My area of study is Oceania with a primary focus on Melanesia. Since 1992 I have been conducting fieldwork in the nation-state of Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific. The people with whom I work, the Arosi, live mainly on the island of Makira.
Currently, my chief theoretical interests lie in the anthropology of ontology (being), an emerging subfield that encompasses both long-standing anthropological interest in cosmology and contemporary developments such as the 'new animism', 'perspectivism', 'relationalism', 'non-dualism', and the study of human-nonhuman relations. In recent and forthcoming publications, I contribute critical analyses to debates in this subfield and propose an agenda for the comparative study of wonder (for an intimation of this project, see the photograph below).
These projects reflect my continued development of analyses introduced in The Severed Snake, an ethnographic exploration of what I term the poly-ontological cosmology of Arosi and its relationship to place-making and the indigenization of Christianity. (Click here| to download Table of Contents and Introduction: Comparative Ontology.) I also lecture and write on theory and ethnography, the anthropology of religion, 'cargo cults', myth-making and ethnogenesis.
During the academic year I co-organize the monthly Melanesia Research Seminar at the British Museum.
For the 2011 Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) at the University of Manchester, I was invited to propose the motion 'Non-dualism is philosophy not ethnography'. Click here| to read my position paper.
Selected publications
Forthcoming [2012]. '"Heaven on Earth" or Satan's "Base" in the Pacific? Internal Christian Politics in the Dialogic Construction of the Makiran Underground Army'. In Christian Politics in Oceania, ed. Matt Tomlinson and Debra McDougall. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
2012. The Matter of Makira: Colonialism, Competition, and the Production of Gendered Peoples in Contemporary Solomon Islands and Medieval Britain. History and Anthropology 23(1): 115-148. Click here| to read the abstract for this article.
2011. 'The Makiran Underground Army: Kastom Mysticism and Ontology Politics in South-east Solomon Islands.' In Made in Oceania: Social Movements, Cultural Heritage and the State in the Pacific, ed. Edvard Hviding and Knut M. Rio, 195-222. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing. Click here| to read this chapter.
2008. 'Proto-People and Precedence: Encompassing Euroamericans through Narratives of "First Contact" in Solomon Islands'. In Exchange and Sacrifice, ed. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, 141-176. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
2007. Neither "New Melanesian History" nor "New Melanesian Ethnography": Recovering Emplaced Matrilineages in Southeast Solomon Islands. Oceania 77(3): 337-354. Click here| to read this article.
2007. The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands|. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
2005. "I was like Abraham": Notes on the anthropology of Christianity from the Solomon Islands. Ethnos 70(1): 101-125.
2005. Hybridity, vacuity, and blockage: Visions of chaos from anthropological theory, Island Melanesia, and Central Africa. Comparative Studies in Society and History 47(1): 190-216.
2000. Ignorance is cosmos; knowledge is chaos: Articulating a cosmological polarity in the Solomon Islands. Social Analysis 44(2): 56-83.
Photographs and the aperture of wonder
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In the early twentieth century Jacques-André Boiffard and Eugène Atget each made a series of Parisian street photographs featuring seemingly deserted, desolate and banal urban spaces which, in the words of film scholar Annette Michelson, 'project a sense of imminence, of occurrences past or still to come.…These streets, squares, boulevards, arcades are cleared for the emergence of le merveilleux; their emptiness is ecstatic' (quoted in Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 2002: 61).
This unremarkable photograph of the black sandy beach at Manu'a'a in Arosi (Solomon Islands), which I made in 1992, provoked a similar response of wonder in one local resident who saw in its emptiness the imminence of a glistening tarmac road he hoped would pave this place when infrastructural development finally comes to Arosi.