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- Title
Nakomaha: a Counter-Colonial Life and its Contexts. Anthropological Approaches to Biography.
- Authors
MacClancy, Jeremy
- Abstract
In the anthropology of Melanesia, local life-histories or biographies have all too often been presented in a non-problematic, acritical manner. Instead of repeating this hide-bound style in an unthinking manner, I attempt to be more ethnographically sensitive to local realities and to open up the genre by presenting information about a ni-Vanuatu leader in a deliberately achronic style. By providing relevant data in terms of their sources, I put up front the biases and blindspots of each source, to enable easier assessment of their worth and to forestall premature closure. In the process I examine the conflictive dialogue between locals and expatriate officials in Vanuatu between the 1940s and 1960s. The final aim is that the open-ended approach adopted here makes the resulting text more accessible to indigenous readers, who might wish to produce their own version of the subject's life-history. Writing this kind of biography can thus be viewed as a further attempt towards decolonizing the anthropology of former colonial states.
- Subjects
VANUATU; NI-Vanuatu literature; BIOGRAPHIES; IMPERIALISM; SOCIAL history
- Publication
Oceania, 2007, Vol 77, Issue 2, p191
- ISSN
0029-8077
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1002/j.1834-4461.2007.tb00012.x