Engaging with Strangers

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In this compelling and often entrancing ethnography, McDougall analyzes what she calls 'stranger sociality'-that is, how the people of Ranongga, Solomon Islands have embraced and incorporated outsiders over the course of 200 years." · Holly Wardlow, University of Toronto "An excellent book. Its high quality is multifaceted, and it will be of great interest to a number of important audiences, most obviously anthropologists, historians, natural resources specialists, government policy-makers, NGO planners, and, importantly, Solomon Islanders... To my mind, this is the best ethnography to come out of the Western Solomons in a good long while." · David Akin, managing editor of Comparative Studies in Society and History 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. Debra McDougall is Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Australia. She co-edited Christian Politics in Oceania with Matt Tomlinson (Berghahn, 2013) and has published chapters and articles on religion, politics, and sociality.