A key moment in history, anthropology and IslandMelanesia. Hviding, Edvard and Cato Berg (eds) (2014)The Ethnographic Experiment: A.M. Hocart and W.H.R Rivers in IslandMelanesia, 1908.New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 320 pp., US95.00,hbk, ISBN: 9781782383420.

Abstract

Hviding and Berg's collection of essays explores a key moment in the history of anthropology: the 1908 Solomon Islands and Vanuatu fieldwork of the British scholars A.M. Hocart, W.H.R Rivers and G.C. Wheeler as the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition. This expedition has not had the scholarly attention of its predecessor the 1898 Cambridge Torres Strait Expedition (where Rivers undertook his first ethnographic research) or the subsequent fieldwork undertaken by Malinowski. Hviding and Berg have rectified this neglect in this fine volume. The book explores Hocart and Rivers's intellectual legacy in their development of ethnographic fieldwork methods and kinship theory, in their influence on colonial interpretations of depopulation in Melanesia; and in the material objects and photographs from the expedition that remain with the Cambridge University Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology and have been given little attention since they were collected (explored in detail in the chapter by Tim Thomas). This range of interests reflects the expertise of the nine contributors to the volume. Drawn from anthropology, archaeology, geography and history, all are mature scholars who have conducted fieldwork in the very region studied by Hocart and Rivers. Hocart and Rivers were products of their time, even as they experimented with new approaches to the study of unfamiliar peoples and places They had their failings, as several contributors make apparent, yet they also had moments of insight that are still valued today. Each of the chapters notes various ways in which the material collected by Rivers and Hocart provides a valuable archive for contemporary research, even if the old analyses have now been found to be less useful. Assessing the legacy of past scholars is a delicate art. Christine Dureau's chapter reflects on the problem of how best to assess these ambiguities by drawing out an analogy with her contemporary Simbo informants who also share an ambiguous relationship to their pre-Christian ancestors. Rivers and Hocart were deeply implicated in the British imperial project, but their research included friendships with key informants that were deeply respectful of the individuality of particular persons, taking careful note of their relative place in society. Hocart and Rivers did not reduce their Melanesian interlocutors into the all-too-familiar colonial stereotypes of simple ‘natives’ or bloodthirsty ‘savages’ that echo loudly into the present day. They were cognisant of differences of opinion and practice within the communities they studied and did not claim a paternalistic ‘ethnographic authority’. This sensitivity to the life worlds of their informants allowed them to embrace what Hviding's chapter refers to as ‘inter-island practice’, a recognition of the deep interconnections between the island communities of the Western Solomons. Hviding and others draw out the contribution of the expedition to the now discipline-defining ethnographic method of participant observation. Hocart also pioneered a form of what would now be called multi-sited ethnography, not only in his collection of data from multiple places but in his ability to see the profoundly regional nature of life in the New Georgia group. The expedition aimed to demonstrate how (older) matrilineal societies develop into patrilineal, an evolutionary theory that was already losing credibility. The irony of the expedition is that Rivers failed to realise that Vella Lavella was the very kind of society that might have provided him with the evidence he sought. This omission puzzles many of the volume's authors. Nevertheless, in their chapter, Rio and Eriksen argue that Rivers's short-comings are not fatal and that his work on ‘mother right’ and ‘father right’ can be usefully applied in contemporary analysis of gendered social life in Ambrym. Both Kolshus's and Bayliss-Smith's chapters underscore the importance of good ethnography as the grounds of theory. Kolshus is highly critical of Rivers's extrapolations from his brief visit to the Banks Islands and Tikopia. Bayliss (following Hocart and some of Rivers's students) uses Rivers's data from Simbo and Vella to show how inadequate the ‘psychological factor’ was in explaining population decline in Melanesia. Rivers argued that the impact of colonialism was a disruptive trauma for Melanesian societies that sapped the collective will to live and to reproduce. As Bennett shows in her chapter, this theory became very influential among British colonial administrators until replaced by biomedical explanations of depopulation as a result of the lack of resistance to introduced diseases. The Ethnographic Experiment redeems the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition from obscurity, exploring its legacy and shortcomings. The tightly focused collection of scholarship in this volume provides a compelling resource for those interested in Island Melanesia, colonial history and the development of anthropology, both as a distinctive discipline and in the global history of ideas.