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Stories of a massive volcanic eruption that destroyed the island of Kuwae in what is now central Vanuatu have been told and retold over centuries. The two most prominent local stories focus not on the eruption itself but rather on the events leading up to it and on its social consequences as survivors returned to the newly created island of Tongoa. Led by these local stories to explore the history of Kuwae, researchers have generated new stories that describe the global impacts of a mid-fifteenth-century eruption that may have contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age. But the local stories about Kuwae, embedded within communally accepted narrative frameworks that are themselves externally grounded in material forms of proof, are told not to historicize or date the eruption but rather to account for its origins and to validate particular positions in the present. Understanding the different needs driving local and global stories of Kuwae is a prerequisite for bringing them together within a single frame of analysis. KEYWORDS: history, story, narrative, volcanic eruption, Kuwae, In the fifteenth century, on the island of Kuwae in what is now Vanuatu, a blue-tailed skink, secreted within a yam tuber by a man named Tombuku and buried at [...]

'We need a word that includes memory but embraces all the other ways of knowing a past,' wrote Greg Dening, in advocating the notion of a 'poetic for histories': culturally specific forms of knowledge of the past that embrace 'reminiscence, gossip, anecdote, rumour, parable, report, tradition, myth ... saga, legend, epic, ballad, folklore, annal, chronicle' (1991, 348-349). To this list we might want to add a range of other performative and sensory modes of engaging--consciously or unconsciously--with the past, including dancing, gardening, carving, smell, sound, and touch. Drawing on a large but diffuse body of global literature, and illustrating my argument with material from local historians, I consider how we might set about describing these historicities, or cultural logics of temporal process, in an Oceanic setting: how are they expressed, how might we come to understand them, and how are they transformed over time and through encounter with other historicities? Keywords: historicities, Oceania, Pacific, history, historical consciousness, Sunlight filtered through a veil of rain, the texture of an axe handle worn smooth with use, feathers nodding above a dancer's head, the true taste of water from one's [...]

Daniel Macdonald, a Presbyterian Church of Victoria missionary to the New Hebrides from 1872 to 1905, developed a particularly strong interest in language. A prodigious author, he published widely and at length on the languages of Efate, and especially those of the Havannah Harbour area where he was stationed. But if his work is recalled today, it is as something of a curio, both for his Insistence--archaic even for the times--on a link between ancient Semitic and Efate, and for his vigorous promotion of the use by the mission and its converts of a single, hybrid Efate language. This paper addresses and seeks to analyze what Macdonald himself called this 'compromise literary dialect.' By identifying distinctive features of the three main varieties of Efate languages known today (Nguna or Nakanamanga, South Efate, and Lelepa), we aim to move beyond the lexical comparisons that have been the sole means of gauging relationships among these languages thus far. This enables us to begin the process of investigating the claim of Captain Rason, British Deputy Commissioner for the New Hebrides during Macdonald's last years on Efate, that the 'compromise literary dialect' was in fact a spoken dialect particular to the area of Havannah Harbour. We hope to reconsider and perhaps recuperate some of Macdonald's writing as a rare if often distorted window on indigenous life and language at a pivotal moment in the transformation of Efate communities., 1. INTRODUCTION. (1) For north and west Efate, in what was then the central New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), the most significant historical sources for the late nineteenth century are the [...]

Pygmies have long served, both in Western imagination and in Western science, as a sheet anchor for racial hierarchies and for putative sequences of human physical and social evolution. In the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western exploration in Africa, Asia and the Pacific generated what might broadly be termed a colonial 'Pygmy mythology', composed of a set of characteristics deemed diagnostic of this diminutive 'race', articulated with an exceptional degree of confidence by travellers and metropolitan scientists alike. This paper charts the manner in which the three central tropes of racist denigration--the primordial, the infantile and the bestial--have been applied to excess in the description of Pygmies. Yet Pygmies have also been enlisted by colonial observers in an unlikely alliance, as third-party foils in arguments that seek to naturalize the conditions of colonial subjugation of non-Pygmy others. The impetus for this strange alliance is considered through reference to the recent re-discovery by the revisionist historian, Keith Windschuttle, of a Pygmy past in the rainforests of Queensland, Australia. Keywords Pygmies; Negritos; mythology; evolution; colonialism; racial hierarchy; miniature; Africa; Australia.

The ship is the dominant element in the visual culture of the South Scandinavian Bronze Age, appearing in several different media, including rock carvings, decorated metalwork and above-ground monuments. Discussion has divided between those scholars who interpret this imagery in terms of long-distance exchange networks and those who emphasize its more local significance, including its deployment in mortuary ritual. A strikingly similar system is identified in Southeast Asia and part of Melanesia and can be interpreted through archaeological and ethnographic sources, but in this case there is no need to distinguish between 'practical' and 'symbolic' interpretations of the depictions of ships. This paper summarizes the evidence from this region and suggests that it can offer a fruitful source of comparison for archaeologists working in northern Europe. Keywords Ships; travel; exchange; rock art; metalwork; mortuary ritual; cosmology; Scandinavia; Southeast Asia; Melanesia.

Abstract The role of narrative in explanation has received considerable attention in most of the disciplines concerned with questions of historical process, including history, geology, psychoanalysis and palaeo-anthropology. Archaeologists, however, [...]

This collection of papers celebrates Jack Golson's influence on the investigation of prehistoric agriculture in the mountainous interior of New Guinea. The breadth of Golson's interests and his remarkable intellectual [...]

Oceania at the Tropenmuseum, by David van Duuren, Steven Vink, Daan van Dartel, Hanneke Hollander, and Denise Frank. Amsterdam: kit Publishers, 2011. ISBN 978-9068327526; 216 pages, illustrations, photographs, endnotes, references, [...]

The gap continued to widen between Indonesian central government rhetoric and performance on the ground in its troubled eastern province of Irian Jaya during 2001. If carrots were proffered to [...]

Christian notions of the Apocalypse, which were first introduced to Huli speakers of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea during the 1950s, encountered an existing indigenous eschatology, or doctrine of last things. Precontact Huli cosmology posited a moral constitution for the fertility of the universe in which the health of people and the land reflected the state of moral order in Huli society. Failure in social behaviour, which could be gauged from the declining condition of the 'skin' of the land, was attributed to an inexorable process of loss of the knowledge of customary lore. Human agency, however, was accorded a significant role in redressing this universal tendency to entropy, and ritual leaders claimed the ability to induce an apocalyptic, earth-renewing fall of fertile soil from the sky. The adoption of Christian understandings of the Apocalypse as the revelation of divine will, and the abandonment of most of the precontact rituals, have thus had significant consequences for Huli conceptions of the role of human agency in history, and for the nature of their engagement with the land.

Reviews of Solomon Islands and Vanuatu are not included in this issue. Fiji Fiji's long journey toward constitutional reform ended in 1997 with the adoption of the bill amending the […]

For the first time, a review of Irian Jaya is included in this issue. FIJI In his new year address to the nation, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka urged the people […]

Time in archaeology 'Strangely', Chris Gosden muses on the opening page of his new book, 'archaeology is not in the forefront of thought about time' (p. 1); a statement likely [...]

Time in archaeology 'Strangely', Chris Gosden muses on the opening page of his new book, 'archaeology is not in the forefront of thought about time' (p. 1); a statement likely [...]

Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier, by Danilyn Rutherford. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-691-09591-4, xxii + 296 […]

The scope of anthropology of mining and its development is reviewed. Re-conceiving mining projects as sites of critical anthropological research are discussed.

Perspectives on the Bird's Head of Irian Jaya, Indonesia: Proceedings of the Conference, Leiden, 13-17 October 1997, edited by Jelle Miedema, Cecilia Ode, and Rien A C Dam. Amsterdam and […]