"Telling Pacific Lives: Prisms of Process" by Brij V. Lal, Vicki Luker

How are Pacific lives imagined, written and read? How are they refracted through prisms of process? From legends about culture heroes to biographies of national leaders, from tales of ancestors to stories of contemporary men and women, from lives told of both the famous and the nameless, this collection of essays by historians and anthropologists, Islanders and Island scholars probes questions of personhood, identity, memory, and time across the sweep of the Pacific, as well as practical issues of research and writing.



Table of Contents
Preface
1. Telling Pacic Lives: From Archetype to Icon, Niel Gunson
2. The Kila Wari Stories: Framing a Life and Preserving a Cosmology, Deborah Van Heekeren
3. From ‘My Story’ to ‘The Story of Myself’—Colonial Transformations of Personal Narratives among the Motu-Koita of Papua New Guinea, Michael Goddard
4. Mobility, Modernisation and Agency: The Life Story of John Kikang from Papua New Guinea, Wolfgang Kempf
5. Surrogacy and the Simulacra of Desire in Heian Japanese Women’s Life Writing, Christina Houen
6. ‘The Story that Came to Me’: Gender, Power and Life History Narratives—Reections on the Ethics of Ethnography in Fiji, Pauline McKenzie Aucoin
7. A Tartan Clan in Fiji: Narrating the Coloniser ‘Within’ the Colonised, Lucy de Bruce
8. Telling Lives in Tuvalu, Michael Goldsmith
9. My History: My Calling, Alaima Talu
10. Researching, (W)riting, Releasing, and Responses to a Biography of Queen Salote of Tonga, Elizabeth Wood-Ellem
11. On Being a Participant Biographer: The Search for J.W. Davidson, Doug Munro
12. ‘You Did What, Mr President!?!?’ Trying to Write a Biography of Tosiwo Nakayama, David Hanlon
13. Telling the Life of A.D. Patel, Brij V. Lal
14. On Writing a Biography of William Pritchard, Andrew E. Robson
15. Writing the Colony: Walter Edward Gudgeon in the Cook Islands, 1898 to 1909, Graeme Whimp
16. An Accidental Biographer? On Encountering, Yet Again, the Ideas and Actions of J.W. Burton, Christine Weir
17. E.W.P. Chinnery: A Self-Made Anthropologist, Georey Gray
18. Lives Told: Australians in Papua and New Guinea, Hank Nelson
19. Biography of a Nation: Compiling a Historical Dictionary of the Solomon Islands, Clive Moore
Notes on Contributors
Index