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TRADITION, TRADE AND WOODCARVING IN STORMY WEATHERS Tradition, Trade and Woodcarving in Solomon Islands, by Jari Kupiainen. 2000. (xxvii + 303 pp. and an accompanying digital photo archive of 135 photos on a cd-rom). The Finnish Anthropological Society TAFAS 45 and The Intervention Press. ISBN 87-89825-48-9. See http://www.intervention.dk/ for additional introduction.
Jari Kupiainen
Images of tropical paradise islands as related to my study are greatly devalued by the current ethnic conflict and civil war taking place in Solomon Islands, especially in the national capital Honiara and its surroundings. This conflict centres particularly between the peoples of Malaita and Guadalcanal Islands and seriously threatens the very existence of the Solomon Islands state in its present form. From this perspective, my attempt at writing a study that extends to the present day seems to have failed. The conflict has transferred the ethnographic present of the study into ethnographic past, because the present-day Solomon Islands society has been fundamentally altered since late 1998, when the conflict began to escalate. The current situation in the country remains chaotic in spite of the Townsville Peace Agreement (15.10.2000) between the principal warring parties, Malaita and Guadalcanal, which has until today been unable to restore the civil society in the country. Yet, my study addresses the contemporary society only partially, since I have mainly focused on two questions: how cultures and traditions change as results of colonial processes, and how these processes influence the local production of woodcarvings and other crafts. When these basic questions have been operationalised into practical topics of ethnographic fieldwork, related to the micro-level of local communities, they have immediately become complex and polysemic. This has been the practical dilemma of my study: how to relate the universal with the particular, how to generalise observations about the particular. The study of local communities from Bellona and Gatokae Islands has eventually become the study of the whole society, culture, tradition and history, and their processuality. My perspective to cultural research is that particular cultural phenomena must be contextualised in the wider context of the society, yet this context is not a stagnated state of being but process. Tradition, culture and society may appear as static and classificatory concepts, but in the social reality they are, first of all, processes - dynamic, living and continuously transforming social practices and action. The recognition of this processuality is a prerequisite for the researcher to genuinely understand the chosen topic, and to produce valid data. Theoretically, such views are challenging. The researcher has to combine various research methods and theoretical viewpoints to reach these objectives. I have done this in terms of my field data accumulation, and in terms of analytical perspectives and methods adopted in this study. A central predicament in cultural research has been the tension between the oral and written forms of knowledge about cultural phenomena. Until recently, the communities studied here have maintained their local knowledge of communal history and traditions in oral forms, and the written narratives have typically represented the distanced perspectives of cultural foreigners. In my ethnographic data accumulation, I have employed diverse sources of data, ranging from written and archival sources to interviews, (participant) observations and visual data of my field study, and focusing on both people and objects. These different sources are often characterised by conflicting information about their topics, and the researcher's role as the interpreter and the synthetisizer of research data becomes central. The researcher and the resulting study become elements of the studied phenomena in the sense that the results and observations influence also the people studied and their thinking about the research topics. Sociocultural research becomes a negotiation process between the researcher and the community; the views expressed in the study relate not only to academic discourse but also to local discussions and concerns, and they have local effects. The central theme of my study is local woodcarving made in the Polynesian community of Bellona and Rennell Islands and in the Melanesian community of Gatokae in the Marovo Lagoon of the New Georgia Group. Woodcarvers of Bellona-Rennell and the Marovo Lagoon dominate the craft markets in Honiara where the craft business has concentrated. Woodcarving and craft production have in these communities been central in local economies, and the money generated from these activities is mostly distributed into the grass-root levels of local communities, increasing thus their local importance. The production of crafts in the studied communities is divided along the lines of gender. The production of crafts both maintains and transforms the local gender divisions of communities, and the economy of craft production is gendered. Women's craft-related incomes provide many women relative independence and agency in the male-dominated communities, and women's craft incomes seem to support the family economies more clearly than men's do. I have concentrated on the relationship between woodcarving and tradition, and on disruptions and continuities in the studied traditions. Colonialism, Christianisation, World War II, urbanisation and the modernisation of the Solomon Islands society have profoundly influenced local communities, and cultural shifts from precolonial times to the present day have often been immense. But how immense? It is somewhat a matter of choice, whether we emphasise disruptions or continuities in cultural analysis. When the social life is analytically seen to be a process, many discontinuities of tradition reveal themselves as continuities, and as transformations of tradition rather than splits. This tells us about the tremendous ability of tradition to remain relevant and important even in the contemporary society, and to influence local interpretations of modernity and its parameters. The contemporary woodcarving of Solomon Islands expresses exactly this. Despite sociocultural changes in the society, woodcarving has remained a central culturally esteemed profession that maintains and articulates local cultural identity. Its cultural importance is not in any significant way undermined by the fact that woodcarvers nowadays produce their works to gain a living, or that the pieces are marketed even on the Internet. The contemporary woodcarvings in Solomon Islands are elements in the same traditions the first European explorers encountered in the Solomon Islands archipelago in the 1580s. After its publication in October 2000, Tradition, Trade and Woodcarving in Solomon Islands has been granted the "Dissertation of The Year" award by the Finnish Academy of Sciences. The award is given annually to four dissertations in the different fields of science. The author has also displayed some of the accumulated photographic materials (and handicrafts) in exhibitions that have been held at the University of Joensuu (October 2000), the Art Centre Ahjo in Joensuu (January 2001), the Helinä Rautavaara Ethnographic Museum in Espoo (February 2001), and abroad at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (15-18 May, 2001).
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