ABSTRACT
Ideas depend on who thinks them, in what context and to what purpose. This chapter focuses on two different ways of thinking the Pacific, one from within and the other from without, that in their contradictoriness have much to tell us about the historical formation of the Pacific. The Pacific occupies the prominent place that it does in our consciousness today not because of what is happening within the Pacific, but because of developments on what has come to be called the Pacific Rim. As with earlier notions of civilization, it is still a social order empowered by capitalism that defines modernity, although it is now a capitalism far in advance of its origins in early modern Europe, and no longer confined to Europe or the Americas. With the passing of the idea of the Third World as a critique of capitalism, indigenous visions now remain as a source of critique, as well as new conceptualizations of alternative modernities.
