Abstract
Studies measuring ethnic/racial classification within a cross-national and longitudinal perspective are rare. Using a unique database of census questionnaires, this study explores mixed classification over a forty-year period in twenty-two countries and territories of the Pacific. The political, linguistic, and cultural diversity of the Pacific, as well as its importance in the development of Western logics of race, make this region an ideal site for comparative analyses of official classification. We find a considerable range of approaches used to categorize mixedness in broadly considered ‘ethnicity’ census questions (excluding those asking language, religion, or civic nationality). While many collections in earlier decades did not recognize mixed identities, over time a growing number of countries have done so, many by allowing multiple responses to ethnicity/race questions. Other approaches, including listing ‘Part-’ identities, were also used to various degrees over the period. Shifts in official constructions of mixedness in the Pacific suggest a gradual lessening of colonial influences on local demographic practices.
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Notes
- 1.
The Marshall Islands, for instance, were first claimed by Spain, ‘sold’ to Germany and then annexed by Japan before being governed by the USA following the Second World War. They eventually gained independence in 1986 (Campbell 2011).
- 2.
For example, European scholar Stephen Roberts promoted ‘racial mixing’ in the colonies of ‘Hawaii, New Zealand, Tahiti, Tonga, and perhaps Samoa in the future’, while explicitly not extending support for it to include unions with Melanesians (Roberts 1927, p. 366).
- 3.
Principal Investigator: Professor Tahu Kukutai. The Ethnicity Counts? dataset was created with the support of a Marsden Fund Fast-Start grant, and is based at the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis (NIDEA), University of Waikato, New Zealand. A repository of included census forms is online at http://www.waikato.ac.nz/nidea/research/ethnicitycounts.
- 4.
Staff from Statistics New Zealand are regularly seconded to work alongside local staff on censuses in Niue and Tokelau, while local branches of the Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE) collect population statistics in the Pacific French territories. Censuses in the US territories of Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands are integrated within the decennial census programme of the metropolitan USA, although they use a customised questionnaire (Rallu 2010; Lewis 2001).
- 5.
- 6.
Including various online repositories and direct communication with national statistics offices.
- 7.
Using ‘nationality’ as an ethnic signifier is rare outside of Eastern Europe. In the Pacific, over the study period Nauru asked nationality alongside citizenship in its 2002 and 2011 censuses, and the 2006 Samoa census asked ‘What is his/her country of nationality/ethnicity?’.
- 8.
The current US territories of American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, and the former territory of Palau, subsumed in every case with ethnic origin as ‘what is your ethnic origin or race?’.
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Broman, P., Atatoa Carr, P., Seiuli, B.M.S. (2020). Vaevaeina o le toloa (Counting the Toloa): Counting Mixed Ethnicity in the Pacific, 1975–2014. In: Rocha, Z.L., Aspinall, P.J. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22874-3_37
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