Telling Pacific Lives

Prisms of Process

Brij V. Lal, Vicki Luker, Brij V. Lal, Vicki Luker

• Publisher: ANU Press
• Year: 2008
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781921313820
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

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

Table of contents

• Telling Pacific Lives
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Telling Pacific Lives: From Archetype to Icon
• The Kila Wari Stories: Framing a Life and Preserving a Cosmology
• From ‘My Story’ to ‘The Story of Myself’—Colonial Transformations of Personal Narratives among the Motu-Koita of Papua New Guinea
• Mobility, Modernisation and Agency: The Life Story of John Kikang from Papua New Guinea
• Surrogacy and the Simulacra of Desire in Heian Japanese Women’s Life Writing
• ‘The Story that Came to Me’: Gender, Power and Life History Narratives—Reflections on the Ethics of Ethnography in Fiji
• A Tartan Clan in Fiji: Narrating the Coloniser ‘Within’ the Colonised
• Telling Lives in Tuvalu
• My History: My Calling
• Researching, (W)riting, Releasing, and Responses to a Biography of Queen Salote of Tonga
• On Being a Participant Biographer: The Search for J.W. Davidson
• ‘You Did What, Mr President!?!?’ Trying to Write a Biography of Tosiwo Nakayama
• Telling the Life of A.D. Patel
• On Writing a Biography of William Pritchard
• Writing the Colony: Walter Edward Gudgeon in the Cook Islands, 1898 to 1909
• An Accidental Biographer? On Encountering, Yet Again, the Ideas and Actions of J.W. Burton
• E.W.P. Chinnery: A Self-Made Anthropologist
• Lives Told: Australians in Papua and New Guinea
• Biography of a Nation: Compiling a Historical Dictionary of the Solomon Islands
• Notes on Contributors
• Index