Neither 'New Melanesian History' Nor 'New Melanesian Ethnography': Recovering Emplaced Matrilineages in Southeast Solomon Islands (Report‪)‬

In a series of publications with significant comparative implications for Oceanist anthropology, Edvard Hviding (1993, 1996, 2003) analyzes unilineal representations of social structure in relation to marine and land tenure in Marovo Lagoon (Western Province, Solomon Islands) as instances of 'indigenous essentialism' in the face of neocolonial development pressures. Hviding shows how Marovo people truncate the complex, flexible and potentially limitless cognatic and bilateral mode of relatedness they call butubutu in order to isolate simple unilineal principles of rights to land when negotiating with global business and development interests. Sometimes, he reports, Marovo people put these attenuated unilineal models into practice in ways that bar whole sets of bilateral kindred from claims to marine and land rights that might otherwise find support in the broader category of butubutu. At other times, he argues, they debate competing unilineal constructions of their customary land tenure and strategically play them against one another to frustrate resource extraction they do not want. In both types of situation, interaction with external agents elicits partial essentializations of Marovo thought and practice and precipitates internal disputes (cf. Foale and Macintyre 2000). In ways that crystallize challenges to any analysis that appears to take indigenous representations of customary land tenure based on unilineal descent at face value, Hviding's interpretations of such phenomena in Marovo intersect with and reinforce the insights of the two most influential theoretical orientations in current Melanesianist anthropology--namely, those that Robert Foster (1995, drawing on Josephides 1991) has labelled the 'New Melanesian Ethnography' and the 'New Melanesian History' (cf. Jorgensen 2001).