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In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers’ later work in psychiatry and psychology, and Hocart’s work as a comparativist, for which both would largely be remembered despite the novelty of that independent fieldwork on remote Pacific islands in the early years of the 20th Century. Contributors to this volume—who have all carried out fieldwork in those Melanesian locations where Hocart and Rivers worked—give a critical examination of the research that took place in 1908, situating those efforts in the broadest possible contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.
“[With this] very cohesive set of essays, Hviding and Berg h ave done an excellent job lifting an important expedition out of the archival oblivion where it reposed for the better part of a century. This is an appropriate volume to introduce the new Pacific Perspectives series. As such, this work appeals to readers interested in the histories of anthropology and Pacific worlds.” · Oceania
“Mere scholars and no novelists here, volume contributors nonetheless have good biographical stories to tell, good ethnographic tales to recall.” · Anthropological Forum
“Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg's new edited collection on the neglected Melanesian expedition on 1908 is timely and important.” · Anthropology Review Database
“It has been quite a while since I encountered a collection of essays that was as well coordinated, topically consistent, and thematically linked as this one. The end result is an intellectually rigorous examination of an overlooked but nonetheless extremely important event in the history of anthropology… The volume, taken as a whole, has a refreshingly critical and reflective quality about it.” · David Hanlon, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa
“This compelling volume invites readers to imagine what the discipline might have been like if this expedition had been taken as a foundational moment in the discipline’s history. It is an alternative to Malinowskian myth of the heroic individual fieldworker isolated on a beach watching the boat go away.” · Debra McDougall, University of Western Australia
List of illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction: The Ethnographic Experiment in Island Melanesia
Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg
Chapter 1. Acknowledging Ancestors: The Vexations of Representation
Christine Dureau
Chapter 2. Across the New Georgia Group: A.M. Hocart’s Fieldwork as Inter-Island Practice
Edvard Hviding
Chapter 3. The Genealogical Method: Vella Lavella Reconsidered
Cato Berg
Chapter 4. Rivers and the Study of Kinship in Ambrym: Mother Right and Father Right Revisited
Knut M. Rio and Annelin Eriksen
Chapter 5. House Upon Pacific Sand: W.H.R. Rivers and his 1908 Ethnographic ‘Survey Work’
Thorgeir S. Kolshus
Chapter 6. Colonialism as Shell-Shock: W.H.R. Rivers’s Explanations for Depopulation in Melanesia
Tim Bayliss-Smith
Chapter 7. A Vanishing People or a Vanishing Discourse? W.H.R. Rivers’s ‘Psychological Factor’ and Depopulation in the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides
Judith A. Bennett
Chapter 8. Objects and Photographs from the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition
Tim Thomas
Appendix I: Unpublished reports by W.H.R. Rivers to the Trustees of the Percy Sladen Memorial Trust Fund
Transcribed by Tim Bayliss-Smith
Appendix II: Materials in archives from the 1908 fieldwork in Island Melanesia
Cato Berg
Appendix III: Planning the Expedition: Letters Written before the Fieldwork Began