This page is the source for the ethnography of Sikaiana life from 1980-1993. I am still working on formatting problems. But each chapter is available in rough form under the menu. These materials pertain to Sikaiana life from 1980-1993. I apologize for any typos and other errors.
Intimacy and Community in a Changing World: Sikaiana Life 1980-1993
William W. Donner
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Contents
Introduction 2020
Chapter I Another Perspective
Chapter II Getting There
Chapter III Land and Sea: Daily Life on Sikaiana
Chapter IV Participant and Observer: My Life with the Sikaiana
Chapter V Taupule’s Warning: The Historical Context of Sikaiana Life
Chapter VI Dependence and Independence: Kinship and the Control of Resources
Chapter VII Gender Roles: Ritual Opposition and Daily Support
Chapter VIII Individuals: Diversity in Life Experiences
Chapter IX Person and Interaction: The Social Organization of Personal Relations
Chapter X Town Life and Community Life
Chapter XI Ceremonies of Community Life
Chapter XII The Social Organization of Drinking : Alcohol in Sikaiana Life
Chapter XIII Conclusion: An Intimate Community in the Late 20th Century
Appendices
Bibliography
New Introduction 2020
This ethnography is based upon living as an anthropologist among the Sikaiana people of the Solomon Islands. I lived there for a total of about 3 ½ years between 1980 and 1993. Most of the material in this ethnography was written between 1988 and 1994 and was intended to be published.
Readers should be aware that life is very different for the Sikaiana people today in 2020 in some significant ways. There have been many changes in Sikaiana life over the past 30 years. Readers should also be aware that this book is not typical of contemporary ethnographic writing and anthropology.
This book is about my understanding of the Sikaiana people from 1980-1993, not about their lives today. I have left most of the book in the “ethnographic present,” that is I use the present tense to describe general cultural patterns that took place in the 1980s. An earlier generation of anthropologists developed this technique in writing ethnographies. The work of anthropologists is to document human diversity. The experiences of a group of people at any point in time reflect some of the diversity of human experience and should be recognized for having its own significance. The past, as some say, is a foreign country. This technique is justly criticized for masking the temporality and dynamics of human life. My use of the present tense is even more problematic because these chapters are really is grounded in the past: it is not fully accurate in depicting present-day Sikaiana life in 2020. I wrote most of this about 5-10 years after living on Sikaiana, when their life was very much in my present. I find that in all my writing, including in ethnographic writing about regional cultures in Pennsylvania, it is challenging to decide what tense to use. In the case of this book, I simply do not want to try to develop the words to describe something in a more remote past in the 1980s when I was living among the Sikaiana, from the perspective of a slightly more recent past in the early 1990s when I was writing this book. Beware of my ethnographic present. One of the biggest changes is the loss of the Sikaiana language as the main medium for everyday speech. I am told it simply is not used very much at all. This is probably the most dramatic change, but there are other changes as well. Occasionally, I add brief comments in red-type to bring readers up to date and historically contextualize the contents of these chapters. Most of these comments about the present are based upon conversations with Robert Sisilo and Priscilla Taulupo who lived in New York from 2017-19, while Robert was posted as the Solomon Islands ambassador to the United Nations.
Although I write about Sikaiana life in the ethnographic present, I write about my own experiences among the Sikaiana people using the past tense. Partly this is an artefact of the way this book was written. I was writing shortly after I left Sikaiana, looking back on myself and trying to explain specific events that shaped my understandings of them. This is somewhat misleading, but does reflect the fact that as I got to know them, I was changing much faster than they were, both in my understandings of them also in terms of the person who I am today. Their culture was something relatively stable that I was trying to understand.
Readers should also be aware that although most of this material has been published in various scholarly journals, it was never published as a book because no one wanted to publish it. To be a little fairer to the monograph and myself, no publisher that I considered worthy of publishing it, wanted it. I tried about 7 or 8 publishers, including a couple trade publishers and some of the better-known academic publishers. Three times it got beyond the series editors, who are rarely professional anthropologists, and sent to an outside reviewer, who were professional anthropologists. The reviewers were somewhat positive, but were not certain that the book would sell well or fit into the publishers’ series. I wrote the book for a general audience including intelligent, interested lay people, college students and some professional colleagues. It was meant also to be something of a discourse on the nature of fieldwork. At the time I was writing, there was a strong post-modern movement that emphasized the subjectivity and contexts of ethnographic descriptions, calling into question any understanding of another culture. I wanted to describe my subjectivity as a vehicle to understandings that I believed had some empirical validity: my understandings were somehow intersubjective enough so that there was a common ground between me and the Sikaiana people that could also be shared with the readers of this book. I tried to explain how I came to these understandings and also show how they increased over time. The idea was that the movement of increased understanding in the book reflected my own increased understanding of the Sikaiana life. Alas, publishers and the reviewers did not seem very impressed. In 1995, I was tired of trying to find a worthy publisher and I was reluctant to lose the copyright to a second/third-tier publisher, my first child was born, and my research interests were shifting to regional ethnography in the United States. I stopped working on the book and it sat on my computer. Even by 1995, I saw some possibilities on the digital world and I wanted to keep the copyright to develop the book as I saw fit. In 2012, I took a sabbatical to resurrect this material as part of a website about Sikaiana.
I think that a website with pictures, songs, and other media is much closer to the actual experience of living with another culture than a book which is really one dimensional in its linear organization. Nevertheless, anthropologists still seem to be mainly interested in published written accounts, although media now offer an incredible range of expressive opportunities. Party this is a result of the expectations of academic life. Back to this book.
The theoretical and comparative references in this book are also dated. Indeed, my approach to examine Sikaiana life in terms of some classical theories of modernization and differentiation was considered passé even in 1995. Nonetheless, I still think it is a useful perspective. Readers should know that there are many professional anthropologists who, if they ever took the time the read the book, would be unimpressed. They would find the theoretical sections dated, and they would not be interested in the descriptive sections. In short, readers should not take this as an exemplar of contemporary anthropology, although in my view that is not necessarily a bad thing. I am not impressed by many of the contemporary trends in anthropology.
I have done very little editing of the early 1990s version in presenting this version. I have updated a few of the literary or theoretical references. Like the Sikaiana people, the rest of the world has changed in the last 40 years and so has the academic discipline of anthropology. Anthropologists are much less likely to find an isolated community (although Sikaiana was far from isolated in 1980) and if they did are likely to have different interests. Much of contemporary anthropology is focused on issues of power and the various expressions of power in affecting marginal groups including those shaped by gender, social class, race, neo-colonialism, and race. These are important concerns, but generally they were not mine when I was living on Sikaiana and a little later when I wrote this book.
Readers should be aware that recent fashion in anthropology has also criticized this kind of ethnography for being implicitly racist, patriarchal, heteronormative, and embedded in an exploitative neo-liberal tradition. Perhaps this is all true. I am a white, heterosexual, male with a middle class, professional background, pushing 70 years old. Perhaps this has completely compromised all my thinking and writing. Readers can decide.
Despite all these shortcomings, when I re-read the book in 2012, I still liked it, and I admit that I still like it in 2020. I think this book and the accompanying material in the website offers an example of the expression of human diversity. Perhaps someone else will find something useful in it. Perhaps some Sikaiana people will appreciate it as a source for understanding their cultural heritage. I think it worthwhile to learn about other cultures, I think I have something worthwhile to write, and I think that knowledge should be shared. I certainly learned a lot from the Sikaiana people and I want to share that with other people.
In 2012, I changed the title. The original title was Polynesian Voyagers in the 20th Century and was meant to be vaguely reminiscent of Bronislaw Malinowski’s famous book, Argonauts of the Western Pacific. I saw Sikaiana’s ancestors as voyagers across large expanses of ocean, and saw the present-day people as voyaging into a contemporary, complex, global culture. The new title reflects my continuing experience that as they voyaged through many changes there was a deep intimacy and closeness in Sikaiana life. That is still my main conclusion about my experiences with them in 2020. It was reinforced when I met Robert and Priscilla in New York in 2o17 and we started talking about the Sikaiana individuals who we knew while I lived there (and their children and grandchildren).
I have changed some names and deleted a couple sections to preserve confidentiality. I did not include extended sections of the Sikaiana vernacular; instead I mostly include the English translations.
Robert Sisilo and Priscilla Taulupo read an earlier version in about 1991. I am grateful for their comments; they are not responsible for any inaccuracies or deficiencies. As stated above, I also had the fortune to meet with them in 2017-19, while Robert was posted as the Solomon Islands representative to the United Nations in New York. My comments about changes in Sikaiana life since 1980-93 are largely based on discussions with them.
Again, the occasional comments about changes in Sikaiana life since the 1980s are marked in red.