The ethnographic experiment : A.M. Hocart and W.H.R. Rivers in island Melanesia, 1908 / edited by Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Print version record.

The Ethnographic Experiment -- Contents -- Figures and Tables -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- The Ethnographic Experimentin Island Melanesia -- Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg -- 1 Acknowledging Ancestors -- The Vexations of Representation -- Christine Dureau -- 2 Across the New Georgia Group -- A.M. Hocart's Fieldwork as Inter-island Practic -- Edvard Hviding -- 3 The Genealogical Method -- Vella Lavella Reconsidered -- Cato Berg -- 4 Rivers and the Study of Kinship on Ambrym -- Mother Right and Father Right Revisited -- Knut M. Rio and Annelin Eriksen -- 5 A House upon Pacific Sand -- W.H.R. Rivers and His 1908 Ethnographic Survey Work -- Thorgeir S. Kolshus -- 6 Colonialism as Shell Shock -- W.H.R. Rivers's Explanations for Depopulation in Melanesia -- Tim Bayliss-Smith -- 7 A Vanishing People or a Vanishing Discourse? -- W.H.R. Rivers's 'Psychological Factor' and Depopulation in the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides -- Judith A. Bennett -- 8 Objects and Photographs from the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition -- Tim Thomas -- Appendix 1 -- Unpublished Reports by W.H.R. Riversto the Trustees of the Percy Sladen Memorial Trust Fund -- Transcribed by Tim Bayliss-Smith -- Appendix 2 -- Materials in Archives from the 1908 Percy Sladen Trust Expedition -- Cato Berg -- Appendix 3 -- Planning the Expedition Letters Written Before the Fieldwork Began -- Transcribed by Tim Bayliss-Smith -- Index.

In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers' later work in psychiatry and psychology, and Hocart's work as a comparativist, for which both would largely be remembered despite the novelty of that independent fieldwork on remote Pacific islands in the early years of the 20th Century. Contributors to this volume-who have all carried out fieldwork in those Melanesian locations where Hocart and Rivers worked-give a critical examination of the research that took place in 1908, situating those efforts in the broadest possible contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.

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