The Things We Value: Culture and History in Solomon Islands ed. by Ben Burt and Lissant Bolton (review)

The Things We Value: Culture and History in Solomon Islands derives from a Melanesian art project sponsored by the British Museum and the University of Cambridge Museum for Archaeology and Anthropology and funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2005–2010. The first object of note for this book is its cover. The photograph on the cover conveys an immediate message. A young woman wearing beautiful shell ornaments holds up a camera through which she is obviously focusing on the reader of the book. The bright red color of the camera emphasizes its presence. The camera lens is no longer the colonial lens through which so many outsiders have viewed Solomon Islanders. That perspective has been reversed—a major objective of the book and of the conference that preceded it.

The title indicates the book’s focus: how and why things are valued by Solomon Islanders within their individual social contexts. These are the subjects explored by authors of the introduction and twelve chapters that make up the book. Four authors are Solomon Islanders; the others are largely anthropologists and archaeologists who have spent considerable time in Solomon Islands.

Solomon Islands is a “culturally diverse country of people speaking over seventy languages who live on six large islands and innumerable small ones” (1). Thus begins the introduction written by volume editors Ben Burt and Lissant Bolton. The introduction, titled “Solomon Islands Artefact Traditions and Their Historical Transformations,” succinctly yet thoroughly surveys aspects of the islands through consideration of exchange, agency, heirlooms and treasures, and their various transformations. Attention is drawn immediately to notions of value and the ways in which artifacts are valued by individuals within specific social groups, a context that often is minimal or lacking for many objects in museum collections. Illustrations for the introduction reference the past as well as the present, bringing both together as did the conference from which this volume stemmed. The introduction fittingly frames the chapters that follow.

Chapters are as diverse as their organization. The reader moves from chapter 1, Salome Samou’s “Santa Cruz Feather-Money”—Santa Cruz representing the southernmost islands in the Solomons group—and transitions directly to chapter 2, Rhys Richards’s “Kesa and Other Shell Valuables from Choiseul,” an island located far to the north in Western Province. Archaeological valuables from other islands in the Western Province, a subject that one might presume to be dealt with initially (since the subject is archaeology) appear in chapter 3, “Shell Valuables and History in Roviana and Vella Lavella” by Peter J Sheppard and Richard Walter. This organizational device moves the reader back and forth from north to south, with layovers, so to speak, in the center (ie, the island of Malaita) in a process that, in effect, serves to unite the islands in nonlinear fashion. Any Western linear preconceptions about the presentation of early or ancient subjects first and contemporary art last are also not followed here.

This organization of material serves to focus on each and every person and his or her family or national valuables in a manner that frees them from predictable organizational categories; all subjects belong to the Solomon Islands nation. In this review I want to consider certain chapters and the insights that they convey to outsiders regardless of any predictable positioning within the body of the text.

In chapter 6, “Clan Valuables of Guadalcanal,” Jackson Gege begins by saying, “Every clan in Guadalcanal has ties to a piece of land that forms their origin and identity” (63). Most of his article is devoted to clan types—small clans (kakau) of people descended from the same ancestors in the female line and large clans (laqili) who are descended from the male line. Clan identity for an individual is then explicated along with associated clan origin stories. Gege...