James Leach

The European Society for Oceanists sponsors an international conference every two to three years, held in a different European country. The conference provides a major venue for exchange among Pacific anthropologists and other scholars in Europe. The conferences are deliberately timed to enable participation by delegates from the Pacific, the US, and Australasia.

The Pacific region, its peoples, cultures, and thought systems have been foundational to the development of anthropology’s core theoretical innovations and continues to provide a vital and challenging context for the contemporary development of theory on human pre-history and migration, gender, colonial legacies, kinship, and exchange, to name but a few. These advances are founded in ongoing dialogues and sustained relations with Pacific peoples. ESfO 2022 builds on and develops this engagement in the context of renewed scientific and geopolitical attention to the region.

The circulation of people and things in extended networks across the Pacific has long captured anthropological attention. From the distant past to our shared future, the Pacific was, is, and will be shaped by movements: movements of people and of things, of ideas and images, of power and ideology, of capital, of shifting political and scientific interests, and of circulating discourses about change, development, the environment, and degradation. The 13th conference opens a timely forum for the discussion of Pacific dynamics.