Author Description

From the book jacket: For people who live in small communities transformed by powerful outside forces, narrative accounts of culture contact and change create identity through the idiom of shared history. How may we understand the potent social, emotional and political meanings of such accounts for those who tell them? How and why do some narratives obtain a kind of mythic status as they are told and retold in a variety contexts and genres? Identity Through History takes up these questions in an ethnography of identity formation on the island of Santa Isabel in the Solomon Islands. The people of Santa Isabel are heir to one of the great stories of socio-religious transformation in the Pacific Islands region. Victimized by raiding headhunters in the nineteenth century, the entire population embraced Christianity within two decades around the turn of the century. This epic storyline is repeated often in narratives of conversion creating images of a shared past that enliven and personify understandings of self and community. But just as history is never finished, neither is identity. It is continually refashioned as people make cultural meaning out of shifting social and political circumstances. Geoffrey White offers an approach to the cultural dynamics of self construction that is at once synchronic and diachronic, examining local histories as discourses of contemporary identity, while locating emergent identities within the longer perspective of one hundred years of colonial experience. The approach makes innovative use of recent work in psychological and historical anthropology to illuminate concepts of person and history that emerge in peoples' ongoing attempts to define and direct their lives.