Intro -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- General Maps -- Note on Language -- Introduction Land Politics and Postcolonial Sociality in the Wake of Environmental Disaster -- 1 An Orientation to the Shifting Patterns of Tolai Land Tenure -- 2 Land at Sikut Freedom from Kastom and Economic Development -- 3 Kulia An Ambiguous Transaction -- 4 What Makes a Landholder A Case Study of a Matupit Land Dispute -- 5 Kastom, Family and Clan Extending and Limiting Obligations -- 6 Kastom and Contested Reciprocity -- 7 Big Shots, Corned Beef and Big Heads -- 8 A Fish Trap for Kastom -- 9 Big Men, Big Shots and Bourgeois Individuals Conflicts over Moral Obligation and the Limits of Reciprocity -- 10 Your Own Buai You Must Buy The Big Shot as Contemporary MelanesianPossessive Individual -- Conclusions -- Glossary -- References -- Index.

In 1994, the Pacific island village of Matupit was partially destroyed by a volcanic eruption. This study focuses on the subsequent reconstruction and contests over the morality of exchanges that are generative of new forms of social stratification. Such new dynamics of stratification are central to contemporary processes of globalization in the Pacific, and more widely. Through detailed ethnography of the transactions that a displaced people entered into in seeking to rebuild their lives, this book analyses how people re-make sociality in an era of post-colonial neoliberalism without taking either the transformative power of globalization or the resilience of indigenous culture as its starting point. It also contributes to the understanding of the problems of post-disaster reconstruction and development projects.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.