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SOCIAL CAPITAL IN THE FACE OF CLIMATE CHANGEVOICES OF EMOTIONAL BELONGING FROM KIRIBATI

Elfriede Hermann

GISCA Occasional Paper Series, No. 18, 2018, ISSN: 2363-894X

GISCA Occasional Paper Series

2GISCA OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES

The GISCA Occasional Papers Series publishes the work in progress of staff and associates of the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology (Institut für Ethnologie) at the University of Göttingen, as well as a selection of high-quality BA and MA theses.

EDITORS Elfriede Hermann Andrea Lauser Roman Loimeier Nikolaus Schareika

MANAGING EDITOR Jelka Günther

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR Julia Koch

TYPESET AND DESIGN Friedlind Riedel

Göttingen Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology

Theaterstr. 1437073 GöttingenGermany

+49 (0)551 - 39 27892ethno@sowi.uni-goettingen.de www.uni-goettingen.de/GISCA

© 2018 by the author

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0

ISSN: 2363-894X DOI: 10.3249/2363-894X-gisca-18

How to cite this paper: Hermann, Elfriede. 2018. Social Capital in the Face of Climate Change: Voices of Emotional Belonging from Kiribati. GISCA Occasional Paper Series, No. 18. Göttingen: Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology. DOI:10.3249/2363-894X-gisca-18

Title page image: A woman and her brother at the ocean side of their compound, where the woman’s husband built a sea wall and planted mangroves. Elfriede Hermann (2010).

INHALTSVERZEICHNIS

Introduction 5

Kiribati: Basic Aspects of Local Government and the Production of Social Capital 6

Belonging as an Embodied Dimension of Social Capital 8Love and Belonging 8Worries and Belonging 8Pity and Belonging 9

Conclusion: Emotional Belonging as Constitutor of Social Capital and Resilience 10

About the Author 11

Acknowledgements 11

References 11

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Elfriede Hermann

SOCIAL CAPITAL IN THE FACE OF CLIMATE CHANGEVOICES OF EMOTIONAL BELONGING FROM KIRIBATI

Faced with globally circulating news of anthropogenic climate change, local responses in the Pacific often include dual articulations: of emotions and of belonging to a specific land and people. In this essay I focus on expressions of emotional belonging that are articulated by citizens of Kiribati, an atoll state in the central Pacific that is considered to be particularly vulnerable to consequences of climate change. In examining the responses of Kiribati’s citizens, I conceptualise emotional belonging to land and people to be a form of social capital. From this perspective, I argue that the social capital that emotional belonging represents is constitutive of people’s will to social resilience vis-à-vis projections of how climate change will likely impact on their home islands. Tracing social resilience from an anthropological perspective, I hope to contribute to a growing body of studies that call for more research into local communities’ potential for adaptation, thus counterbalancing the prevailing emphasis on vulnerability.

Angesichts global zirkulierender Nachrichten über den anthropogenen Klimawandel rea­gieren Pazifiki nsulanerInnen oft mit Artikulationen sowie Verknüpfungen von Emotionen und Zugehörigkeit zu einem spezifischen Land und der dort lebenden Gesellschaft. In die­sem Essay richte ich mein Augenmerk auf Äußerungen von emotionaler Zugehörigkeit, die von BürgerInnen Kiribatis artikuliert werden. Kiribati ist ein Atollstaat in der zentralen Pazifikregion, der als besonders vulnerabel gegenüber Folgen des Klimawandels gilt. Im Zuge meiner Betrachtung der Reaktionen von Kiribatis BürgerInnen konzeptualisiere ich emotionale Zugehörigkeit zu Land und Gesellschaft als eine Form sozialen Kapitals. Aus die­ser Perspektive argumentiere ich, dass das soziale Kapital, das emotionale Zugehörigkeit darstellt, den Willen der Menschen zur sozialen Resilienz vis­à­vis Projektionen von Klima­wandel folgen für ihre Heimatinseln konstituiert. Mit meiner ethnologischen Forschung über soziale Resilienz hoffe ich zu einer wachsenden Anzahl von Studien beizutragen, die weitere Untersuchungen des Adaptionspotentials von lokalen Gemeinschaften fordern, um damit die vor herrschende Betonung von Vulnerabilität auszugleichen.

ABSTRACT

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Introduction1

Along with their national counterparts, local governments in the Pacific island states are be ing increasingly confronted with globalised discourses on climate change and its pro-jected impacts. In coming to terms with these discourses, local bodies assess the specific risks posed by global warming for their region and the commu nities living there. In do ing so, they develop an awareness of the particular vulnera bilities to which they are exposed. Vulnera bility is a crucial factor, but it is not the only one in play. Social capital is no less important, strengthening social resilience as it does. Capital, for Pierre Bourdieu (1986:241), is “accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its ‘incorporated,’ embodied form).” Capital can take three forms: economic, cultural and social. Bourdieu offered this definition of social capital:

[It] is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group (Bourdieu 1986:248).

Bearing in mind the challenges potentially facing Pacific Island communities in the wake of climate change, it is important not to lose sight of local social capital. Ueantabo Neemia-Mackenzie has well summarised the significant role now being played by this form of capital:

In the present context, it can be argued that social capital is critical in the pursuit of community action and self-help undertakings necessary in minimizing the risks and vulnerabilities from climate change (Neemia-Mackenzie 2004:26).

So focussing on dimensions of social capital has much to tell us about tackling the conse-quences of climate change, a point emphasised by social scientists like Barnett and Adger (2003:330) and Farbotko (2005:288), who have called for increased study of resilience and re sourcefulness.

In this paper I explore one of these dimensions from an anthropological perspective. My argument has two parts: first, I show that belonging to land and the people living on it, with all that this implies in terms of emotional bonding, is to be reckoned to the form of accu mulated labour that is social and embodied. Second, I argue that emotional belonging is con s titutive of people’s will to social resilience vis-à-vis projections of how climate change will likely impact on their home islands. As such, articulations of be longing are con ducive to building islanders’ capacity for adaptive measures designed to counteract en vironmental changes due to global warming.

Here I am using the term ‘resilience’ in the sense introduced by Kirsten Hastrup (2009). She began her discussion of the concept by referring to a definition set out in the 2007 IPCC report, depicting resilience as the “ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances” (quoted in Hastrup 2009:20). Hastrup then expanded this definition by point-ing out that “resilience in the socio-ecological system, which has now revealed itself to be of planetary scale, resides in people” (Hastrup 2009:20). She therefore suggested it might be better to talk of ‘social resilience’. She also drew attention to the fact that the absorbing of disturbances can result in changes to social organisation as well as changed expectations

1 This essay is the original version of a contribution submitted by Elfriede Hermann on 12 March 2013 for the collected volume titled Pacific Voices: Local Government and Climate Change, edited by Ropate Qalo and published by USP Press in 2014. During the production process, several errors were inserted by the production team. Among other things, a section and references were deleted, and terms in the Kiribati lan-guage as well as authors’ names were misspelt. These errors remained undetected until the book appeared in print, as there was no review process and no proofs were sent by USP Press to the contributors of the volume. The author kindly acknowledges the apology made by the editor of the aforementioned volume for the errors that occurred. The present essay has been slightly edited for publication in the GISCA Occasional Paper Series. A minor correction the author made is explained in a note.

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in local societies. Other aspects of the IPCC definition still resonate in Hastrup’s concept, as for example “the capacity to adapt to stress and change” (quoted in Hastrup 2009:20). Moreover, she stressed that social resilience extends to the flexibility shown by actors in conceptualising a disaster and taking countervailing measures (Hastrup 2009:28). From this she concluded that “social resilience inheres in human agency” (Hastrup 2009:20; cf.28).

In a case study from the atoll state of Kiribati, I will analyse the potential emotional expressions of belonging have for maintaining social capital and strengthening social resilience in the face of climate change. On the main island, Tarawa, but also on Nonouti and Onotoa, I carried out related research with I-Kiribati hailing from various islands (in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012, I spent a month or more each year there). Among my respondents were members of the Banaban community with whom I have been doing ethnographic fieldwork ever since 1996, whose home island, Banaba, I visited and whose emotions of belonging I gradually grew to understand (Hermann 2004; Hermann and Tebitaki Kokoria 2005).

But before looking more closely at people’s reactions to discourses of climate change in Kiribati, it is appropriate to briefly introduce this island state in terms of both local government and the will to resilience.

Kiribati: Basic Aspects of Local Government and the Production of Social Capital

The state of Kiribati has a territorial extent of some 5 million square kilometres, most of it water (Storey and Hunter 2010:168). Running from west to east, Kiribati comprises Banaba Island, the Gilbert Islands, the Phoenix Islands, and eight of the eleven Line Islands. The elevated phosphate-bearing island of Banaba is the exception, while the remaining 32 are reef islands or low-lying atolls. The islands making up Kiribati today were once part of the political entity created by the British in 1916 and known as the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony. During World War II, the islands were under Japanese occupation before they were recaptured by Allied forces. In 1979 Kiribati attained independence.

A glance at Kiribati’s system of government shows that the central authority, which has its seat in South Tarawa, is superordinate to the so-called island councils – each of the inhabited islands has one. In Kiribati, the local government is a “government of the island” (as Hassall and Tipu 2008:8 put it), taking the form of island councils (cf. Neemia-Mackenzie 2004:7). These island councils, according to the revised Local Government Act of 2006, are now set to receive more autonomy and responsibility. That this is so is made clear in the island profiles issued by the Ministry of Internal and Social Affairs (e.g. Ministry of Internal and Social Affairs, Republic of Kiribati 2008:52). The functions vested in the island councils by the revised Local Government Act of 2006 are as follows: the management of “Agriculture/Forestry, livestock and fisheries; Land use, Buildings and village planning; Education; Relief of famine and drought (Disaster management); Markets; Public health; Public order, peace and safety; Communications and public utilities; Trade and industry” (ibid.:52–53; capitalisation retained from original). Even if the central gov-ern ment retains responsibility for these functions, as Hassall and Tipu (2008:17) have written, and extend support to the local councils on a variety of levels, it is still the case that the local governments are obliged, within the framework of the possible, to take charge of the above areas.

From this list of the functions of local governments it is fair to conclude that, in the event of climate change taking its course, these institutions would be among the first responders. Being the actual powers on the ground, they would have to deal with changed patterns of rainfall, increased frequency of extreme weather events, salinisation of the freshwater lens, elevated sea levels, and soil erosion. In such a situation local governments, as Ropate Qalo (2010:1) has trenchantly noted, are “vital as implementers of adaptation” to the challenges posed by climate change. It will be important that these local bodies receive logistical help

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from the central government (as well as other forms of financial and technical aid). But it will also be important to estimate with what kind of composition of social capital and what degree of social resilience in the population these local governments can reckon.

The relationships contributing to the production of social capital in today’s Kiribati are many and varied. Among those that are institutionalised by kinship ties is one based on membership of the kainga group (Neemia-Mackenzie 2004:22–26). Kainga refers to a descent group that is simultaneously a landholding corporation (Lambert 1991:122). Descent is cognatic.2 The fact that kainga also means the land to which members of the group hold entitlements proves that land and the people on it are conceived as a continuum. The kainga group, according to Neemia-Mackenzie (2004:26), was long primarily implicated in generating social capital; however, in recent years, it has been weakened, in this as in other functions, by encroaching cultural change. In today’s Kiribati, these bonds based on descent and intermarriage have been joined by other types of relationship – for example, by those a person forges with the neighbourhood, at school, on the job, in a sports team, with a church group, with a choir or dancing ensemble, through charitable activities or social work, through encounters with travellers, by travelling oneself and staying in other countries. But the list is not yet complete. There is also being a member of larger communities: of the community of a particular Kiribati island, say; and frequently, owing to cognatic descent, of the communities of several such islands; and finally, of the largest community of all, the nation of Kiribati. Following this cultural logic, namely that land and the people on it are one, both an island community and the island itself are referred to as te aba – a name that is also applied to Kiribati as a nation, as well as to all the land within its far-flung borders.

To be sure, it is a primary concern of Kiribati’s central government (but also of international and national donors) to bolster the resilience of Kiribati and its people.3 This has even been expressly written into Kiribati’s Adaptation Project II (Kiribati Adaptation Project 2011:53). Thus, a new project was planned, titled: “Increasing Resilience to Climate Variability and Hazards”. This project supports the government in establishing adaptation to climate change and the reduction of disaster risk as mainstream benchmarks and social norms in terms of core aspects of Kiribati’s social and economic development. Concerning this goal, the paper reads: “The specific development objective would be to strengthen the resilience of Kiribati to the impact of climate variability and climate change as well as climate-related hazards” (ibid.). In the paper the emphasis is on “coastal resilience” (ibid.). But we may assume that the two kinds of resilience are intended that Neil Adger (2000) has called “ecological resilience” and “social resilience”.

In the following, I will consider various statements of belonging to land and people that refer to the regional as well as the national level. I will proceed to elucidate three discourses on emotions to see what they can tell us about belonging. Pre-empting my conclusion, I argue that such discourses about belonging do, in fact, form a significant part of social capital and thus constitute a will to social resilience.

2 Lambert’s characterisation of descent as ambilineal, given in the original version, was, for clarity’s sake, altered to cognatic in the present essay. As Lambert (1991:122) elaborates, every person belongs to descent groups of several ancestors. These descent groups have been described as nonexclusive cognatic groups (Lambert 1970:264). The kainga is a residential group that is constituted by members of these cognatic descent groups, their spouses and children (Lambert 1991:122; 1970:164).3 See the Statement by His Excellency Anote Tong, President of the Republic of Kiribati at the Conference “Local Governments: Structures, Functions and Climate Change” 16–18 July, 2012, University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji.

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Belonging as an Embodied Dimension of Social Capital

Love and Belonging

One emotion the I-Kiribati have taken to invoking, in response to discourses about the possible effects of global climate change, is love of the land of Kiribati. The vernacular term used here is te tangira. Discourse invoking te tangira clearly conveys the sense of a common bond as well as a sense of belonging. In today’s discourses, two strands of belonging are articulated: belonging to one or more collectivities of people and belonging to the land itself. If love is felt for one’s own kind, then it is only logical to also cultivate love for one’s land.

When love is expressed for one’s land in a context of climate change, it comes with a baggage of associations, which we will do well to explore more closely. Consider, for example, how a young man responded when I asked him the following question, “If Kiribati is affected by climate change, what will you do?” These were his words:

It [i.e. climate change] is really happening and we must prevent it for we really love our land here because it is where we originated from long ago. That’s why we must prevent it (Te mane Mwaiana, Teaoraereke, 14 September 2010).4

What the young man actually told me in the vernacular was “ti bon tangira abara aio”, which translates as “we really love our land here”. Interestingly, the young man mentioned this emotion of his own volition, since my question had been about something else. By grounding his love in the collective origins of his in-group, he was, at one and the same time, extolling the close ties that had grown between the land and his people as a result of living together. He was formulating very clearly the central tenets of the discourse of love, which turns on the sense people have of belonging to their land. What is also highly remarkable about his statement is that he cites his love for the land as a reason for ensuring that pre-ventive measures are taken against the effects of climate change. Thus he is explicitly stat-ing what is implicitly assumed in what many other I-Kiribati will tell you: that it is from shared bonding with their land that they derive the duty to protect it.

Worries and Belonging

Reacting to news of the likely effects of climate change, the I-Kiribati worry that their coun-try may actually cease to exist. This can be seen from discourses where terms like raraoma and tabeaianga figure repeatedly.

To gain a sense of how this works, consider the case of a young male respondent. When asked what climate change might mean for him, he volunteered the following:

Climate change is something that causes our people to worry, like the rising of the sea level, or no rainfall for many days. That causes great worries to the Kiribati people and also to other lands which are low-lying atolls (Te mane Nikunau, Betio, 14 September 2010).

In the opening sentence the young man uses the causative verb kararaoma, translated here by the phrase “causes to worry”. The object of the verb is kaain abara, literally “those of our land” or, more briefly, “our people” (note that the speaker includes himself too). In the second sentence he uses the term aba, likewise in the dual sense of “people/land”. What

4 This response and the following two have been translated from Kiribati language to English with the help of an I-Kiribati translator.

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both sentences are at pains to stress is that people are worried about their land. Whenever such worries were voiced in my presence, there was an overtone of people belonging to the land. Now, to worry about the land presupposes that people have bonded with it. If I-Kiribati society hadn’t forged such close ties with its territory and habitat, it would not be as anxious as it plainly is about what the future may bring. Thus the worries this society entertains, fed by a sense of uncertainty, are indicative of belonging to the land.

As was clearly apparent in subsequent remarks made by this young man, such worries can also carry the implication of the land needing to be protected. Asked what he would do if climate change impacted negatively on Kiribati, he told me that they, the I-Kiribati, would plant mangroves along the coast. Other interlocutors, as they voiced their worries (raraoma or tabeaianga) to me, talked of having the same plan. The sum of these various statements was clear: worrying and feeling for the land was not the end of the matter – it went with a determination to adopt measures to protect it.

Pity and Belonging

When islanders articulate their feelings about the projected effects of sea-level rise, a multi-layered discourse on pity (or empathy) can often be heard resonating in the background (cf. Hermann 2011 on empathy among the Banabans). One side of this emotional discourse consists in an act of fellow feeling for a deserving other. The other side consists in a call for others to show empathy for oneself.

Given a worst-case scenario of the coastal strip being inundated, I-Kiribati sometimes react by stating that they would then be in the most desolate of situations. Listen, for ex-ample, to the following response of a young man:

In my view ... there will be no problem if there is someone to pity us (nanoangaira), but if there is nobody then we will be left to die with our beloved land Kiribati (Te mane Arorae, Temwaiku, 14 September 2010).

Here, then, the receiving of pity is seen as a precondition for survival. Unless pity – and therefore help from others – is forthcoming, the self would seem joined to the land, until death do them part.

However, the active side of pity – feeling such an emotion for others – is also stressed at times by islanders. For example, there was a young woman who, when asked how she would feel and what she would do if Kiribati were to be hit by climate change, answered as follows:

If Kiribati is affected by climate change I will feel sorry for our younger generations. I will do what is best to save my land and people (Te aine Arorae, 16 September 2010).

Apart from the above I-Kiribati interlocutors, others too articulate the different sides of the pity discourse; but when they do, their core message of belonging to the land is essentially the same. Whether they talk of receiving or of dispensing pity, they bring the pity-deserving people into close association with their land. They do not talk of people as being detached from the land; rather, the stress is invariably on their attachment to the land. Thus, any help for the islanders must include the land itself, whether calls are directed at the outside world or take the form of calls for self-help.

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Conclusion: Emotional Belonging as Constitutor of Social Capital and Resilience

Belonging is embodied, formed and expressed via emotions like love, worrying and pity. Since belonging includes the existential ties to land and people that a person has accumu-lated, it anchors that person against the vicissitudes of life. It therefore represents an actual (as well as a potential) resource on which an islander can draw when facing challenges of all kinds, small or great, such as the inroads of climate change. For this reason, emotionally fostered belonging should be seen as part of the social capital of I-Kiribati society.

Emotionally cultivated belonging to the land plays a key role in ensuring that the is-landers, alerted now to the menacing consequences of climate change, react by willing themselves to act. This has found expression in the quotations I chose above, in which the intention is clearly formulated to take adaptive measures. Statements of this kind about emotional attachments to the land and intended actions contain vital messages about the will to social resilience among the I-Kiribati. Confronted with more or less dramatic (and certainly dramatised) news, they are not about to admit defeat. The overwhelming majority of those expressing such attachments are not ready, at least not for now, to abandon their homes. Instead, these islanders cling to their land and stress that they are all members of rooted communities. The readiness they show – citing their emotions when it comes to taking adaptive measures to meet the stress of climate change – may be read as indicating the personal and collective agency that is currently being mobilised in this connection. Similar considerations apply to the clear intention the I-Kiribati have, prompted by the pity they feel for the land and its people, to adopt a proactive stance, or – alternatively – to proactively solicit pity from other nations (as well as the help this would be expected to bring with it).

Falling as it does under social capital, emotional belonging is a key indicator of the will to social resilience. As for the longer-term consequences of emotional belonging, I further conclude that it is co-constitutive of such resilience, resulting in a strong motivation for the I-Kiribati to act. So emotional belonging contributes fundamentally to developing the ability, first, to manage the news of climate change and, second, in the event of it actually happening, to deal with and adapt to the consequences. Hence emotional belonging ena-bles the islanders, via the actions thus inspired, to influence land and people in ways bene-ficial to both.

Local governments are suitable institutions for representing core aspects of social capital and social resilience in local populations vis-à-vis superordinate political institutions, such as the central government. Moreover, they are well placed to convey to representatives of the national government and to international donor institutions (which will be asked to fund adaptive measures to climate change) that the social resilience of their respective communities is real. In any event, it will be important for all the actors to take seriously the social resilience of local populations, constituted as this is by emotional belonging, for it will provide the platform for any adaptive measures that may need to be taken.

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About the Author

Elfriede Hermann has engaged in anthropological research with I-Kiribati, Banabans and Papua New Guineans. She is professor at the Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Göttingen. The foci of her research are identifications, belonging, emotions, historicity, ethnicity, migration, cultural transformations, transculturation, and cultural perceptions of climate change. Among her publications is the edited volume Changing Contexts, Shifting Meanings: Transformations of Cultural Traditions in Oceania (2011, University of Hawaiʻi Press), and, with Wolfgang Kempf, „Climate Change and the Imagining of Migration: Emerging Discourses on Kiribati’s Land Purchase in Fiji“, The Contemporary Pacific 29 (2): 231–263 (2017).

Contact: Elfriede.Hermann@sowi.uni-goettingen.de

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the government of Kiribati for granting me a research visa and for providing on-the-ground support. My thanks also go to members of the local governments of Tarawa, Nonouti, Onotoa and Banaba, as well as to the many people on those islands who not only shared their thoughts in interviews and in conversation but were wonderful and cooperative hosts. We owe much to Nei Taiman and to members of our family for receiving us into their midst and for enthusiastically expediting our research. I am much indebted to Associate Professor Dr. Ropate Qalo for kindly inviting me to the conference on “Local Governments: Structures, Functions and Climate Change” (16–18 July, 2012) he had organised at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji, where a first version of this paper was presented. To the participants at the conference many thanks for the many probing questions and stimulating conversations; and let me also acknowledge the help of the organising team. To the institutions that funded the conference a special word of thanks is due. Dr. Wolfgang Kempf, as ever, cooperated with valued feedback. Thanks not least to Dr. Bruce Allen who helped by competently proofreading the English-language text.5

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