Contents

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Figures and Tables vii
4. Preface ix
5. Acknowledgements xi
6. Introduction: The Ethnographic Experiment in Island Melanesia 1
7. 1 Acknowledging Ancestors: The Vexations of Representation 44
8. 2 Across the New Georgia Group A.M. Hocart’s Fieldwork as Inter-island Practice 71
9. 3 The Genealogical Method: Vella Lavella Reconsidered 108
10. 4 Rivers and the Study of Kinship on Ambrym: Mother Right and Father Right Revisited 132
11. 5 A House upon Pacific Sand: W.H.R. Rivers and His 1908 Ethnographic Survey Work 155
12. 6 Colonialism as Shell Shock: W.H.R. Rivers’s Explanations for Depopulation in Melanesia 179
13. 7 A Vanishing People or a Vanishing Discourse? W.H.R. Rivers’s ‘Psychological Factor’ and Depopulation in the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides 214
14. 8 Objects and Photographs from the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition 252
15. Appendix 1 Unpublished Reports by W.H.R. Rivers to the Trustees of the Percy Sladen Memorial Trust Fund 283
16. Appendix 2 Materials in Archives from the 1908 Percy Sladen Trust Expedition 291
17. Appendix 3 Planning the Expedition: Letters Written Before the Fieldwork Began 295
18. Notes on Contributors 303
19. Index 307