PACIFIC UNITY

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26517, 4 September 1951, Page 3

PACIFIC UNITY

PROBLEM OF DIVERSE RACIAL GROUPS “In the Pacific we have people whose religious systems date tack to the very old animistic systems of the past,” said Dr. Margaret Mead, a noted American anthropologist, in a broadcast talk. "We have people who were Christianised three and four centuries ago by the Spanish and Portuguese; we have a Hindu community in Bali; large Mohammedan settlements in Indonesia, and in the Philippines; and we have the missions that have come irom England and from the United States. “So,” said Dr. Mead, “if we include the Chinese, who have come into so many parts of the Pacific and built up trading posts, we have all the great religions of the world represented here. We also have represented here almost every level of civilisation, from that of the simple nomadic people of Central Australia to the most modem technological advances found in New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaii. “A real technical problem of the mid-twentieth century is how we are to knit together people so diverse m religious background and so diverse in history. Some have lived here so long that they believe that they originated on the particular small island where we now find them, and others nave just come on the last boat. “A present problem,” Dr. Mead said, “is that, as communication seems to improve in the Pacific, as it becomes possible to send a letter in a very few hours from New Zealand to San Francisco or to London~at the same time I as the planes increase, the boats disappear, and in many cases where it used to be possible to go from island to island, it is no longer possible to go at all. “We are running the risk of developing a new kind of isolationism in the Pacific, a new kind of segregation and ' loneliness in many of our island communities, which is not what we want if we are going to try to build a whole ; Pacific world.”