Lamont Lindstrom

The Pacific theater : island representations of World War II

Contributions from anthropologists participating in a symposium of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania, New Harmony, Indiana, 1986, examine the experiences of Pacific Islanders in the war and their remembrances of it as observers, laborers, on patrol, under bombardment. The studies de

Melanesian Kastom and Its Transformations

Editorial Board Note: In 2006, the Discipline Group of Anthropology and Sociology at The University of Western Australia hosted a symposium, ‘Anthropology in the West: 1956–2006’, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the then Department of Anthropology by the late Ronald Berndt and his wife, Catherine, whose contributions to anthropology were a major focus of the symposium. Symposium participants also documented contributions made by UWA staff and students from Anthropology and Sociology within and beyond Australian social science. A notable theoretical focus on kastom in the work of Robert Tonkinson, who in 1984 succeeded Professor Berndt in the Departmental Chair, was the topic of Lamont Lindstroms paper, published here in a fuller, revised and fully refereed version. We intend to publish further papers from the symposium in later issues of Anthropological Forum. If Ronald and Catherine Berndt are ancestral spirits haunting Anthropology and Sociology at The University of Western Australia some 50 years after the founding of the Department of Anthropology, their student, Bob Tonkinson, still happily with us, is their intellectual descendant and institutional heir. As in the case of the Berndts, issues relating to social change, religion and values, and, in particular, the politics of tradition have loomed large in Tonkinsons career. I trace, in this retrospective essay, the rise to prominence of an anthropology of Melanesian tradition and, more specifically, Tonkinsons contribution, notably his analyses of traditions ‘symbiotic’ relations with Christianity, its identity functions, its local versus its national significance, and its relations with evolving anthropological theories of culture in a shrinking world. Tonkinsons Vanuatu research, which began among Ambrym Island emigrants, has spanned, over the past forty years or so, many notable transformations: from New Hebrides to Vanuatu; from modernisation theory to world systems and globalisation; and from tradition to kastom.

Kava Pirates in Vanuatu

Cultural property activists have worried about the bioprospecting, or even biopiracy, of kava ( Piper methysticum ), a plant exchanged and consumed for many Pacific social and ritual purposes. By the 1990s, kava and concoctions made from the plants component kavalactones were increasingly popular products within global markets for recreational and medicinal drugs. Starting in 2002, however, a number of European countries among others banned kava imports after initial reports that some heavy users suffered liver damage. This has complicated the kava story as producer efforts shifted from protecting rights to the plant to reopening blocked export markets. The difficulty is to both push kava into global markets while protecting local rights to the plant. A promising strategy may be developing consumer awareness of geographic indicators and “noble” kava varieties that Vanuatus local producers may control yet globally market as “the best in the world.”

Mambu phone home

Mambu: A Melanesian millennium, by Kenelm Burridge. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1995 [reprinting of original 1960 edition with new preface]. 296pp., appendices, index. ISBN 0–691–00166–9 (paperback).

Big men and the conversational marketplace of Tanna (Vanuatu)

“Big men” in different parts of Melanesia achieve political status by various means. However, all big men possess a reputation—a “big name.” Reputations grow or decline as people talk. Big men acquire renown by meeting the costs of the “conversational marketplace,” to use Randall Collins’ term. Some of these costs are systemic, given by the local mode of communication; others are discursive, related to cultural rules for producing authentic talk. This paper describes the conversational costs of acquiring renown on Tanna, Vanuatu. It traces how Nampas, who emerged as a leader of the John Frum movement, made his name by investing in the islands conversational marketplace.

Shooting Melanesians: Martin Johnson and Edward Salisbury in the Southwest Pacific

By the turn of the 20th century American photographers were venturing into the western Pacific. Two of the first cinematic teams to film in Melanesia were the Kansan explorers Martin and Osa Johnson and the yachtsman Edward A. Salisbury, who was joined by Merian Cooper (of later King Kong fame). Both drew on representational practice honed partly along the American Western Frontier. Both pairs took still and motion pictures in the New Hebrides and Solomon Islands which they used to illustrate magazine articles, travelogue books and silent films, including the Johnsons’ Cannibals of the South Seas [1918] and Head Hunters of the South Seas [1922], and Salisbury and Coopers Gow the Head Hunter [1928]. Differences in their print and motion imagery of islanders reflect the newer movie aesthetic, stimulating new ways to shoot Melanesians as spectators, as actors and as occasional filmmakers themselves.

The Pacific War: aftermaths, remembrance and culture

John Dewey, in 1939, acknowledged that ‘All history is necessarily written from the standpoint of the present’ and that ‘material that had formerly been passed by, offers itself as data because the...

Agnes C.P. Watt and Melanesian Personhood

Abstract Analyses of Melanesian personhood recently have taken the person to be ‘dividual’, partible or fractal – different in significant ways from the Western monadic, coherent and unitary individual. Melanesian persons, however, have experienced global forces for more than two hundred years, and these encounters certainly modified personal practice. Published letters of Agnes C.P. Watt – who with husband William served as a Presbyterian missionary at Kwamera and Port Resolution, Tanna (New Hebrides, today Vanuatu), from 1869 to her death in 1894 – offer insight into Islander personhood during the first decades of foreign settlement of that island. Christian missionisation, spreading mobility, commodity exchange and increasing numbers of Western persons themselves were reworking Tannese partible, relational personhood. Agness dissenting and communitarian womanhood complicated her own Victorian personhood. In particular, her letters document personal innovations in naming practice, mobility, respect, character building and spirituality.

Geoffrey Gorer and Féral Benga, a Collaboration

We now expect that an anthropologists temperament and life experience, including personal and academic relationships with key informants, shape at least to a degree that persons scholarly interest and writing. Geoffrey Gorer and François (Féral) Benga, whose lives crosscut those of a number of leading intellectual and artistic figures of interwar Britain, France, and the USA, offer one example of how ethnographic partnership may come to shape a corner or two of disciplinal history. In 1934, before Margaret Mead encouraged his anthropological career, Gorer toured West Africa with Benga who had come to France from Senegal to perform in the Folies Bergères. Gorer [(1935. Africa Dances: A Book about West African Negroes. New York: Alfred A. Knoft)] published an account of their travels as Africa Dances. This collaboration would shape Gorers subsequent contributions to the broader contours of culture and personality theory and national character study before and after World War II.

Christian politics in Oceania, edited by Matt Tomlinson and Debra McDougall

viewing the phantasmagoric temple as the expression of eroticism suppressed and exalted—exalted because, as the abbot remarked about his sale of amulets, ‘even if you break the monastic code of conduct you can still keep the main tenets of Buddhism’ (p. 44). In an age of political taboo and uncertainty in Thailand, long caught between authoritarian and egalitarian impulses, it is refreshing to have this uncompromisingly perceptive portrait of an emblematic but enigmatic figure struggling in the churning waters between piety and desire.