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.

List of illustrations¿
Preface¿
Acknowledgements¿
Contributors

Introduction: The Ethnographic Experiment in Island Melanesiä
Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg

Chapter 1. Acknowledging Ancestors: The Vexations of Representation¿
Christine Dureau

Chapter 2. Across the New Georgia Group: A.M. Hocart's Fieldwork as Inter-Island Practice
¿Edvard Hviding

Chapter 3. The Genealogical Method: Vella Lavella Reconsidered¿
Cato Berg

Chapter 4. Rivers and the Study of Kinship in Ambrym: Mother Right and Father Right Revisited
¿Knut M. Rio and Annelin Eriksen

Chapter 5. House Upon Pacific Sand: W.H.R. Rivers and his 1908 Ethnographic 'Survey Work'
¿Thorgeir S. Kolshus

Chapter 6. Colonialism as Shell-Shock: W.H.R. Rivers's Explanations for Depopulation in Melanesiä
Tim Bayliss-Smith

Chapter 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¿
Judith A. Bennett

Chapter 8. Objects and Photographs from the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition
¿Tim Thomas

Appendix I: Unpublished reports by W.H.R. Rivers to the Trustees of the Percy Sladen Memorial Trust Fund¿
Transcribed by Tim Bayliss-Smith

Appendix II: Materials in archives from the 1908 fieldwork in Island Melanesiä
Cato Berg

Appendix III: Planning the Expedition: Letters Written before the Fieldwork Began

In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers' later work in psychiatry and psychology, and Hocart's work as a comparativist, for which both would largely be remembered despite the novelty of that independent fieldwork on remote Pacific islands in the early years of the 20th Century. Contributors to this volume-who have all carried out fieldwork in those Melanesian locations where Hocart and Rivers worked-give a critical examination of the research that took place in 1908, situating those efforts in the broadest possible contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.