The Ethnographic Experiment: A.M. Hocart and W.H.R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908

In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers’ later work in psychiatry and psychology, and Hocart’s work as a comparativist, for which both would largely be remembered despite the novelty of that independent fieldwork on remote Pacific islands in the early years of the 20th Century. Contributors to this volume―who have all carried out fieldwork in those Melanesian locations where Hocart and Rivers worked―give a critical examination of the research that took place in 1908, situating those efforts in the broadest possible contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.

Edvard Hviding is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Director of the Bergen Pacific Studies Research Group, and Coordinator of the EU-funded European Consortium for Pacific Studies. Among his publications are Guardians of Marovo Lagoon (1996), Islands of Rainforest (with T. Bayliss-Smith, 2000), Reef and Rainforest: An Environmental Encyclopedia of Marovo Lagoon (2005) and Made in Oceania (co-edited with K.M. Rio, 2011). In 2010, Hviding was awarded the Solomon Islands Medal for his development of vernacular education programmes in the Marovo language.

Cato Berg is an Associate Senior Scholar of the Bergen Pacific Studies Research Group. He has a PhD from the University of Bergen, where he has also held positions as a Postdoctoral Fellow and a Lecturer in anthropology. His research experience from Solomon Islands includes fieldwork both in Honiara and on the island of Vella Lavella. He has recently studied how localized forms of hierarchy, kinship, and land tenure are transformed in engagements with a Westminster-based legal system inherited from the nation’s colonial past.