Making an Ethnic Boundary between Ryukyu Cuisine and Washoku: A Case Study of UNESCO Intangible Cultural List

Abstract

Critical geographical research has been instrumental in illuminating how peace and violence are place-specific. The geographical perspective raises the question of peace in island and oceanic contexts, such as the Pacific, where the critical examination of peace has been limited. Drawing insights from critical geopolitics and island geographies, this presentation examines peace and security treaties along with islanders' experiences in the Western Pacific during the first half of the twentieth century, when a notion of collective peace took prominence. I argue that the logic of geopolitical containment constituted the discourse of collective peace. The discourse conceived negative peace (i.e., absence of direct armed conflicts) through othering and spatial control as a means of imagining peace in the Pacific, informing the arms control and collective deterrence. In doing so, the entanglement of peace and geopolitics (re)produced conditions where lives on the islands and their agency were rendered secondary to the interests of metropolitan states while foreclosing different ways of thinking about peace. Particularly, I focus on the case of Okinawa and Pacific Islands in the Western Pacific as a window to explore a different imagining of the Pacific. It sheds light on the need to problematize the entangled relations of peace and geopolitics and consider the possibility of critical engagement with peace that attends to islands and marginalized perspectives. Overall, this study seeks to deepen the understanding of peace and geopolitics by illustrating how peace is a critical reflective practice that carries a range of everyday and state level implications.