London; New York: Routledge [Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business], 2019. xviii, 577 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, B&W photos, illustration.) US$250.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-138-69371-5.
In the topography of Melanesian studies, this latest addition to the Routledge “Worlds” series is a significant waypoint, an occasion to take stock of the current configuration of the field, and—at least for the historically minded—a moment in which to reflect on how that field has evolved. The editors, London-based anthropologists Eric Hirsch and Will Rollason, have managed to assemble 34 chapters from 39 authors (no mean feat in itself), which together cover a considerable spread of the available topics. The resulting collection is encyclopaedic, in the good sense of the term, and available online as individual chapters, which secures its future as an invaluable teaching resource.
The Melanesian world is first and foremost a Melanesian-ist world, defined by those who make Melanesia their object of study. Its boundaries are famously but productively elastic, reflecting the very different agendas to which the region has been recruited. The editors opt here to work within the borders of the contemporary polities of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, with New Caledonia, West Papua, and the Torres Strait Islands thrown in; Fiji is excluded, as are the Papuan-speaking enclaves of eastern Indonesia. Who then are the Melanesianists of this collection? Overwhelmingly anthropologists (29), it would seem, with geographers (4) and scholars from other disciplines in supporting roles; and almost all anglophone. While this might be taken to reflect the personal interests and networks of the editors, I suspect it is also an accurate reflection of the contemporary Melanesianist constituency; Melanesia as a frame for analysis simply has less resonance now for historians, ecologists, and archaeologists. Compare the spread of disciplines in what is perhaps the precursor to this volume, the 1982 collection Melanesia: Beyond Diversity edited by Ron May and Hank Nelson (Canberra: Australian National University)—with 8 anthropologists, 11 historians, 7 linguists, 12 geographers and demographers, 5 archaeologists, and 6 political scientists—and note the almost four decades that have elapsed since, underscoring the need for a new overview. Finally, none of the authors in the present volume, to the best of my knowledge, identifies as Melanesian, which is an enduring and unfortunate limitation of the field.
The editors’ introduction identifies “the contemporary moment … as a kind of meta-frame” (3) for the challenge of defining what, if anything, might mark Melanesia out as distinctive in a global context of other modernities, other economies, and other Christianities. This tension between Melanesia either as a site of alterity or as enmeshed unequally within a universal modernity is left unresolved. Indeed all three words of the title are open to challenge: the singularity implied by the article, the unbounded nature of the regional label, and the question of whether any region can be a whole unto itself. But a Melanesian emphasis, evident throughout the volume, on connection, relationship, kinship, and road-building, points to a distinctive quality of engagement—both internal and external—that is also matched by a refusal to be constrained by externally imposed boundaries.
Six seemingly conventional thematic sections (history, regional overviews, economy, politics, religion, material culture, and development) open up to reveal individual chapters that are much more diverse and distinctive in their coverage and approach, but both individually excellent and strong across the board. The historical and overview chapters (Glenn Summerhayes on archaeology, Max Quanchi on history, John Barker on missionaries; and Stewart Firth on geo-politics, Alan Rumsey on language, and Jaap Timmer on cultural diversity) are succinct, but authored by leaders in each field and thus perfect as introductory statements to current thinking. Staple topics such as big men (Keir Martin), cargo cult (Lamont Lindstrom), and initiation (Pascale Bonnemère) are critically reviewed from the perspective of the present. Other chapters adopt novel frames for established topics, such as Borut Telban on places and paths, Lissant Bolton on Melanesian museums as experiments, Anna-Karina Hermkens on the creation and destruction of material culture, and Melissa Demian and Benedicta Rousseau on owning the law. But it’s the resolutely contemporary topics that really establish the collection as a new kind of statement about Melanesia: John Cox on money schemes, Geoffrey Hobbis on new media, Tim Sharp and Mark Busse on recent research on markets, John Taylor on Paradise tourism, Annelin Eriksen and Michelle MacCarthy on new churches, and Edvard Hviding and Camilla Borrevik on climate change, amongst others.
Marilyn Strathern, as she often does, gets the last say in an afterword that nudges us to think more about the work that “Melanesia” does, or fails to do, in presenting a particular scale for analysis (and thus obscuring others): What, in any accounting of the contemporary in Melanesia, would be considered intrusive or non-Melanesian? Looking ahead, we might well ask what could be expected of a successor volume in another twenty or even forty years. It’s a solid bet that boundaries and boundary making, or practices of inclusion or exclusion, will still dominate the introduction. But for the here and now, this is an impressive roster and a compelling volume.
Chris Ballard
The Australian National University, Canberra