Reviewed by Anton Ploeg
(Centre for Pacific and Asian Studies)

 
The title and the subtitle of this book jar; whereas the title refers to domestic, hence private space, the subtitle does to public space. The book's content conforms more to the subtitle. It is not just about houses, but more about buildings and their locations. And the author discusses them so as to discuss colonial history: "I use these buildings as windows through which to glimpse and puzzle over some of the variety of the colonial project that was the New Hebrides" (p. 4). Using a concept coined by George Marcus, she describes her field research as "multi-sited" because she had to collect information both in what is now Vanuatu and in the various countries, Britain, Australia and France, where the former inhabitants of the buildings discussed have settled in retirement.

Rodman starts with an account of the house where she lived during her fieldwork in the hills of the island Amae, in the late 1970's an early 80's, in other words the house in which she started her career as an anthropologist. She writes: "[T]he house glowed at night... like a loosely woven basket... [P]ale golden light from kerosene lanterns inside the house twinkled through the warp and weft of the woven walls" (p. 4). Her emotional attachment to this house led her to write the present book. However, nowhere else in the book she records an analogous level of attachment to their former houses among the British colonial administrators whom she interviewed. Since, for the British colonial administrators, home was still in the British isles. To a certain extent this is because in the course of their careers they had gone, as happens to diplomats, from one posting and one dependency to another. Moreover, their work in the New Hebrides, a "fragment of Empire" shared with the French, took place when this Empire was in an advanced stage of deconstruction. It was clear to them that they were working themselves out of their jobs.

In turn Rodman discusses the British Residency, the official house of the top administrator, on a small island in the harbour of Vila; the British prisons in their infancy; the British Paddock, a grass square lined by houses for expatriate officials but at the same time "the public plaza of British colonial space"; the house of the District Agent on Tanna in the south of the archipelago, and remnants of the house of the District Agent on Espirito Santo in the north. This house too was located offshore, on an islet. And finally, the former house of the French District Agent on Espirito Santo, now inhabited by the aged widow of a French settler, the only home Rodman discusses.

Obviously, such a sequence of houses leaves out those of other members of the colonial establishment: the French public servants, the missionaries, and the businessmen, whether of European or other extraction. Nevertheless, Rodman was correct in surmising that discussing the houses people had to live in, and the various ways in which they refashioned and used them, enabled her to record aspects of colonial life that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. It makes a most readable and useful complement to more conventional histories of the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides.