SEMINAR: Anthropology Seminar Series

When outsiders have lived for many years on Ranongga in the Solomon Islands' Western Province, people may joke that they have "lost their passports" (lusim paspot) and become "citizens" of the island. Such joking calls attention to the difference between connections to ancestral territory and membership in a nation-state, but it also reflects real worries about the possibility of alienation. This paper tracks the ways that migrants to customary and alienated land in rural and urban locales seek to attach themselves to local places and how they deal with the possibility of becoming alienated from ancestral places. These processes are strikingly similar across what Islanders and outsiders alike often characterize as a great divide between urban and rural lifeworlds. I suggest, however, that migrants to urban areas find it more difficult to attach themselves to local people and land. In rural villages on Ranongga, migrants from other islands become local by living on local land, caring for local people, bearing children, clearing land, planting trees, or even dying and being buried on their adoptive land. In urban areas, where people may be less dependent on local land and people than in rural areas, fluid and emergent place-based identities are likely to calcify into ethnic identity, understood as a fixed and unchanging quality of the person.