Identity through History
Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society

This book is about the construction of cultural identity through narratives of shared history.

Geoffrey M. White (Author)

9780521533324, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 February 2003

292 pages, 16 b/w illus. 2 maps
22.9 x 15.4 x 1.8 cm, 0.448 kg

'White's book is a rich and nuanced contribution to the literature on perceptions of the past and colonial change in the Pacific … an important contribution to Pacific anthropology.' Man

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 victimised 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]