Edvard Hviding
University of Bergen
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Featured researches published by Edvard Hviding.
Marine Resource Economics | 1992
K. Ruddle; Edvard Hviding; R. E. Johannes
Although customary marine tenure (CMT) systems for the management of local marine resources occur throughout the world, compared with other models of fisheries management they remain relatively little known. The Pacific Basin is especially rich in CMT systems, which play key roles in overall social, economic and cultural life of societies. Based on a Solomon Island example, we examine the organizational principles and potentials of CMT systems to provide sustainable yields and equitable access to resources, their resilience to external pressures, and mechanisms for ensuring local autonomy in resource control. Next we demonstrate that CMT systems are an expression of traditional ecological knowledge, and show the importance of such knowledge to scientific research and the planning of resource management. Finally, we suggest priorities for research on CMT systems.
AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment | 2003
Tim Bayliss-Smith; Edvard Hviding; Tim Whitmore
Abstract On the basis of a Solomon Islands case study, we report that tropical rainforests hitherto perceived as untouched, pristine, virgin, etc., are actually sites of former settlement, extensive forest clearance, and irrigated/swidden agriculture. An unusually wide range of sources—rainforest ecology, forest classification and mapping, ethnobotany, land-use history, oral traditions, ethnographic and archaeological observations—supports our conclusions. These observations have bearings for contemporary perspectives on scenarios for rainforest regeneration after logging. They also force a revision of certain assumptions concerning Melanesian prehistory and historical demography, and indicate that interdisciplinary links between botany, archaeology and social anthropology are needed to achieve a better appreciation of rainforest dynamics.
Ocean & Coastal Management | 1998
Edvard Hviding
Abstract In this paper I discuss some long-term continuities in the socio-political dynamics of customary marine tenure in the Melanesian South Pacific. Building on field research material from Solomon Islands, and paying close attention to the pan-Melanesian concept of kastom, I exemplify how customary marine tenure and its social contexts are challenged and transformed by external economic and political pressures. These challenges and transformations are discussed with reference to the emerging legislative contexts of customary tenure rights. General trends are identified for Solomon Islands, particularly regarding the management potential of customary marine tenure. It is argued that the relationship between external challenges andlocal transformations is not one-sided. Certain modern pressures may lead to organizational innovation and reinforce the political base of customary control over marine resources, as expressed by present systems of customary marine tenure.
virtual systems and multimedia | 2009
Mona Hess; S Robson; Francesca Simon Millar; Graeme Were; Edvard Hviding; Arne Cato Berg
This paper describes the 3D digital documentation of a highly significant cultural heritage object from the Melanesian Southwest Pacific, held in the ethnographic collections of the British Museum. The object, which dates from about 1910, is a large plank-built war canoe from the island of Vella Lavella in New Georgia, Solomon Islands. 3D laser scanning is paired with anthropological research, which aims to deliver a holistic virtual 3D reconstruction and multimedia interactive delivery of the boat for the digital repatriation to the source community.
Archive | 2003
Edvard Hviding
In this essay I provide some insights into how the peoples of Oceania relate to their environments of land and sea. For the reader interested in following up these questions, I provide extensive references to ethnographies and comparative studies from most corners of this far-flung region, as well as to related discussions of theoretical relevance. A note on regional definitions is in order. “The peoples of Oceania” for the present purposes includes the Pacific Islanders on both sides of the Equator (among them also the peoples of the large island of New Guinea), as well as the indigenous peoples of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. This use of “Oceania” rather than the more restricted (but, admittedly, very evocative) “South Pacific” follows present-day usages by indigenous scholars (notably Hau’ofa 1993, 1998), and as a definition it accommodates the indigenous peoples of Australia. For reasons of space Australia is sparsely treated in this essay, yet Aboriginal Australian views of the environment have a significant place in the overall comparative perspective. [Editor’s note: See the chapter by J.L. Kohen on Indigenous Australians and the Land.]
Journal of Pacific History | 2015
Edvard Hviding
ABSTRACT This paper discusses the multiple ways in which rural economic wealth in the New Georgia islands of the western Solomons has been built up in both ephemeral and enduring ways through several decades of intensive industrial logging on customary lands. The scale of wealth accumulation in the rural western Solomons and the often associated process of dispossession of communal natural resource rights are rarely taken into account in discussions of political economy in early 21st-century Solomon Islands. Through this paper, changing configurations and trajectories of accumulation and dispossession are traced. The comparison of two distinctly different processes whereby collective social agency over customary land is weakened, ultimately for accumulation in the hands of a few, involves a discussion about the centralisation and disintegration, respectively, of customary chieftainship in New Georgia. This leads to a more general assessment of how authority over customary land in Melanesia can be the subject of large-scale dispossession.
Environmental Archaeology | 2015
Tim Bayliss-Smith; Edvard Hviding
Abstract In the Pacific islands, subsistence diversity made possible continuous production of food while well-developed exchange networks redistributed these foodstuffs as well as items within the prestige economy. All these were aspects of the ‘storage structures’ that enabled social and nutritional value to be saved, accumulated and later mobilised. In addition, there were investments in the land, landesque capital, which secured future food surpluses and so provided an alternative to food storage, in a region where the staple foods were mostly perishable, yams excepted, and food preservation was difficult. Landesque capital included such long-term improvements to productivity as terraces, mounds, irrigation channels, drainage ditches, soil structural changes and tree planting. These investments provided an effective alternative to food storage and made possible surplus production for exchange purposes. As an example, in the New Georgia group of the western Solomon Islands irrigated terraces, termed ruta, were constructed for growing the root crop taro (Colocasia esculenta). Surplus taro from ruta enabled inland groups to participate in regional exchange networks and so obtain the shell valuables that were produced by coastal groups. In this paper, we reconstruct how this exchange system worked in New Georgia using ethno-archaeological evidence, we chart its prehistoric rise and post-colonial fall, and we outline the factors that constrained its long-term expansion.
Archive | 2016
Edvard Hviding
I discuss recent engagements of European anthropology of the Pacific with large-scale Pacific-oriented activities of the European Union (EU). In response to an EU-funding call, a consortium of Pacific research centers in Europe and the Pacific was formed in 2012. Coordinated from Norway, the European Consortium for Pacific Studies (ECOPAS) connects anthropology with the knowledge needs of a growing Pacific engagement by the EU. ECOPAS organizes and carries out research in all Pacific countries and on the policy-making scene itself and advises the European Commission and the European Parliament. This model of anthropological engagement exemplifies the potential of long-term research for applied involvement and indicates a certain openness in EU agencies to ethnographically grounded contributions to policy-making.
Archive | 2015
Edvard Hviding
The rainforests of the large mountainous islands of Melanesia are routinely assumed by outside observers to be an example of last remaining wilderness, high in biodiversity, valuable to humankind in general, and somehow largely undisturbed by humans until logging operations escalated in recent decades. But the fact that most Melanesian islands have substantial numbers of people living inland, or at least had inland populations until quite recently, would undermine such assumptions. As Bennett (2000: 18–26) expresses in her
Archive | 1996
Edvard Hviding