Identity through History: Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society

by Geoffrey M. White

• ISBN13: 9780521533324
• ISBN10: 0521533325
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-02-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

For people who live in small communities transformed by powerful outside forces, narrative accounts of culture contact and change create images of collective identity through the idiom of shared history. How may we understand the processes that make such accounts compelling for those who tell them? Why do some narratives acquire a kind of mythic status as they are told and retold in a variety of contexts and genres? Identity Through History attempts to explain how identity formation developed among the people of Santa Isabel in the Solomon Islands who were victimized by raiding headhunters in the nineteenth century, and then embraced Christianity around the turn of the century. Making innovative use of work in psychological and historical anthropology, Geoffrey White shows how these significant events were crucial to the community's view of itself in shifting social and political circumstances.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

Part I. Orientations

2. First encounters

3. Portraits of the past

4. Chiefs, persons and power

Part II. Transformations: 5. Crisis and christianity

6. Conversions and consolidation

Part III. Narrations: 7. Becoming Christian: playing with history

8. Missionary encounters: narrating the self

Part IV. Revitalization: 9. Collisions and convergence

10. The paramount chief: rites of renewal

11. Conclusion

Notes

References.