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Reviewed by:
  • The Sweet Potato in Oceania: A Reappraisal
  • William C Clarke
The Sweet Potato in Oceania: A Reappraisal, edited by Chris Ballard, Paula Brown, R Michael Bourke, and Tracey Harwood. Ethnology Monographs 19, Oceania Monograph 56. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh; Sydney: University of Sydney, 2005. ISBN 0-945428-13-8; viii + 227 pages, tables, figures, maps, photographs, index. US$43.65.

As ethnobotanist Douglas Yen tells us in the concluding chapter of this hefty volume, academic discussion about the dispersal of the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) in Oceania may be traced back to the 1786 doctoral thesis of the younger Georg Forster (De Plantis Esculentis Insularum Oceani Australis), who, in reviewing the ­economic botany of Cook's voyages, attributed to sixteenth-century Spanish voyagers the introduction of this American crop into the Philippines and the East Indies. But Forster left without comment the source of the varieties in Tahiti and "the Southern Ocean." Over the intervening centu­ries, much comment has been offered about the mechanisms and chronology of the sweet potato's dispersals throughout Oceania. In recent decades the principal foundation for continuing research on the sweet potato in Oceania has been the work of Yen himself, whose 1974 publication, The Sweet Potato and Oceania: An Essay in Ethnobotany (Bernice P Bishop Museum Bulletin 236), the volume under review honors in retrospect. And the debate that has surrounded Yen's depiction of the three-part hypothesis of the dispersal of thesweet potato, from Mexico and north­ern South America into farthest [End Page 318] Oceania, remains an important theme.

This book grew out of the 2002 annual meeting of the Association ­forSocial Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO), where thirteen papers were presented at a working session intended to review the status of knowledge about the sweet potato in Oceania since the publication of Yen's study almost thirty years earlier. The volume that resulted from that beginning contains eighteen chapters, all of which respond through various topics and levels of specificity to the concern with recent developments in Oceanic sweet potato research. General fields of knowledge dealt with include the agronomic, botanical, oral historical, archaeological, geographic, and ethnographic. As the editors acknowledge, an obvious absence is any detailed coverage of recent genetic research and the molecular analysis ofvariation, although several of the authors mention recent DNA research in passing. The editors agree, generally, that to be definitive these approaches await a more rigorous collection of samples and closer collaboration with archaeologists and other Pacific researchers.

Chris Ballard's trenchant introduction reviews the two major foci of the "sweet potato problem": first, the timing and direction of the multiple introductions of the crop into Oceania, and, second, the impacts of its introduction on Oceanic peoples, whether those impacts have been agronomic, demographic, or broadly sociological. A good example of the expansion of knowledge since Yen's volume is our increased understanding of the agronomy and small-scale distribution of the sweet potato, ­particularly thanks to the uniquely detailed data available from the Mapping Agricultural Systems in Papua New Guinea project (MASP) carried out during the 1990s from the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. This increased knowledge is clearly reflected in chapters 2 and 17, both by R Michael Bourke, who was a scientist on the MASP project and who has carried out research on Papua New Guinea (PNG) agriculture for over thirty years. An example of a line of inquiry newly developed since the 1970s is our greatly expanded research on extreme climatic events, particularly the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Both of Bourke's chapters include consideration of the role of extreme events on the adoption of new crops and the shift from one cultivar to another. In chapter 9 (much of which has to do with Mäori and Hawaiian mythology in relation to the introduction of the sweet potato), Serge Dunis looks at how the ENSO weather phenomena provide a voyaging link from the west to Rapa Nui and between Rapa Nui and the coast of South America.

Although archaeological research over the years since 1974 has come upwith unexpectedly few "smoking...

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