Ben Burt

The Things We Value: Culture and History in Solomon Islands Ben Burt

Publisher Marketing: The Things We Value takes as its subject the creativity and cultural heritage of Solomon Islands, focusing on the kinds of objects produced and valued by local communities across this diverse country in the south-west Pacific. Combining historical and interpretive analyses with personal memories and extensive illustrations, the contributors examine such distinctive forms as red feather-money, shell valuables, body ornaments, war canoes, ancestral stones and wood carvings. Their essays discuss the materials, designs, manufacture, properties and meanings of artefacts from across the country. Solomon Islanders value these things variously as currency, heirlooms and commodities, for their beauty, power and sanctity, and as bearers of the historical identities and relationships which sustain them in a rapidly changing world. The volume brings together indigenous experts and leading international scholars as authors of the most geographically comprehensive anthology of Solomon Islands ethnography yet published. It engages with historical and contemporary issues from a range of perspectives, anthropological and archaeological, communal and personal, and makes a major new contribution to Pacific Islands studies. Contributor Bio:  Burt, Ben Ben Burt has worked for the British Museum for almost forty years, as an anthropologist, educator and curator in what is now the department of Africa, Oceania and Americas. He has published museum educational materials and studies of the culture and history of Solomon Islands, and this book derives from his world art teaching for Birkbeck College, University of London. Contributor Bio:  Bolton, Lissant Lissant Bolton is curator for Oceania at the British Museum.