In this autobiographical account of life in the capital of the Solomon Islands, Michael Kwa'ioloa reflects on the challenges of raising a family in town and sustaining ties with a distant rural homeland on Malaita island. Continuing the long tradition of Kwara'ae community leaders participating in political activism, he discusses how the roles of these leaders were severely tested by the violent conflict between Malaitans and the indigenous Guadalcanal people at the turn of the century. Kw...

Burt studies the effects of the 19th century labour trade, colonial subjugation and the subsequent Christian conversion. He examines the anti-colonial Maasina Rule movement of the 1940s and finally illustrates the subsequent efforts of Kwara'ae leaders to regain their self-determination and to reaffirm the values of "tradition" under Christianity.The Kwara'ae example of colonialism and Christianity is part of the broader experience of Melanesia and of other peoples in the Third Worl...

What do we mean by 'art'? As a category of objects, the concept belongs to a Western cultural tradition, originally European and now increasingly global, but how useful is it for understanding other traditions? To understand art as a universal human value, we need to look at how the concept was constructed in order to reconstruct it through an understanding of the wider world. Western art values have a pervasive influence upon non-Western cultures and upon Western attitudes to them. This i...

The Museum of Mankind was an innovative and popular showcase for minority cultures from around the non-Western world from 1970 to 1997. This memoir is a critical appreciation of its achievements in the various roles of a national museum, of the personalities of its staff and of the issues raised in the representation of exotic cultures. Issues of changing museum theory and practice are raised in a detailed case-study that also focuses on the social life of the museum community. This is the...