Prof Michael Scott

This course is available on the MSc in Anthropology and Development, MSc in Social Anthropology and MSc in Social Anthropology (Religion in the Contemporary World). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course provides an introduction to selected themes in the anthropology of the region in the Southwest Pacific Ocean known as Melanesia.  It gives students a grounding in the contemporary anthropology of the region, primarily through a close reading of three book-length ethnographies.

The three ethnographies, which are all new since 2021, are Tom Bratrud's Fire on the Island, an analysis of the hopes and fears expressed in a Christian charismatic revival on the small island of Ahamb in the nation-state of Vanuatu; Melissa Demian's In Memory of Times to Come, an account of memory, time, and history among a people living on the southeastern coast of Papua New Guinea who feel nostalgia for the colonial past; and Matthew Lauer's Sensing Disaster, a study of how nearly everyone on Simbo in the western Solomon Islands managed to escape a destructive tsunami.

These ethnographies not only provide students with focused accounts of three very different national contexts in Melanesia, they also address histories, dynamics, and concerns familiar to people living throughout the region.  Furthermore, because the three authors draw on different intellectual antecedents and disciplinary traditions, their work provides an entrée into the most influential theoretical debates animating Pacific anthropology today.

Topics to be traced throughout the course include landscape and place, personhood and sociality, religion and cosmology, the past and the present, colonialism and its consequences, development, globalization, the state, and the nature of ethnographic fieldwork.  Engagement with these three books will be enhanced and supplemented by other readings, including works by Pacific Islanders.

10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the WT.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of WT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the WT.

Tom Bratrud, Fire on the Island: Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu (2022); Melissa Demian, In Memory of Times to Come: Ironies of History in Southeastern Papua New Guinea (2021); Matthew Lauer, Sensing Disaster: Local Knowledge and Vulnerability in Oceania (2023).  Detailed reading lists are provided at the beginning of the course.

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in the ST.

The assessed essay must be between 3,500 – 4,000 words in length.