School Of Oriental And African Studies Research Articles

Recognising a kaleidoscopic archive: working with London Missionary Society records in the geekosphere’

This article is an ultra-reflective account of an encounter with London Missionary Society (LMS) records through the Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP) collections at the State Library of Victoria (SLV) and the home office as socially and materially informed research spaces. The genealogies of surrogate archives are little analysed, yet they have complex pasts worth investigating. As Jasmine Burns (JALSNA 33: 150–167, 2024), the librarian and metadata specialist explained, information about an archive’s ancestry is valuable as it illuminates the history and a pattern of use beyond the original author’s intent. The subsequent discussion shows how I inspect descriptive categories associated with the AJCP LMS microfilmed and digitised records in the custody of SLV, the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the National Library of Australia, (NLA) showing how meaning was layered onto these records. Extending on the social historian Arlette Farge’s analogy of the archive as a kaleidoscope, I demonstrate the introductory process by which a historian determines absences and presences in the archive and to what extent the initial imperial categories used by archivists and librarians informed my research practices. By analysing the history of the LMS AJCP collection, I demonstrate how these Australian-Pacific artefacts contain layers of knowledge about historical cultures and relationships. The different agendas and experiences of librarians, archivists, and historians—all curators of historical records –have revealed or obscured encounter narratives concerning European and indigenous men and women.

Pendekatan Thomas Beighton (1790-1844) dalam Penyebaran Agama Kristian di Pulau Pinang dan Kedah (1819-1844) (Thomas Beighton (1790-1844)’s Approaches to Propagate Christianity in Penang and Kedah (1819-1844))

Studies on the history of Christian propagation among Muslim communities in Malaya are mostly limited to certain aspects such as education, printing, and others. Hence the need for a thorough study of the approaches used by Christian missionaries was discovered to be significant because the European Christian missionaries typically developed closer relationships with the local community and the Sultan than the colonists themselves. Therefore, this study aims to identify the approaches used by Thomas Beighton (1790-1844), an LMS missionary, in propagating to the Malay committees in Penang and Kedah. Also, the historical analysis used in this study is based on Beighton’s letters and reports, which were obtained from the collection of the Council of World Mission-London Missionary Society (CWM-LMS) Penang in the archives of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the University of London. Thus, based on the research, there are three main approaches that Beighton has used: education, writing and publications, and his relation with the local ruler. This is where Beighton indirectly played a role as an agent of British colonialism through certain approaches. This indirectly shows that there are elements of Westernization in Beighton’s approach to the local community in both states.

Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan by Peter Kornicki

Reviewed by: Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan by Peter Kornicki Roger H. Brown (bio) Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan . By Peter Kornicki. Oxford University Press, 2021. xxx, 402 pages. $29.95. For decades after World War II, the extent of Allied success in breaking enemy codes and the contribution it made toward the defeat of the Axis powers remained classified. The gradual lifting of the veils of secrecy finally opened the archives to scholars and permitted participants to share their experiences. Regarding the Asia-Pacific theater of the war, the lion's share of attention went to codebreaking in relation to battles such as Pearl Harbor and Midway and to strategic decisions such as those regarding war termination. More recently, historians have produced a small but solid body of scholarship examining the intensive Japanese language programs required to exploit such cryptological successes, as well as to translate documents recovered on the battlefield and interrogate prisoners. However, reflecting the dominant role of the United States in the Pacific theater, the scholarship on wartime linguists has almost totally neglected the British contribution. 1 In Eavesdropping on the Emperor, Peter Kornicki endeavors to redress this deficiency and to thereby "reveal what made the Japanese-language training programmes during the war so successful, who the remarkable teachers and their extraordinary students were, and what unseen contributions they made to the war effort in all theatres of war" (p. xxviii). Kornicki's successful effort echoes the achievements of the men and women whose stories he tells. Indeed, recovering the personal experiences of British linguists, which is at the heart of Kornicki's account, constitutes one of the great strengths of his book. The reader meets an almost endless variety of people appearing and often reappearing throughout the book, and the details regarding these individuals and their experiences in various services, programs, and theaters of action should prove valuable to a wide array of researchers. Kornicki begins by demonstrating how, even as the likelihood of war with Japan loomed, British diplomatic and military leaders responded with [End Page 267] astonishing complacency to entreaties from knowledgeable academics and military officers about the dire need for Japanese linguists. He partly attributes this lack of action to the overall underestimation of the military threat posed by Japan, a prejudice that was only shattered by the successful Japanese operations during the first six months of the war. In response to these setbacks, the few academics, missionaries, military officers, and other individuals with close knowledge of Japan and its language then established language programs at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the Bedford School. The instructors and students came from eclectic backgrounds ranging from professors at elite universities to working-class youths and enlisted servicemen. Together they confronted the daunting challenge of attaining a high level of proficiency in a difficult language in an extraordinarily short period of time. Success required not just personal ability but powerful motivation. Inspiration could come from many sources, but those already in service sometimes bore their own special incentives. Peter Laslett, who joined Fleet Air Arm in 1940 and was sent to learn Japanese in 1942, recalled that: "They … told us that if we couldn't read Japanese within a year we would be sent back to our ships. I had been on the Murmansk route, which was extremely dangerous, so I learned Japanese under sentence of being drowned" (p. 82). Kornicki details how these diverse students, once enrolled, engaged in truly intense study directed at mastering those aspects of the Japanese language required for their expected tasks, which included translation of decoded diplomatic messages, tactical wireless intercepts, diaries and orders found on the battlefield, and interrogation of prisoners. Graduates deployed to duty posts scattered as far as Singapore, Mauritius, India, Australia, Burma, and, eventually, occupied Japan. As was the case with their U.S. counterparts, most of these men and women returned to their civilian lives and never made use of their language skills again, but some went on to lay the foundations for the great postwar expansion of Anglophone Japanese studies. The tardiness of...

The Protestant Missions to South-East Asia: Experimental Laboratory of Missionary Concepts and of Human Relations (Circa 1780–1840)

Abstract The relationship between the Anglo-Scottish Ultra-Ganges Mission and the Dutch missionaries in South East Asia, both missions based at Batavia and at Melaka (Malacca), could be described as “distant but cordial” – even during times of colonial conflict – but the same cannot always be said about the internal conditions of the British mission. This article will attempt to place the relationship between the Anglo-Dutch missionary enterprises into a historical context which includes the complex networks built up by the missionaries with the colonial administrations, as well as with the local Malay and Chinese communities. Ultimately, the success of their mission depended as much on such external factors as on the internal cohesion between the individual missionaries. Much of the historical sources for this article has been derived from the Special Collections archives kept at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Shaping future food system leaders

Shaping future food system leaders

Arho – The Afar Salt Trade of Northeastern Ethiopia

“Arho – The Afar Salt Trade of North-eastern Ethiopia” follows the journey of a camel caravan to the salt plains of the Afar Depression. Traditionally the caravans moved from Afar Depression to other parts of Ethiopia and to the Red Sea coastal regions of modern-day Eritrea and Djibouti. For centuries the control, trade and distribution of salt was of primary importance in the articulation of economic, social, and political life of the nomadic communities living along the caravan trails. Since 2010, trucks have slowly replaced the camel caravans. This has led to a steady decline in the trade. The film, relying on strong visual imagery and traditional Afar music, selected by the participant of this project, documents how the decline of this trade affects the daily life of the communities in Berahle district of North-eastern Ethiopia. The documentary is part of PhD project at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University London. It is based on 13 months ethnographic research (2017-2018) that combines anthropological theory with ethnographic filmmaking to explore new and creative ways of collaborative research.

A view from below: some thoughts on musicology and EDI work as acts of care

ABSTRACT This article presents an autoethnographic account of the structures of inequality and legacies of colonial knowledge systems still active in Music departments in a cosmopolitan UK city from the point of view of the studentship. Institutions of Higher Education have increasingly acknowledged the dimensions of difference and exclusion in their spaces, personnel and curricula, mainly through the so-called policies of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. It is argued that these policies have failed to tackle the structural layers of discriminations in academia, creating instead an illusion of care. Drawing on the author’s involvement in the Music Departments of King’s College London and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and focusing on disciplinary practice in music studies, this article analyses the discourses of care invoked through EDI and how they intersect with the cultural logics of neoliberal capitalism. To this end, this article presents a series of student-lecturer conversations in an exercise of self-knowledge, with the aim to illustrate how music scholars strive to care in a context shaped by coloniality and austerity.

The Journal of Quranic Studies published by SOAS London University: The Problem of Objectivity and Prejudice

أهداف البحث: تصدر مجلة الدراسات القرآنية عن كرسي الملك فهد منذ عام 1990 والذي يتبع لقسم الدراسات الشرق أوسطية في جامعة لندن: المدرسة الشرقية الإفريقية. ويهدف هذا البحث أن يعرف القارئ بهذه المجلة وبأهميتها من الناحية العلمية، وتأثيرها في المجال الأكاديمي وفي الإثراء العلمي الذي تقدمه في حقل الدراسات القرآنية. ويبين البحث أيضا مدى التزام المجلة بالمنهج العلمي المحايد في عرضها لآراء متناقضة حول القرآن الكريم وعلومه من قبل الباحثين المسلمين والغربيين الذين ينشرون في المجلة.  منهج الدراسة: اعتمد الباحث كلا من المنهج الوصفي والاستقرائي في دراسة كل الأعداد الصادرة من عام 1999 وحتى تاريخ إجراء الدراسة عام 2018، حيث بلغت المقالات المنشورة حوالي 267 بحثا باللغات العربية والإنجليزية والفرنسية. وكذلك اعتمد الباحث على المنهج التحليلي في دراسة بعض الأبحاث التي قدمها مسلمون وغربيون. النتائج: هذه المجلة هي مجلة علمية دولية لها وزنها وأثرها الكبير لدى الباحثين في الغرب في مجال الدراسات القرآنية. وقد تضمنت المجلة أبحاثا رصينة وجديدة، إلا أن إشكالية الموضوعية والتحيز لم تستطع هذه المجلة تجاوزها أو وضع ميزان ضابط لها، فانحازت للكتاب الغربيين المعارضين للإسلام دون أخذ بعين الاعتبار لمشاعر المسلمين وعقائدهم بدعوى الحيادية، ولم تطرح موضوعات ناقدة للمنهج الغربي الذي يتناول القرآن الكريم بتحيز واضح. وأوصت الدراسة بضرورة إنشاء مجلة علمية دولية متخصصة بالقرآن الكريم وعلومه، تعرض آراء المسلمين والغربيين المنصفين بطريقة علمية منصفة.

Samuel N. C. Lieu, Erica Hunter, Enrico Morano, Nils Arne Pedersen (eds.). Manichaeism East and West

This volume opens a new sub-series, Analecta Manichaica, of the very successful series Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum. This sub-series shall be used not only for publishing the proceedings of the international conferences of the International Association of Manichaean Studies (IAMS), but also serve as a peer-reviewed occasional journal of the IAMS. This first volume contains the proceedings of the 8th International Conference of the IAMS held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)...

‘Is Anthropology Legal?’

AbstractIn May 2018, the European Union (EU) introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with the aim of increasing transparency in data processing and enhancing the rights of data subjects. Within anthropology, concerns have been raised about how the new legislation will affect ethnographic fieldwork and whether the laws contradict the discipline’s core tenets. To address these questions, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London hosted an event on 25 May 2018 entitled ‘Is Anthropology Legal?’, bringing together researchers and data managers to begin a dialogue about the future of anthropological work in the context of the GDPR. In this article, I report and reflect on the event and on the possible implications for anthropological research within this climate of increasing governance.

Roads to interdisciplinarity \u2013 working at the nexus among food systems, nutrition and health

The development agenda over the next 15 years will be framed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), of which more than half relate either directly or indirectly to the agricultural sector, highlighting its importance in economic growth and development of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) (FAO 2015). It is therefore imperative that agricultural systems are better understood, so that they may be strengthened and optimised to deliver outcomes in line with the SDGs. The interface between agriculture, nutrition and health is particularly multifaceted and complex, and the development of successful strategies will require an integrated and multi-sectoral approach (Dorward and Dangour 2012; Jones and Ejeta 2016). ‘Agri-health’ is an evolving paradigm seeking to unify research approaches and methodologies between agriculture and health. Research within the field encapsulates a broad range of disciplines, locations and actors, and aligns these into a common research agenda. In doing so, agri-health aims to transcend barriers imposed by the longstanding institutional and disciplinary silos. Much progress has been made in recent years in this regard (Harris et al. 2013; Kanter et al. 2014; Picchioni et al. 2015). However, more coordinated efforts are required to generate consensus and target strategic priorities amongst the many existing information gaps (Webb and Kennedy 2014). Understanding the linkages between complex issues such as globalisation, climate change, food systems, and evolving burdens of malnutrition is central to agri-health research. The Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH) was created in 2010 with a key focus on agri-health interdisciplinary research. LCIRAH includes experts from across the member colleges of the University of London: the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and the Royal Veterinary College (RVC). The Agriculture, Nutrition and Health Academy (ANH Academy), was established in 2015 as a platform to facilitate learning, knowledge sharing, capacity building and collaborative partnerships among the growing global community of researchers, practitioners and policy makers working within agri-health. It was developed with support from the Innovative Metrics and Methods for Agriculture and Nutrition Actions (IMMANA) research programme,Footnote1 led by LCIRAH and Tufts University, in partnership with the CGIAR Programme on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH). Within this scope, the ANH Academy hosts an annual ANH Academy Week, building on the legacy of five agri-health research conferences organised by LCIRAH; as well as events and activities coordinated under the CGIAR A4NH. The inaugural ANH Academy Week took place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in June 2016 and included two days of interactive ‘learning labs’ (training sessions on skills and methods across a broad range of disciplines in agri-health), followed by a three-day research conference. The conference included a mix of abstract-driven sessions, round table discussions, and keynote speeches from across the spectrum of agriculture, nutrition and health disciplines, and a wide range of countries. Hawkes et al. (2012) developed a conceptual framework (Fig. 2, hereafter referred to as the Framework), outlining the key pathways through which agriculture may affect nutritional status in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs), as well as broader drivers of these pathways. Drawing on this Framework, this paper aims to provide an analytical synthesis of the ANH Academy week by mapping the research and debates presented during the conference.

Ooi Kee Beng. The Eurasian Core and Its Edges: Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014, 254p.

The Eurasian Core and Its Edges: Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the WorldOOI KEE BENGSingapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014, 254p.Scholars from, or based in, Europe, North America, or Australia have shaped most of the writing on world history over the past half century. Few Asians have taken up the challenge of examining the forces and developments, contacts and collisions, connecting and shaping the world's societies over the centuries. Although it has a somewhat limited focus (mostly Eurasia) and emphasizes the Big Picture rather than details, this innovative book illuminates the always interesting thoughts of a prominent Singapore-based Malaysian scholar, Wang Gungwu, and adds a new and largely Asian perspective through a dialogue with a younger Malaysian historian also working in Singapore, Ooi Kee Beng. In a series of interviews in 2013 the author, Ooi, skillfully posed thoughtful questions to Wang and compiled their extended conversations into this unconventional but intriguing book. The collaboration, which is loosely organized thematically rather than chronologically, should be of interest to specialists on world, European, Indian, Southeast Asian, and especially Central Asian and Chinese history. The result is like a rewarding and intellectually exciting graduate school seminar with a master historian bringing together his vast knowledge to ponder the broad structure of world history over several millennia.Few historians are more qualified to explore and identify some of the main themes of such a vast topic. Wang Gungwu is one of the most outstanding, prolific, and wide-ranging historians of our generation. His life and career have spanned the tumultuous transition from Western colonialism through World War II, decolonization, the Cold War, and the multipolar world of today. His background is exceptionally cosmopolitan. Born in 1930 in colonial Indonesia to an ethnic Chinese family and raised in British Malaya, Wang was educated at the University of Malaya in Singapore (BA, MA) and School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London (Ph.D.) before his highly successful academic and administrative career at the University of Malaya (History Department Head), Australian National University (Professor and Head of Far Eastern History and Director, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies), Hong Kong University (Vice Chancellor), and National University of Singapore (University Professor). His travels and sojourns have also taken him to many countries around the world. This reviewer first met Wang in the mid-1960s at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, where Wang had helped build a globalized History Department with a multinational faculty offering courses on both Southeast Asia and various world regions, a harbinger of the cosmopolitan approach he would demonstrate in some of his writings, including this book. Wang's numerous books and articles examine diverse topics but especially China's pre-modern and modern history and politics, Chinese migrations and the resulting diaspora (a concept he dislikes), Malaysian and Singapore history and society, political and economic relations among Asian societies, and Asia's role in world history.The book is structured around several key themes that Wang believes were major factors in the broader history of Eurasia, which he identifies (along with North Africa) as the canvas where most of world history was made. This view does not conflict with a lot of Western historical writing on the subject, which also (in the reviewer's mind, wrongly) devalues Africa and the Americas prior to the past few centuries, but Wang places stronger emphasis on Central Asia and China. Wang views Eurasia as a vast core of irrepressible power and several coastal edges (some historians might use the term fringes)-the agrarian-based west (Europe), south (India), and east (China)-connected by Central Asian horse-riding pastoral nomadic societies whose interaction, friendly or hostile, with inland-looking states to the west and east fostered the emergence of European and Chinese civilizations. …

Terence Ranger’s Return to the University of Zimbabwe in the Late 1990s

I first met Terry at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in 1979, when he presented his paper on Mugabe and the revival of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU).1 I had...

Report on BAAL ‘Language in Africa’ SIG meetings Reading in African languages: Developing literacies and reading methodologies

This report describes ongoing research on reading in African languages. It draws mainly on contributions from two British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) ‘Language in Africa’ (LiA) Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings: the LiA SIG strand at BAAL 2013 and the seminar on Reading Methodologies in African Languages held at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in January 2014. This report will only cover contributions that focused on reading research and practice.

Precarious workers in London: New forms of organisation and the city

This paper discusses precarious workers in London. The aim is to consider the particular challenges and possibilities for resistance in the context of London. It addresses the theoretical questions of precarity and its significance in post-Fordist capitalism. The innovations of the Operaismo—in terms of workers' inquiries, the concept of class composition and the strategy of refusal—provide the theoretical basis for the paper. The paper draws on two examples of recent struggles on university campuses, that of casual teaching staff and cleaners, which highlight different points. The first is that a method inspired by the tradition of the workers' inquiry can provide an important starting point for a campaign, combining knowledge production and a project of organisation. This is illustrated with the use of surveys as a starting point for a campaign at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London. The second example draws on the experience of the cleaners' campaigns at the University of London. The history of the dispute is considered along with the use of the London living wage and alternative forms of trade unionism. This paper argues that the particular pressures for precarious workers in London need to be considered, but could also be posed as potential demands from workers, drawing on Henri Lefebvre's notion of ‘the right to the city'. The conclusion of the argument is a call for further research that is attentive to the new forms of organisation that are emerging from workers' struggles and to how a consideration of urban demands could provide important opportunities for developing this further.

Palestine and Palestine Studies

In this overarching March 2014 inaugural lecture at the newly established Center for Palestine Studies at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, while reminiscing about the genesis and evolution of the new narrative on the 1948 war, provides fresh analyses of both the Balfour Declaration and UN Security Council Resolution 242. He also addresses such pressing Palestinian issues as the one-state/two-state debate, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), and the Hamas/Fatah relationship. He concludes by highlighting the potentially catastrophic nature of the disputes centering on Jerusalem's Muslim holy places and the threat to the Middle East posed by the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, “the most dangerous political leader in the world today.”

An Introduction to Archive Collections held at SOAS

AbstractSusannah Rayner provides an introduction to the archive collections held at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Library which relate to legal studies, based on a presentation given at the National Socio-legal Training Day on the subject of legal biography, held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies 15th May 2013.

Bibliography of Art and Architecture in the Islamic World

Index Islamicus, begun in 1906, is a database of bibliographic information ofpublications in all areas of studies connected with the Islamic world. Since thattime, interest in Islamic art and architecture has surged from specialists to manyscholars, students, and general interest worldwide. The recent and updated supplementsBibliography of Art and Architecture in the Islamic World, edited bySusan Sinclair, who was assisted by Heather Bleaney and Pablo Garcia Suarez,fills a serious void by listing the materials from 1906 to 2011.Sinclair, an independent scholar with a Ph.D. from the University ofLondon’s Courtauld Institute of Art, is currently researching material in themedievalArab world and has served as the co-editor of the Index Islamicussince 2007. With the support of the university’s renowned School of Orientaland African Studies, she was able to comb the archives of the United Kingdom’sleading institutions, including the National Art Library in London,the British Library, the library of the Warburg Institute, the Cambridge UniversityLibrary, and the University of Oxford libraries, as well as importantcollections located in Spain (e.g., the Biblioteca Nacional de España, theBiblioteca Islámica, and the libraries of Consejo Superior de InvestigacionesCientificas). The compilation of resources from these vast collections aswell as the material available online has brought this bibliographic collectionto a new level.At first glance, the material may seem to be no more than a listing ofsources on the subject, with no “content” per se to read. However, the valueof such texts and of this set in particular is that the bibliographic listings aregrouped by type and subtypes, which enable researchers in particular areas toaccess a wealth of information not necessarily accessible by other search enginesor mechanisms ...

The Handbook of the political economy of financial crises

The Handbook of the political economy of financial crises

In Memoriam, George Milner, 1918–2012

In Memoriam, George Milner, 1918–2012 Paul Geraghty Professor Emeritus George Milner, well known to Oceanic linguists as the author of Fijian grammar and Samoan dictionary, as well as numerous articles, passed away peacefully at his home in South Petherton, Somerset, England, on July 7, 2012, at the age of 93.1 He was born George Bertram Milner on September 9, 1918, and received his early education in Lausanne, Switzerland, before moving to Manchester Grammar School in England. Bilingual in English and French, he would later publish a number of scholarly articles in French. In 1937 he was awarded a scholarship to Christ’s College Cambridge to study Modern Languages, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1940, whereupon he joined the Army Intelligence Corps and served with the Eighth Army in the Western Desert and Italy. Like many who served in the war, he preferred not to talk about it. After the war, he joined the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, having been awarded a scholarship to study Fijian, culminating in a Master of Arts degree in 1947, after which he became lecturer in linguistics at SOAS. His research in Fijian, and subsequent fieldwork, was commissioned and supported by the colonial government, feeling perhaps that the most recent grammar (Churchward 1940), though a good reference grammar, was not suitable as a primer (Milner 1971a:405, Schütz 1972:76). During this time, he first came into contact with Josua Bogidrau, a native of Tubou, Lakeba, Lau, who had previously worked with Arthur Capell on his compilation of a new Fijian dictionary, and was now seconded to SOAS for sixteen months in 1946 and 1947. Bogidrau was, incidentally, the grandson of Melaia Lutu, who had been one of Arthur Hocart’s principal informants for his classic study of Lauan culture, The Lau Islands (Hocart 1929). After acquiring the rudiments of Fijian from Bogidrau, Milner prepared to go to Fiji to carry out fieldwork, under the guidance of G. K. Roth, a senior colonial administrator who had done anthropological fieldwork in Fiji (Roth 1953Roth 1973), and who was considered at the time the authority on Fijian culture. Roth arranged for Ratu Sukuna, then Secretary of Fijian Affairs and also an authority on language and culture, later to become Fiji’s leading statesman of the mid-twentieth century, to write for George a sketch of the dialects of Fiji, to guide him in his fieldwork (Scarr n.d.:425). Milner and Ratu Sukuna were to become firm friends, and Sukuna assiduously read the manuscript grammar and [End Page 265] recommended hundreds of amendments during a visit to London in 1953. The historian and bibliographer Philip Snow (1998:62) commented that Milner would have made an excellent biographer of Sukuna, “combining scholarship and personal knowledge of a high order.” Fieldwork lasted 14 months during 1948 to 1949, most of the time being spent in the village of Vatani in Kaba, to the south of the island of Bau, considered then to be the basis of Standard Fijian, though some time was spent in Ba and Nadroga in Western Fiji (Milner 1952, 1971a:412). Ever the keen observer, Milner was taking copious notes as he watched the villagers of Kaba build the house he and his wife and their new-born baby Michael would stay in, and these resulted in a unique study of the language of house-building in Fiji (Milner 1953a), which remains the only one on this topic. When I carried out fieldwork in Kaba in the 1980s, some people still remembered George fondly, and referred to him as Tamai Maikeli (‘Michael’s father’), following the naming custom of that part of Fiji. From 1949 to 1950 he also visited Tonga and the Solomon Islands to conduct linguistic and anthropological fieldwork. The resulting publication, Fijian grammar (Milner 1956), was acclaimed as “perhaps the first complete grammar of a Melanesian or Polynesian language to be written by a professional linguist” (Biggs and Nayacakalou 1958:80), and “the most important work on Fijian” (Schütz 1972:75); for other reviews, all positive, see Buse (1958), Capell (1959), Carr (1958), and Robins (1958). At the...