Hall of mirrors: Ritualized homosexuality in Melanesia

Herdt, Gilbert H. Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. xviii + 409 pp. including maps, bibliography, and index. $24.95 cloth.     

Muslims in Melanesia: putting security issues in perspective

The hype about the potential for terrorism in Melanesia due to the region's weak and failing states has obscured some of the less newsworthy but equally important developments. One of these is the slow but steady growth in the popularity of Islam in Melanesia. This article reviews the limited literature on terrorism in the Pacific. It provides a brief historical overview of the growth of Islam in Melanesia on a country-by-country basis, and draws on a comparative case study and theories of culture and public goods to explore possible reasons for Islam's appeal. It argues that although Islam is likely to continue to grow, its growth is neither a necessary or sufficient basis for declaring terrorist threats to exist. The article emphasises the need to analyse the broader social factors behind Islam's growth as a basis for understanding the conditions through which potential threats to regional security might develop.     

Bridewealth1 and the Autonomy of Women in Melanesia

Considering bridewealth in Melanesia from the angle of women's autonomy, in this introduction we review and analyse the various elements of this marriage practice that reveal its place in the symbolic, social and economic worlds of women. With an accent on social transformation, we discuss women's autonomy and agency in relation to the constraints that bridewealth puts on their lives, and on how they engage with it. Knowing what bridewealth is, and how the rules of reciprocity that it indexes obligate married women, the focus is on women's ability to act within these constraints or to redefine their contours, particularly with regards to economic and reproductive agency. The article, which serves also as the introduction for the special issue on bridewealth in the journal Oceania, discusses themes analysed in the collection, such as the moral prospects of bridewealth today, its relation to ‘capital’ in twenty-first century Oceania, the triad value/valuables/valuers, and the empowerment of women. It concludes with thoughts on gender inequality.     

On Academic Foucauldian‐dramaturgy and Modernity in Melanesia

This short paper offers a critical reflection on the uses of Michel Foucault's ideas and the notion of ‘modernity’ which mark a current trend among so many ethnographers of Melanesian life‐worlds. Through the examination of several ethnographic cases I show the limitations of these usages and, correlatively, advocate a more mindful epistemic regard for the cultural realities and the processes of transformations of Melanesian life‐worlds in the present‐day world‐historical context.     

Mural and Other Paintings,in English Churches

In 1825 Lewis Nockalls Cottingham removed Romanesque carvings from the spandrels of the great west window at Rochester Cathedral as part of a comprehensive programme of restoration and repair. The architect's preliminary drawings for this project (held by Avery Architectural Library at Columbia University in New York) permit the accurate reconstruction of these spandrels, and this reconstruction, in turn, reveals some of the principles which guided this important early nineteenth-century restorer. It can be shown that in attempting to clarify the several styles of medieval building at Rochester, Cottingham repressed some features which he saw as hybrids and emphasized others which he judged insufficiently prominent. This desire to make the fabric history more clearly legible as a sequence of stylistic cues reflected recent advances in the writing of architectural history, in particular the taxonometric approach pioneered by Thomas Rickman.