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Migration and social transformation in the contemporary Pacific

by 20 Sep 2007Events0 comments

Massey University Professorial Lecture Series
Professor Cluny Macpherson
Albany
Thursday 20th September
7.00–9.00 pm
Cluny Macpherson

Lifelong Friend: Mahurangi resident Cluny Macpherson first visited the harbour as a child, a chum of Mike Vine whose father farmed in Lagoon Bay. Cluny has longstanding teaching and research interests in Oceania and reviewed Vaka Moana in the January 2007 Mahurangi Magazine.

Change in Pacific societies has been occurring continuously since humans settled and began to move around in the region thousands of years ago.

Contemporary changes, driven by increasing levels of migration, are however both more rapid and dramatic than at any time in the past. This lecture explores the role and impact of migration on social change in the modern Pacific.

Cluny Macpherson first went to work in Samoa in 1965 and has been working there, studying and teaching about the Pacific region ever since. He spent 30 years teaching at the University of Auckland, before moving to a chair in the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Massey University in 2004.

In 2005, he was awarded the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Sir Peter Buck Medal for ‘a major contribution to research on social, cultural and economic development of New Zealand and the Pacific’.