You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book addresses the contending views of the uses of Solomon Island forest. Ranging from an examination of the interaction between the first settlers and their forest, the book goes on to analyse the attitudes of the British administrators, planters, and missionaries. The colonial government sought to protect the resource, but neglected to consider the wishes of the forest’s inhabitants in planning for its future economic use. The independent governments failed to protect the dwindling forest on customary land in the face of accelerating demands from their own people and of Asian-based logging companies, while non-governmental organisations and aid-donors have tried to invoke a more conservative regime of forest use.
None
The civil conflict in Solomon Islands (1998-2003) is often blamed on the failure of the nation-state to encompass culturally diverse and politically fragmented communities. Writing of Ranongga Island, the author tracks engagements with strangers across many realms of life—pre-colonial warfare, Christian conversion, logging and conservation, even post-conflict state building. She describes startling reversals in which strangers become attached to local places, even as kinspeople are estranged from one another and from their homes. Against stereotypes of rural insularity, she argues that a distinctive cosmopolitan openness to others is evident in the rural Solomons in times of war and peace.
None
None
Reprint of the original, first published in 1860.