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.

• List of illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
ContributorsIntroduction: The Ethnographic Experiment in Island Melanesia
Edvard Hviding and Cato BergChapter 1. Acknowledging Ancestors: The Vexations of Representation
Christine DureauChapter 2. Across the New Georgia Group: A.M. Hocart’s Fieldwork as Inter-Island PracticeEdvard HvidingChapter 3. The Genealogical Method: Vella Lavella Reconsidered
Cato BergChapter 4. Rivers and the Study of Kinship in Ambrym: Mother Right and Father Right RevisitedKnut M. Rio and Annelin EriksenChapter 5. House Upon Pacific Sand: W.H.R. Rivers and his 1908 Ethnographic ‘Survey Work’Thorgeir S. KolshusChapter 6. Colonialism as Shell-Shock: W.H.R. Rivers’s Explanations for Depopulation in Melanesia
Tim Bayliss-SmithChapter 7. A Vanishing People or a Vanishing Discourse? W.H.R. Rivers’s ‘Psychological Factor’ and Depopulation in the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides
Judith A. BennettChapter 8. Objects and Photographs from the Percy Sladen Trust ExpeditionTim ThomasAppendix I: Unpublished reports by W.H.R. Rivers to the Trustees of the Percy Sladen Memorial Trust Fund
Transcribed by Tim Bayliss-SmithAppendix II: Materials in archives from the 1908 fieldwork in Island Melanesia
Cato BergAppendix III: Planning the Expedition: Letters Written before the Fieldwork Began

“[With this] very cohesive set of essays, Hviding and Berg h ave done an excellent job lifting an important expedition out of the archival oblivion where it reposed for the better part of a century. This is an appropriate volume to introduce the new Pacific Perspectives series. As such, this work appeals to readers interested in the histories of anthropology and Pacific worlds.” · Oceania“Mere scholars and no novelists here, volume contributors nonetheless have good biographical stories to tell, good ethnographic tales to recall.” · Anthropological Forum“Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg's new edited collection on the neglected Melanesian expedition on 1908 is timely and important.” · Anthropology Review Database“It has been quite a while since I encountered a collection of essays that was as well coordinated, topically consistent, and thematically linked as this one. The end result is an intellectually rigorous examination of an overlooked but nonetheless extremely important event in the history of anthropology… The volume, taken as a whole, has a refreshingly critical and reflective quality about it.” · David Hanlon, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa“This compelling volume invites readers to imagine what the discipline might have been like if this expedition had been taken as a foundational moment in the discipline’s history. It is an alternative to Malinowskian myth of the heroic individual fieldworker isolated on a beach watching the boat go away.” · Debra McDougall, University of Western Australia