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The depopulation of Melanesia: an assessment of epidemiological versus psychological factors, and the work of W.H.R. Rivers

Melanesia was one of the last regions of the world to be affected by the process of global integration that, arguably, began in 1492 with European colonisation of the New World. This was a process accomplished globally with the help of Guns, Germs and Steel, to quote the title of Jared Diamond's book. In New Guinea, Solomon islands, Vanuatu and Fiji the resulting depopulation process was witnessed and commented upon by the first generation of social anthropologists. Two examples are William Rivers and Arthur Hocart, who conducted joint fieldwork in the western Solomons in 1908. The influential book edited and partly written by Rivers, Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia (1922), was mainly based on his own and Hocart's ethnographic surveys of Simbo Island. Rivers's field notebooks seem not to have survived, but his genealogies are in the Cambridge University library, and this resource forms one basis for this study.

Lizzie, a young woman of Simbo island, photographed by Rivers and Hocart in 1908.
'Lizzie' on Simbo

The project involves an attempt to reconstitute the demographic statistics generated for Simbo by Rivers, using his own primary sources, in order to test his suggestion that rapid population decline was more the result of declining fertility rather than catastrophic mortality from introduced disease. It is hoped to evaluate Rivers's conclusion that childlessness and low fertility stemmed from 'psychological factors' connected to the cultural impacts of colonialism, rather than reflecting epidemiological impacts, in particular the impact of the sexually-transmitted disease that had been introduced to Solomon Islands. Collaborators include Edvard Hviding (Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway), and Judy Bennett (Department of History, University of Otago, New Zealand).

Publications

There are two recent publications: