Will Rollason - Böcker

This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The ‘Melanesian world’ assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.

This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The ‘Melanesian world’ assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.

In Motorbike People: Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets, Will Rollason examines the relationship between power and culture. Rollason looks at what social scientists gain—and lose—by abandoning the assumption that power is a universal feature of human social life. Through an ethnographic account of the lives and livelihoods of motorcycle taxi drivers in Kigali, Rwanda, Rollason depicts how forms of personhood can sit uneasily with conventional accounts of power relationships. From the motorcyclists’ everyday dealings with the police and each another to the regulation of their businesses at large and the Rwandan constitution, Rollason depicts the need for varied concepts of power. By allowing concepts of power to proliferate, the social sciences lose the political capacity to engage in questions of justice and make common cause with the oppressed, but gain the ability to rethink what it means to act politically and meet the challenges of a swiftly changing world. This work is recommended for students and scholars of the social sciences.

The Pacific region presents a huge diversity of cultural forms, which have fuelled some of the most challenging ethnographic work undertaken in the discipline. But this challenge has come at a cost. Culture, often reconfigured as ‘custom’, has often served to trap the people of the Pacific in the past of cultural reproduction, where everything is what it has always been, or worse—outdated, outmoded and destined for modernization.Pacific Futures asks how our understanding of social life in the Pacific would be different if we approached it from the perspective of the futures which Pacific people dream of, predict or struggle to achieve, not the reproduction of cultural tradition. From Christianity to gambling, marriage to cargo cult, military coups to reflections on childhood fishing trips, the contributors to this volume show how Pacific people are actively shaping their lives with the future in mind.