The Ethnographic Experiment

In 1908 Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers brought about a turning point in modern anthropology. The two pioneers’ fieldwork in Island Melanesia brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. Contributors to this volume—who have all carried out fieldwork in Melanesian locations—situate the scholars’ efforts in the contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.

Edvard Hviding is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Director of the Bergen Pacific Studies Research Group, and Coordinator of the EU-funded European Consortium for Pacific Studies. Among his publications are Guardians of Marovo Lagoon (1996), Islands of Rainforest (with T. Bayliss-Smith, 2000), Reef and Rainforest: An Environmental Encyclopedia of Marovo Lagoon (2005) and Made in Oceania (co-edited with K.M. Rio, 2011). In 2010, Hviding was awarded the Solomon Islands Medal for his development of vernacular education programmes in the Marovo language.

Cato Berg is an Associate Senior Scholar of the Bergen Pacific Studies Research Group. He has a PhD from the University of Bergen, where he has also held positions as a Postdoctoral Fellow and a Lecturer in anthropology. His research experience from Solomon Islands includes fieldwork both in Honiara and on the island of Vella Lavella. He has recently studied how localized forms of hierarchy, kinship, and land tenure are transformed in engagements with a Westminster-based legal system inherited from the nation’s colonial past.

Edvard Hviding is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Director of the Bergen Pacific Studies Research Group, and Coordinator of the EU-funded European Consortium for Pacific Studies. Among his publications are Guardians of Marovo Lagoon (1996), Islands of Rainforest (with T. Bayliss-Smith, 2000), Reef and Rainforest: An Environmental Encyclopedia of Marovo Lagoon (2005) and Made in Oceania (co-edited with K.M. Rio, 2011). In 2010, Hviding was awarded the Solomon Islands Medal for his development of vernacular education programmes in the Marovo language.

“[With this] very cohesive set of essays, Hviding and Berg h ave done an excellent job lifting an important expedition out of the archival oblivion where it reposed for the better part of a century. This is an appropriate volume to introduce the new Pacific Perspectives series. As such, this work appeals to readers interested in the histories of anthropology and Pacific worlds.” · Oceania

“Mere scholars and no novelists here, volume contributors nonetheless have good biographical stories to tell, good ethnographic tales to recall.” · Anthropological Forum

“Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg's new edited collection on the neglected Melanesian expedition on 1908 is timely and important.” · Anthropology Review Database

“It has been quite a while since I encountered a collection of essays that was as well coordinated, topically consistent, and thematically linked as this one. The end result is an intellectually rigorous examination of an overlooked but nonetheless extremely important event in the history of anthropology… The volume, taken as a whole, has a refreshingly critical and reflective quality about it.” · David Hanlon, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa

“This compelling volume invites readers to imagine what the discipline might have been like if this expedition had been taken as a foundational moment in the discipline’s history. It is an alternative to Malinowskian myth of the heroic individual fieldworker isolated on a beach watching the boat go away.” · Debra McDougall, University of Western Australia