Hill, Carolyn. “The ‘Unchanged’ Place: Lifescapes of Cook Island Historic Churches.” Historic Environment 31, no. 1 (January 2019): 28–41. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.997465921744887.
Abstract
The coral stone churches of the Cook Islands have entangled indigenous and foreign beliefs, social practice and place-making since their instigation in the mid-19th century. This paper argues that despite sometimes major physical modifications, these church places may be perceived by local people as essentially ‘unchanged’, enduring as the living work of ancestors.
Based on research undertaken on Rarotonga in 2014, the paper explores key drivers of change that have shaped the physical fabric of the island’s five historical churches. It examines their temporal and intangible aspects, finding that it is these qualities that hold most heritage significance to associated people. However, they are also intimately linked with physical form and place, with both essential to, and reliant on, the other.
What does conservation look like in this context, where there is no expert, when decisions are centred on inlaying meaning through community process, rather than end product? It is suggested that a cultural landscape perspective may usefully inform conservation thinking, with potential to blur boundaries between transitory and permanent, present realities and ancestral pasts, space and time. It is through these very processes of (re)contestation and (re)contextualisation that churches are sustained in a Pacific milieu.
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