Suspended in 2025/26
AN424      Half Unit
The Anthropology of Melanesia

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This course provides an introduction to selected themes in the anthropology of the region in the Southwest Pacific Ocean known as Melanesia.  It gives students a grounding in the contemporary anthropology of the region, primarily through a close reading of three book-length ethnographies.

The three ethnographies, which are all new since 2021, are Tom Bratrud's Fire on the Island, an analysis of the hopes and fears expressed in a Christian charismatic revival on the small island of Ahamb in the nation-state of Vanuatu; Melissa Demian's In Memory of Times to Come, an account of memory, time, and history among a people living on the southeastern coast of Papua New Guinea who feel nostalgia for the colonial past; and Matthew Lauer's Sensing Disaster, a study of how nearly everyone on Simbo in the western Solomon Islands managed to escape a destructive tsunami.

These ethnographies not only provide students with focused accounts of three very different national contexts in Melanesia, they also address histories, dynamics, and concerns familiar to people living throughout the region.  Furthermore, because the three authors draw on different intellectual antecedents and disciplinary traditions, their work provides an entrée into the most influential theoretical debates animating Pacific anthropology today.

Topics to be traced throughout the course include landscape and place, personhood and sociality, religion and cosmology, the past and the present, colonialism and its consequences, development, globalization, the state, and the nature of ethnographic fieldwork.  Engagement with these three books will be enhanced and supplemented by other readings, including works by Pacific Islanders.

15 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Essay (1500 words)

Students will have the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words during the course.

Students will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 4 of term.

Tom Bratrud, Fire on the Island: Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu (2022); Melissa Demian, In Memory of Times to Come: Ironies of History in Southeastern Papua New Guinea (2021); Matthew Lauer, Sensing Disaster: Local Knowledge and Vulnerability in Oceania (2023).  Detailed reading lists are provided at the beginning of the course.

Essay (100%, 3500 words)