Abstract
Jean Guiart’s seminal Un siècle et demi de contacts culturels à Tanna eschewed anthropological theorizing for understanding Tannese society in favour of listening to and privileging the stories that the Tannese tell themselves. This approach appealed to me as an historian wanting to understand the Tannese construction of reality, and informed my research on the island from the mid-1970s to the present. As I describe in this paper, in 1996 I collaborated with Guiart to translate his text into English. Since then there have been six English versions, with the differences between them explained in the paper. Drawing from his memoire Oranges and Lemons and interviews I conducted with him in the 1990s, I outline some of the ethical and methodological considerations Guiart gave for writing his magnum opus the way he did. In the final section of the paper, I apply the concept of ‘beachcomber’ to Guiart on Tanna to arrive at a deeper understanding of the significance of his fieldwork.
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