Reviews: Samoa: Mapping the Diversity

John Connell reviews R. Gerard Ward and P. Ashcroft’s 1998 atlas Samoa: Mapping the Diversity. Its more than 60 maps cover Samoa’s 48 fipule districts, chiefly using late-1980s data and emphasizing agriculture through the 1989 Census of Agriculture. Explanations and bibliographies accompany every map and trace changes back to the 1950s. Connell values the recovery of material from obscure unpublished reports, particularly on fishing. He finds that the atlas demonstrates the spread of the wage economy near Apia, similar spatial patterns in commercial agriculture and fishing, uneven development, probably increasing inequality, and population movement towards northern Upolu. Forest cover on Savai‘i and differences in access to services further illustrate regional diversity. He also stresses the limits imposed by missing housing, income, nutrition and mortality data and by district boundaries that blur distinctions between Apia and nearby rural areas. Connell praises the atlas as comprehensive within the available disaggregated data and hopes it will encourage comparable atlases for other Pacific island countries.