaki on his home page, The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge is a study of Suvavou people's long-standing hope to regain their ancestral land. In that book, drawing on extensive archival and field research, I examine how Suvavou people have kept hope alive over the last hundred years." "Residents of Suvavou once occupied the central land in what is now Fiji's capital, Suva, but were relocated to a less desirable area in the late 19th century when a high chief from a neighboring area sold their land to an Australian company," explained a writer for AES Online. "Since that time, Suvavou residents have presented numerous unsuccessful claims for compensation." The Method of Hope tries to understand how and why the Suvavou claimants maintain their claim to their original home sites, even after more than a century of unsuccessful attempts to win back their rights. "What is hope? Can one hope to understand it? Must one hope in order to understand it? Is hope, then, a method of knowing rather than an object of knowledge?" asked Andrew Arno, writing for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. "In a brilliant synthesis of philosophy and anthropology, Miyazaki engages the reader with these questions in a path-breaking example of contemporary ethnography."

The issue of Suvavou is particularly complicated because of the legal issues surrounding the ways in which the land was taken to build the city of Suva. The problem arises from the relationship Fijians have with their land, known as vanua; under Fijian custom, land, people, and political entities are unbreakable—they cannot be separated from one another. The original British colonial governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, tried to set up a legal system that would maintain his understanding of vanua. As a result, the residents of Suvavou received a promise of an annual stipend of 200 pounds sterling. Immediately the Suvavouans began to petition the government, asking for clarification of the legal meaning of vanua and their interest in the land that had been taken from them. Even after more than one hundred years of having a variety of governments refuse their interest, Miyazaki points out, the Suvavouans keep trying to reestablish their claim to their ancestral lands. It is their hope that they can recover some of what rightfully belongs to them that the author investigates in The Method of Hope. "Along the way, Miyazaki develops a number of fascinating insights into Fijian cultural practices and national politics," declared Susanna Trnka in Oceana.

To support his interpretation of the idea of hope, Miyazaki draws on a variety of understandings of what "hope" means for the Suvavouans. "He analyzes various strategies by which the people of Suvavou have kept their hope alive, and how a ‘method of hope’ has become ‘an ontological condition’ … central to their knowledge of themselves and to their social being," declared Robert Norton, writing in the Australian Journal of Anthropology. "Their hope is ‘a modality of engagement with one another, with their God, and with their government.’" "What is necessary," Norton continued, "is a renewed prospective momentum by which to break from the constraint of how reality is presently understood and reorient knowledge to the future. Miyazaki urges on us the need to reignite ‘the spark of hope in anthropological knowledge’ … to take up the ‘the task of anticipating a new kind of Anthropology on another terrain.’" In other words, hope for restoration of Suva (or of just compensation) to its indigenous inhabitants has replaced the actual vanua connected with the property. "Hope, as a method for knowledge formation, Miyazaki suggests, can and must move from one domain to another," Trnka stated, "much as Miyazaki's own analysis traverses the place of hopefulness in Fijian knowledge, in philosophy, and in the anthropological endeavour."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Australian Journal of Anthropology, August 1, 2006, Robert Norton, review of The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge, p. 245.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, March 1, 2006, Andrew Arno, review of The Method of Hope, p. 253.

Oceania, July 1, 2007, Susanna Trnka, review of The Method of Hope, p. 249.