Year: 2011
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: When I first began research in Nduindui district in west Aoba (subsequently renamed Ambae) in November 1958, not only was it well and truly prior to independence, but very few had even begun to seriously contemplate that they might live to see such a day.In other words, there was a feeling that though independence would most probably occur one day, it was still a long way off, maybe half-a-century or more away.If we had known that it would be a reality in a mere 22 years we would without doubt have been astonished.It might help if I begin my story with a brief outline of just what set of circumstances led to my arrival in Port Vila on that, for me, highly auspicious day, 30 October 1958.And I still well remember when I stepped ashore from the Messageries Maritime mini-liner the Polynesie the truly astonishing sight of Keith Woodward (Assistant Secretary for District Affairs, British Residency) clad in resplendent and glittering white colonial gear, waiting to formally greet me with that intense yet slightly lost look that his already failing eyesight conveyed.Just one year earlier I had completed an MA Honours Qualifying course in anthropology at Sydney University (SU) and for my fourth year's honours thesis I had carried out a library-based comparative study of male cults and initiations throughout Melanesia (Allen 1967).Of all the early ethnographic material that I had then saturated myself in none fascinated me more than the work of Robert Henry Codrington (1891), William Halse Rivers Rivers (1914), Arthur Bernard Deacon (1934) and John Willoughby Layard (1942), most particularly on both the public-graded societies and the secret societies of the northern New Hebrides.Hence, when I was offered a four-year postgraduate scholarship by the Australian National University (ANU) I expressed a strong preference to locate my PhD research in one of the less-studied communities in the northern district.But, by mere coincidence, at much the same time that I was offered my scholarship, the ANU had received a letter from the Colonial Social Science Research Council (CSSRC) in London, at that time the principal source of social science research funding in the UK, asking whether the ANU knew of a suitable anthropologist who might be interested in making a study of the social structure of Aoba Island (Comfort to Freeman).As I subsequently
Source: ANU Press eBooks
Author: Michael Allen
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2814532709