The Ethnographic Experiment : : A.M. Hocart and W.H.R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908 / / ed. by Edvard Hviding, Cato Berg.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• MitwirkendeR: Bayliss-Smith, Tim,; Bennett, Judith A.,; Berg, Cato,; Dureau, Christine,; Eriksen, Annelin,; Hviding, Edvard,; Kolshus, Thorgeir S.,; Rio, Knut M.,; Thomas, Tim,
• HerausgeberIn: Berg, Cato,; Hviding, Edvard,
• Place / Publishing House: New York ;, Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Pacific Perspectives: Studies of the European Society for Oceanists ; 1
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (336 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures and Tables -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: The Ethnographic Experiment in Island Melanesia -- 1 Acknowledging Ancestors: The Vexations of Representation -- 2 Across the New Georgia Group A.M. Hocart’s Fieldwork as Inter-island Practice -- 3 The Genealogical Method: Vella Lavella Reconsidered -- 4 Rivers and the Study of Kinship on Ambrym: Mother Right and Father Right Revisited -- 5 A House upon Pacific Sand: W.H.R. Rivers and His 1908 Ethnographic Survey Work -- 6 Colonialism as Shell Shock: W.H.R. Rivers’s Explanations for Depopulation in Melanesia -- 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 -- 8 Objects and Photographs from the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition -- Appendix 1 Unpublished Reports by W.H.R. Rivers to the Trustees of the Percy Sladen Memorial Trust Fund -- Appendix 2 Materials in Archives from the 1908 Percy Sladen Trust Expedition -- Appendix 3 Planning the Expedition: Letters Written Before the Fieldwork Began -- Notes on Contributors -- Index