The Emergence of an Autonomous Political Arena in Ouvéa: An Ethnography of Its Local Council

Abstract

The sessions of the Ouvéa local council attract the ethnographer’s attention because of the discrepancy between their discussions and local daily life on the island. On the one hand, these sessions look like any other local council sessions, including those of metropolitan France. But on the other, they also present various peculiarities characteristic of Ouvéa’s social and cultural context.

As elsewhere in the world, the organisation of political power observed and experienced during local council sessions is not simple. On the contrary, it exhibits hybrid characteristics from both a French institutional republican political world and from the so-called Kanak customary political universe. This chapter explores what J.-M. Tjibaou named “colonisation within the Republic” (Tjibaou, La présence Kanak. O. Jacob, Paris, 1996) by exploring this aspect of hybridity in a case study based on a long-term ethnography of local political practices and, more particularly, of the local council sessions held between 2007 and 2010.