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Australasia and the Pacific Islands, Book Reviews

Volume 90 – No. 3

ENGAGING WITH STRANGERS: Love and Violence in the Rural Solomon Islands | By Debra McDougall

ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016. xx, 287 pp. (Maps, figures.) US$120.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-78533-020-9.


When foreigners come ashore in the rural Solomon Islands, which is where Debra McDougall’s new book is set, a classic van Gennepian rite of territorial passage may ensue; the insecurity and unpredictability involved in traversing a no-man’s land are allayed by means of conventionalized scripts of symbolic action. In a way, the little rite evokes the Polynesian concept of the “stranger-king,” of sovereignty as overseas agency that must be domesticated by the landed citizenry. The sociopolitical authority of the landed community over its political-geographic boundary in space is symbolically asserted when male youth armed with spears and decorated in leaves and face paint threaten the new arrivals until a member of the ranking elite intervenes and beckons them safely in the community, not as “sharks on the land,” but as “guests.”

The intriguing point is not the moral transformation of the stranger that is achieved but what McDougall makes of the broader attitude it typifies. Not just new arrivals, Solomon Islanders view everybody in society as a “stranger.” Everybody descends from an “empty-handed” immigrant, or a woman captured during pre-contact warfare, or just lives on land that their matrlineage does not own. In other words, status legitimacy is an ongoing problem in Solomon Islands society, of which this ritual greeting, or “warrior welcome,” is a symptom instead of a solution. McDougall’s conclusion about this problem, which might be likened to an indigenous form of alienation, is more generative than ambivalent. “Intense attachment to place,” she declares, “is not incompatible with radical openness to others” (21). For McDougall, particularism should not be condemned as a subversive form of sociality that necessarily undermines society at the local level, much less the state level.

At the local level, questions about status legitimacy become particularly critical in contexts of land disputes, which modernity, needless to say, has done its part to exacerbate. Industrial logging began in the Solomons in the 1960s but only reached Ronongga several decades later. Environmental damage was done. No benefit was left behind. Instead, logging destroyed gardens and old settlements and old coconut groves. Meanwhile,  kinsmen, seeking to consolidate land claims, made efforts to exclude kin who became viewed as “other,”  for example, as not having descended from an apical ancestress. A series of land disputes, and inevitably, court cases followed. When the World Wildlife Federation wanted land rights, a controversy arose over the role of chiefs as landowners. Community development projects were undertaken, such as coconut oil production, which required stipulation of land boundaries.

Civil war broke out in Honiara, the capital of the postcolonial state, in the late 1990s. The violence, McDougall argues, was not caused by primordial, ethnic rivalry, as political scientists might assume, but rather resulted from state-based neglect of hereditary landowners on Guadalcanal who saw peri-urban migrants as being favoured, despite their illegitimate presence in town. Indeed, if anything, the violence was curtailed by the porous construction of social groups in an intercultural world in which acts of hospitality like the “warrior welcome” occur, as well as its valuation of usufructory claims through which non-kin may work on the land and start to become members of a matrilineage—but of course never in any conclusive way.

After two years of violence, the so-called “Ethnic Tensions” between Guale hereditary landowners who wanted to evict Malaitan settlers, the latter staged a coup, and all out warfare broke out. A multilateral mission, led by Australian military, arrived in the Solomons to police the region. “Hardened warlords” surrendered weapons. Perpetrators sought to personally reconcile themselves with former enemies and victims. Prayer groups formed in prison. The Australian prime minister arrived in 2003 and was greeted by the “warrior welcome.” But when riots broke out in the capital in 2006, state failure ensued. The world of Ronongga Island and of the Solomons, more generally, may be a “cosmopolitan space” of a sort, but it is one that is being severely compromised by modernity.

Engaging With Strangers is itself an engaging, if disturbing, ethnography, which left me feeling bewildered and exhausted at times. McDougall attends to the problem of illegitimate identity through an examination of the sociological, demographic, cosmological, missionary, political, and of course, economic impacts on the alienated construction of moral personhood among Ronongga Islanders, who are as often as not individually named. The narrative, that is to say, might have been edited with a more rigorous hand and made tighter.

Still, McDougall’s ethnography is thoughtful and composed in relatively accessible prose. It presents a useful example of a broader problem in the postcolonial Pacific, not to mention, the wider developing world, which I see as a kind of double alienation, one that is constituted in terms of both indigenous and modern estrangements.


David Lipset
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA

pp. 635-637


Last Revised: June 22, 2018
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