Debra McDougall

The Unintended Consequences of Clarification: Development, Disputing, and the Dynamics of Community in Ranongga, Solomon Islands

Outside agencies working in the Solomon Islands-whether a postwar land commission or a late-twentieth-century global environmental organization-have consistently called for the clarification of property rights as the necessary starting point for any form of economic development. Many residents of Ranongga, a small mountainous island in the Western Solomons, are eager to have their territorial rights recognized by national and international organizations and by other islanders. Yet transforming complex, crosscutting, localized relationships into abstract rights that are commensurable, predictable, and knowable to outsiders raises major political and ethical dilemmas for Ranonggan leaders. As in other Oceanic polities, the true people of the land are supposed to generously welcome foreigners. Aggressively claiming exclusive rights for oneself or ones group would effectively alienate those others who are necessary for a properly functioning polity. Clarification-however necessary for the workings of a capitalist economy-thus threatens to undermine the tenuous achievement of unity that Ranonggans see as the prerequisite to peace, prosperity, and (as they understand it) development.

Christianity, Relationality and the Material Limits of Individualism: Reflections on Robbins's Becoming Sinners

In his 2004 monograph, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society, Joel Robbins argues that the Urapmin, a small group of newly converted Chistrians in the Papua New Guinea Highlands, are trapped between two conflicting systems of values, namely the relationality of indigenous culture and the individuality of Christian culture. Yet, Robbins suggests that the Urapmin are troubled not only by conflicting values, but also by the fact that they have embraced a new ideological system without changing the material base of their lives, that is, subsistence agriculture on land owned by kin groups. Drawing on Robbinss work on the Urapmin and my own research on two different Christian denominations in the Western Solomon Islands, I bring a political–economic dimension to discussions of subjectivity, cultural change and ideologies of modernity that have arisen within the anthropology of Christianity.

Dramatic tectonic uplift of fringing reefs on Ranongga Is., Solomon Islands

An 8.1 Richter magnitude earthquake on 2 April 2007 raised the fringing reefs of Ranongga Island, Western Province, Solomon Islands about 1 m above the high water mark (HWM) in the north, and up to 2–3 m in the south (Fig. 1). Ranongga Island is 28 · 7 km in size, and is surrounded by a fringing coral reef, which was previously about 100 m wide and drops steeply into deep water. Following the uplift, up to 80% of the reef is now above sea level. Only a very narrow reef remains submerged. The quake also toppled large Porites and Acropora colonies underwater. Mangrove forests and seagrass meadows now above HWM are dying. The island’s fringing reefs, once among the best in the western Solomons were a critical food source for the population of 6,000. In the first weeks following the earthquake, local fishers reported unusually good catches. Fish apparently were biting hungrily on baitless hooks, and spearfishermen were finding it easy to approach disoriented fish. It appears that the loss of reef habitat had displaced fish into the small remaining reef areas. Many local people remain convinced that their reef has not uplifted but that the sea has subsided, and that it will return again. By mid-July the few fishers brave enough to come down from high ground to fish from the edge of the reef were reporting poor catches. This is not the first time Ranonggans have dealt with major geologic change. Landslides following a 1952 earthquake led to a major relocation of the population, and reefs in the north subsided, creating opportunities for a surge of coral development. However, the scale of damage to the island’s land and reef in 2007 is unprecedented, and the landscape is yet to stabilise. Runoff from heavy June rains built up behind natural dams created by landslides from the earthquake. These dams burst and large boulders and huge volumes of sediment were carried to the coast. Despite a renowned capacity to cope with adversity, these traditional Melanesian communities are not well equipped to deal with such dramatic environmental changes. Researchers, governmental, and non-governmental agencies seeking to assist Ranongga communities and their natural resources to recover are faced with an unusual challenge.

Rethinking Christianity and Anthropology: A Review Article

Several years ago, Joel Robbins (2003) called for anthropologists to approach Christianity as a coherent tradition that can be compared across diverse local manifestations. The two volumes under review here suggest that such an anthropology of Christianity is coming of age. As Matthew Engelke and Matt Tomlinson point out in their Introduction, anthropologists have been studying Christianity for several decades, but ‘what is new is a more self-conscious engagement with Christianity as a cultural logic’ (p. 19). In the Afterword to the same book, Robbins notes that its contributors show that studies of Christianity ‘can contribute to questions of general theoretical import’ (p. 220). The papers in these two volumes thus do more than describe the lives of people who happen to be Christian; they also engage with questions involving materiality, meaning, and personhood. Most of the essays reframe questions that anthropologists have asked about Christianity for a couple of decades now. Several essays in The anthropology of Christianity explore the entwining of the indigenous and exogenous (a staple of anthropological studies of Christianity), but they pay close attention to the way that theological concerns about orthodoxy and heterodoxy have shaped such engagements. Without dismissing the elective affinity between certain forms of Protestant Christianity and modern European capitalism so famously identified by Weber,

Customary Authority and State Withdrawal in Solomon Islands: Resilience or Tenacity?

ABSTRACT After a period of civil crisis (1998–2003), the Solomon Islands state was often characterised as weak and failing, but the society as strong and resilient. Such characterisations resonate with discussions of ‘resilience’ now prominent in international development discourse. Focusing on institutions of chiefly authority in Ranongga (in Solomon Islands’ Western Province), this paper suggests that while such non-state forms of governance did help to maintain social order in a time of national crisis and economic collapse, they should not be understood as autonomous systems that have retained their identity against external disturbances. To the contrary, like other neo-traditional institutions of governance, chiefs’ committees have emerged out of institutions of colonial indirect rule. Contemporary frustration about the states absence and weakness paradoxically highlights the importance of the state in ordinary communities.

Book Review - Customary Land Tenure and Registration in Australia and Papua New Guinea: Anthropological Perspectives (Asia-Pacific Environment Monograph 3)

At the core of this book is an argument for valuing local knowledge produced by social movements involved in place-based struggles for land, resources and livelihoods. The book questions the dominant regimes of modernity and development that are founded on capitalist relations and reductionist science and technology, and makes an important contribution to development studies, anthropology, geography and cognate fields by problematising the production of knowledge itself. The author is concerned with how processes and consequences of globalisation have been represented in social theory, arguing that ‘the tendency today is to state that globalization has rendered place irrelevant, meaningless, or at least secondary in the constitution of places and regions’ (p. 30). Escobar brings activists’ knowledge into conversation with academic knowledge and theory development to promote new ways of thinking, visioning and enacting regional development via what he terms a ‘politics of difference’. The book’s regional focus is the Colombian Pacific. Much of the ethnographic research presented stems from Escobar’s long-term collaboration with a network of ethnoterritorial organisations known as Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN), a collective of oppressed black and indigenous groups. The author analyses historical transformations due to the dramatic incorporation of this region into ‘modernity, the nation and the globe’ (p. 29) over the past few decades with the adoption of a (statesponsored) capital accumulation model. Escobar’s main concern is with what happens to people and place under such conditions, outlining how industrial shrimp farming, African oil palm and coca plantations have come at a high cost to the environment and human populations. The context of violence, repression, displacement and poverty, and the associated struggle for justice, peace, democracy and human rights in Colombia by black and indigenous peoples is starkly laid out in this book, leaving no question about the miserable conditions under which many live. In this context, Escobar argues for place-based (not place-bound) recognition of the difference of local ecologies, economies and cultures, positioning this as an ongoing political project that ‘asserts a logic of difference and possibility that builds on the multiplicity

Book Review - Tell It as It Is: autobiography of Rt Hon. Sir Peter Kenilorea, KBE, PC - Solomon Islands' first prime minister

In this volume, D’Arcy has two tasks, both equally difficult. The first is to capture the history of Oceania to 1870 through a selection of previously published papers; the second is to fit the end result into the wider enterprise of a multi-volume series on The Pacific World: lands, peoples and history of the Pacific, 1500–1900. More specifically, the volume editor’s ambitious objectives are to present the history of the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands, to do so from the perspective of the Pacific Islanders, and to portray the evolution of Pacific Islands history as a sub-discipline. In keeping with the broadly interdisciplinary approach expected in Pacific Islands history and Pacific studies more generally, the papers selected here come from a range of disciplines. There are several familiar authors and themes — Lewis on navigation, Finney on voyaging and Irwin on settlement, for example; and Kirch, Lewthwaite and Golson on aspects of agriculture and the maritime economy. Similarly, Te Rangi Hiroa, Gunson and Waiko deal with aspects of traditional histories, while Kaeppler, Bolnowski, Lessa and Berg all explore facets of tribute systems and the exchange of goods in selected societies. There are contributions on political systems, leadership and culture contact from Goldman, Brown, Sahlins and Dening; and papers on interaction with Europeans, Western technology and religions by Campbell, Hezel, Shineberg, Howe, Denoon and L at ukefu. This list, while not exhaustive, should give the flavour of the contents. Overall, and allowing for a degree of disciplinary cross-over, the combined efforts of anthropologists and archaeologists outnumber those of historians. D’Arcy’s selection offers insight into scholarly preoccupations within Pacific studies. We find, for example, that nine contributions are from the Journal of Pacific History, and four from the Journal of the Polynesian Society, together accounting for half of all papers. This suggests a narrow range of publications in which the works of, or relevant to, Pacific Islands history have appeared and raises the question of how far the sub-discipline has engaged with its mainstream parent. It is also noteworthy that, of the 26 papers, the ‘median’ publication date falls in the 1970s, reflecting the editor’s intention of representing the historiography. However, the inclusion of just one contribution later than 1994 (and that a contemporary rather than historical item from 1998) suggests that recent and current scholars in Pacific history have little interest in the pre-1870 past or in interrogating the antecedent work in their field. Are there really no papers from the last decade that are worthy of inclusion? Despite the editor’s efforts at coverage and representation, only a quarter of the papers are by Pacific Islanders with the two most recent being 1986 (Waiko) and 1994 (Hau‘ofa). In other words, ‘the perspective of Pacific Islanders’ is presented largely through an outsider’s lens. The book has a preliminary section of some 80 pages, divided between an editor’s Introduction and a Select Bibliography. The latter, to take it first and quickly, is reasonably comprehensive to the 1990s although some sections have very few entries beyond 2000 — or is this, too, simply a comment on recent scholarly interests? This notwithstanding, the preparation of this bibliography has been a major and valuable undertaking and, being divided into broad sections, will provide a helpful starting point on the pre-1870 history of the region. The editor’s Introduction is more problematic. D’Arcy provides useful comment on the evolution of the sub-discipline, and the multidisciplinary nature of Pacific Studies. He surveys the environmental context, the symbiotic relationships that join people, land and environment, and human-caused changes to the environment. He also provides an overview of social and political systems and the debates that have arisen over these and their regional variations and how they have had a bearing on Islanders’ relationships with outsiders. In these sections, D’Arcy provides a brief overview of historical events and the historiography of differing interpretations and