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Chapters: Ramo, Culture of the Solomon Islands, Public Holidays in the Solomon Islands, Cross of Solomon Islands, Nguzu Nguzu, Solomon Time, Agunua, List of People on Stamps of Solomon Islands. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 24. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: A ramo (Kwaio: lamo) was a warrior-leader among certain tribes on Malaita in the Solomon Islands. A ramo was recognized when he had killed an adversary in personal combat, and established an intimidating reputation. This was also believed to represent ancestral support, and their supernatural abilities contributed to their reputation. Modern Malaitans generalize that ramos were part of the leadership triumvirate for each clan, along with a priest and a feastgiver; in practice, sometimes a single person fulfilled more than one role, and not all clans had established ramos or feastgivers. In theory, ramos lead the group in war and blood feuding, avenging murder or a violation of the sex code for bounty. Their prestige and wealth depended on their ability to collect and redistribute blood money. A ramo usually had blood money offered against him, but he was able to successfully intimidate anyone from attempting to collect it. They may even kill their own relatives in order to collect money put up for their own death. The power of the ramo on Malaita enlarged during the decades of blackbirding, as firearms and steel tools (decreasing the time required for farmwork) appeared on the island. Noted ramos from this time, such as Harisimae of Waisisi, are still remembered. At the turn of the century, observers noted that rifles were so common on Malaita that nearly every man carried one. This may have been an exaggeration, and they were largely outmoded guns and there were dwindling amounts of ammunition, but the rifles remained a...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=11875430 ... Read more

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Sir Raymond Firth is the most distinguished living British anthropologist, and one also internationally acclaimed. His latest work forms part of one of the fullest and most professional ethnographic accounts by any anthropologist of a nonindustrial people, an account which extends over many years. This book is about the songs of a Western Pacific people, the Tikopia, who until recently lived entirely on a small remote island of the Solomons. Their songs vary from lively dance chants to mournful funeral laments. All are novel to western ears. The book provides about 100 examples in text and in translation, discusses the relationship of the songs to the social life of the people, and includes an analysis of the structure of their music by Mervyn McClean, a noted musicologist. A cassette which reproduces about 30 of the songs that appear in the book is also available. ... Read more

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Part of the Ritual Studies Monograph Series. Examining the secretive dynamics of competing land claims among the Arosi of the island of Makira (Solomon Islands), Michael W. Scott demonstrates the explanatory power of ethnographic attention to the nexus between practice and indigenous theories of being. His focus on the ways in which Arosi understand their matrilineages to be the bearers of discrete categorical essences exclusively emplaced in ancestral territories forms the basis for a timely and accessible rethink of current anthropological representations of Melanesian sociality and opens up new lines of inquiry into the transformative relationships among gendered metaphors of descent, processes of place making, and the indigenization of Christianity. Informed by original historical research and newly documented variants of regionally important mythic traditions, The Severed Snake is a work of multidisciplinary scope that proposes critical and methodological shifts relevant to historians, development professionals, folklorists, and scholars of religion as well as anthropologists. ... Read more

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This volume summarizes the findings of the Harvard Solomon Islands medical-anthropological expeditions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and presents the results of subsequent surveys of the same populations a decade later. The Harvard expeditions amassed extensive anthropological, genetic, and health data on over 3,000 individuals living in eight varied groups in these southwest Pacific islands. At the time, the Solomons were only marginally affected by world culture and technological advances. Particular strengths of this collection include genetic distance studies, longitudinal studies in blood pressure change and associated changes in body build, a prospective study of hepatitis B status and mortality, and an overview of epidemiological trends with modernization. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Countries and Their Cultures, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 3589 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Covers the broad range of popular religious culture of the United States at the close of the twentieth century. Beliefs, practices, symbols, traditions, movements, organizations, and leaders from the many traditions in the pluralistic American community are represented. Also includes cults and phenomena that drew followers, such as Heaven's Gale and UFOs. ... Read more

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In this ethnographic study of traditional sculpture from Santa Cruz Island, near the Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific the late anthropologist William H. Davenport presents a distinctive genre of figure sculpture produced for and used in traditional religious rituals and ceremonies.

The body of the book discusses the history of Santa Cruz Island society since the first Europeans came to the area in 1595, the cultural meanings of its most conspicuous features, and descriptions of the main components of worship, the rituals. The book includes discoveries about the making and use of the figurines, as well as the iconography of the pieces. The latter information is derived from general ethnographic data collected in the course of field research between 1958 and 1976 on Santa Cruz Island and the adjacent islands of the Santa Cruz Group, where Davenport's many close friends included both his informants in the villages and officers of the British Colonial Service.

A dual study of a tradition of so-called tribal art in its context and a study of Santa Cruz Island society, the book includes meticulous descriptions of the sacred objects, currency, dances, and social interactions. Davenport's records of 55 specimens of Santa Cruz sculpture from both private collections and museums—initial acquisition, subsequent ownership, and other detailed physical information—constitute the catalogue section of the book.

An engaging and previously unrecorded transcription of information distilled from local informants of the oral myths, rituals, and ceremonies reveals how Santa Cruz believers distinguished, celebrated, and communicated with their deities.

Davenport's own unique photographs—both black and white and color—illustrate rituals on the island and life as it was lived before independence in 1978. His work here is a record of a culture which is barely now either lived or remembered by the descendants of those who created it, and all figural sculpture discovered in the future must be judged against this corpus of authenticated originals.

Audiences will include anthropologists interested in the tribal arts of Pacific peoples, libraries with Melanesian collections, art historians, contemporary historians interested in the difference between description and comparison, and the special political and economic situation of colonialism.

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Santa Cruz Island Figure Sculpture and Its Social and Ritual Contexts
This book is an outstanding classic of its genre.It defines a specific type of sculpture in the Santa Cruz Islands.Identifies all the known examples in museums, private collections etc. Discusses how these statues were traditionally used in early Solomon Islands religion, as well as who collected these sculptures.Its also includes a CD of photos of daily life in the Santa Cruz Islands.This was William Davenports last work before his death and it stands as as testiment to the depth of his research.I would highly recommend it. ... Read more

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Straight dope about Polynesian navigation
One of the founders of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, Ben Finney, says in the foreward to this book that Pacific islanders "are as much a creation of their voyaging technology as they were creators of it." If so, the virtual extinction of that technology a hundred years ago was a cultural catastrophe for the Polynesians. (Micronesian skills were better preserved.)

Any survivals of the great tradition are exceptionally valuable. Thus Anuta, a Polynesian "outlier" island in the mostly Melanesian eastern Solomons archipelago, comes to the fore. Anuta is not part of the great voyaging tradition -- not for 10 or more generations anyway-- but its insignificance helped preserve its traditions.

Richard Feinberg, an anthropologist at Kent State University, did his dissertation research on Anuta in 1972. In those days, before Hokulea and the PVS, the unimpressive Anutan fleet did not seem to merit special attention. But Feinberg liked boats and kept good notes.

In the late '80s he returned to Guadalcanal (the easiest place to find Anutans) and improved his knowledge, so that in "Polynesian Seafaring and Navigation" we have a rare comprehensive report of prehistoric techniques based on both foreign observation and explanations from living experts.

Even Anuta, which is roughly 500 miles from anywhere, was changing rapidly by the late '80s. "The exceptional skill and knowledge (of the best living Anutan navigators) may never be recaptured in the coming generations," wrote Feinberg then.

Depending upon whether you consider a glass to be half full or half empty, this book will seem depressing or heartening.

Anutan canoes are not large, they make only short voyages and few of those. On the other hand, their techniques are a smaller, if not quite exact, replica of those used by the great interisland voyagers; their craftsmanship is very fine, and their memories are long.

Anuta is a tiny island, only half a mile across, and one reason Anutans don't make great voyages is that they don't produce many first-rate navigators. It may be true that on the steppes every boy becomes an expert horseman, but a canoe made from a hollowed-out tree is a much more demanding steed.

Every Anutan man is a good boatman, but it appears that a really self-confident Anutan navigator comes along less than once in a generation.

The ocean has many swells. While the chief and perhaps one other Anutan can steer just by the feel of the waves slapping the hull, other men admitted to Feinberg that they could not even distinguish the different swells. (The navigator of Hokulea, Nainoa Thompson, had the same experience. His teacher, Mau Piailug, worked with five swells; Thompson never learned to use more than three. See also my review of Will Kyselka, "An Ocean in Mind.")

Oil may be under the sea around Anuta, and if it is, Feinberg believes, Anutan society in its authentic form is doomed. Already the islanders have switched from sennit to monofilament fishing line to lash their canoes.

Still, their attitude remains steadfastly Polynesian, Anutan and premodern. : When a canoe is destroyed, it gets a human funeral.
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