Engaging with Strangers : : Love and Violence in the Rural Solomon Islands / / Debra McDougall.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2016
• VerfasserIn: McDougall, Debra,
• Place / Publishing House: New York; , Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2016]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology ; 6
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (308 p.)

The civil conflict in Solomon Islands (1998-2003) is often blamed on the failure of the nation-state to encompass culturally diverse and politically fragmented communities. Writing of Ranongga Island, the author tracks engagements with strangers across many realms of life—pre-colonial warfare, Christian conversion, logging and conservation, even post-conflict state building. She describes startling reversals in which strangers become attached to local places, even as kinspeople are estranged from one another and from their homes. Against stereotypes of rural insularity, she argues that a distinctive cosmopolitan openness to others is evident in the rural Solomons in times of war and peace.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Notes on Language, Orthography, and Names -- Maps -- Introduction: On Being a Stranger in a Hospitable Land -- 1 Ethnicity, Insularity, and Hospitality -- 2 Ranongga’s Shifting Ground -- 3 Incorporating Others in Violent Times -- 4 Bringing the Gospel Ashore -- 5 No Love? Dilemmas of Possession -- 6 Estranging Kin The Tribalization of Land Ownership -- 7 Losing Passports: Mobility, Urbanization, Ethnicity -- 8 Amity and Enmity in an Unreliable State -- Glossary -- References -- Index