Book of the Week: Stone Men of Malekula Vao

John Layard, Chatto & Windus, London, 1942

Reviewed by Andrew Paul Wood

Haidy Geismar included this photo of Vianney Atpatoun holding a 'bootleg' copy of John Layard's book in her fascinating essay 'The Stone Men of Malekula: an ethnography of an ethnography'. The essay can be read via her page at ResearchGate.

John Layard & Stonemen of Malekula: from Colonial Archives to Village Council

I.

Ethnographic texts, far from being static documents, are living artifacts that continue to shape and be shaped by the communities they record. This is particularly apparent in Vanuatu, where the return and circulation of historical manuscripts has sparked passionate local engagement and even disputes. John Willoughby Layard’s Stone Men of Malekula (1942), a monumental ethnographic study based on his 1914–15 fieldwork in Vao, a small island off the northeast coast of Malakula in Vanuatu, is the exemplar of what can happen.ⁱ Layard’s work mainly dealt with Vao, one of the small islands of Malakula’s coast, though it does also touch on other Malakulan cultures, such as the Big Nambas, to demonstrate the significant degree of cultural divergence on the smaller islands from larger Malakula. Aside from his own observations, and extensive secondary reading, Layard translated and included relevant texts by the French Marist missionary Father Jean Godefroy (1878-1933).ⁱⁱ A whole appendix on the ritually significant birds of the islands, by Layard’s successor, the researcher Tom Harrison, brings an extra dimension to the text which feels almost collaborative.ⁱⁱⁱ Thus, a diverse range of viewpoints and perspectives are brought into a single format.

English anthropologist and psychologist John Layard (1891-1974) was born in London, the son of the essayist George Somes Layard (1857-1925).^iv In around 1902 the family moved to Bull's Cliff, Felixstowe in Suffolk, where Layard encountered his aunt, the poet and archaeologist Nina Frances Layard (1853-1935), who lived nearby in Ipswich and specialised in the palaeolithic history of the area. Nina Layard introduced the young John to several Cambridge academics: anthropologist and ethnologist A. C. Haddon (1855-1940), classicist and anthropologist William Ridgeway (1853-1926), geologist Thomas McKenny Hughes (1832-1917), Imperial Naval surgeon and paleoethnologist Leopold Pfeiffer (1759-1831), and surgeon and anthropologist Wynfrid Laurence Henry Duckworth (1870-1956). Nina Layard’s companion, Mary Outram (1862-1935), was a cousin of Baron Anatole von Hügel (1883-1921), who at the time was establishing Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.^v There was a certain inevitability that when Layard finished with his education at Bedales School he would find himself at Cambridge where he gained a degree in modern languages. He remained, however, passionately interested in anthropology.

In those days there were fewer professional cordons sanitaires demarking academic disciplines and excluding amateurs, and so, in 1914, Layard accompanied the anthropologist and psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers (1864-1922) to what was then known as the New Hebrides along with Haddon and two of his students, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) and Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942, better known for his work on the Trobriand Islands in New Guinea). Layard and Rivers travelled around the archipelago, stopping at the small islet of Atchin close to Malakula. The Atchinese regarded these white interlopers coolly to begin with, and Rivers elected to continue travelling while Layard stayed on Atchin to immerse himself in and document the culture. Layard send many ni-Vanuatu artifacts to the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge, and, via his aunt, to Ipswich Museum. This also seems to have been something of a period of sexual and social liberation from repressive Edwardian cultural norms for Layard, which may also explain his tendency to romanticise his observations.^vi

Layard’s interest in psychology and psychiatry was likely sparked on his return to England. He was physically and emotionally exhausted, and his brother Peter Clement Layard (1896-1918) had been killed on the Western Front.^vii Layard underwent several courses of psychotherapy in England, and in 1926, Vienna, where he fell in with the expatriate English literary circle of David Ayerst (1904-1992). Layard seems to have been haunted by depression for most of his life. By 1929 he was living in Berlin, part of the gay expatriate literary demimonde recorded in the books of his friend Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986). It was at this time that he was rejected romantically by the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973). Melodramatically he turned up at Auden’s apartment with a serious headwound, demanding the poet finish the job. Fortunately, Auden got Layard to a hospital. One wonders if Layard was ever completely able to re-assimilate to the European way of life after having immersed himself so thoroughly on Vao.

The 1940s found Layard in Zurich being treated by none other than Carl Jung (1875-1961), leading to him studying with Jung, before eventually suffering another psychological crisis and returning to England, settling in Oxford where he fell in with the circle of the historian Mansfield Forbes (1889-1936). Layard’s writing of Stone Men of Malekula predates his association with Jung, so presumably his interest in Jung’s theories preceded his actually meeting him. The book was intended as part of a trilogy on Vao, Atchin and Rano. No other ethnographical monographs on the subject were forthcoming, though Layard would continue to publish articles in psychoanalytical journals about the islands, and in 1944 he would publish The Lady of the Hare, a study of his Jungian dream-analysis therapy with an English family in 1940.^viii A further work of psychoanalysis, Celtic Quest: Sexuality and Soul in Individuation, was published posthumously in 1985.^ix Despite his predominantly homosexual inclinations, it was in Oxford that he met Doris Dingwall, the wife of anthropologist and psychical investigator Eric Dingwall (1891-1986). They would later marry and have one son, the British labour economist Richard Layard (born 1934).

II.

The term Melanesia identifies both a geographical and cultural subregion within the Pacific islands. It is commonly used alongside other categories such as Polynesia and Micronesia in descriptive discourse about the Pacific. However, Melanesia encompasses more than a simple classification or distinction—the term bears significant historical and cultural baggage, with both positive and negative associations. Its origins lie in racialist ethnography as a term manufactured from classical Greek (along with Latin, one of the in-languages of European scholarship) to mean “black islands’ in reference to the skin colour of the people who live there, in contrast to brown-skinned Polynesians (meaning “many islands”), but in the postcolonial era it has positive connotations of indigenous identity and transnational solidarity. ^x

Vanuatu is a sovereign archipelagic nation of 83 island arranged in a loose “Y” shape running approximately 1,100km from north to south. It is part of Melanesia, along with Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Fiji, New Caledonia, and West Papua. During the colonial period it was jointly administered by the relict imperial powers of Britain and France until it gained independence in 1980. Although the largest island in the chain is Espiritu Santo, the capital, Port Vila, is on the third largest island, Efate. From a cultural perspective, one of the things that makes Vanuatu so attractive to scholars, is that it is the most linguistically diverse country in the world, with over 110 indigenous languages spoken by just over 300,000 people. Vanuatu has also positioned itself as a political voice for Melanesian solidarity, an indigenous Melanesian socialism, and West Papuan independence. Insofar as Vanuatu has a unified national identity it is largely a modern and postcolonial construct based around the creole national language Bislama; mythic elements in kastom; oral traditions; symbols of national iconography centred around the use of pig tusks, palm leaves, and slit gongs; a dialectical tension between traditional chiefly authority and legislative governance; colonial history; and the historical trauma of blackbirding.^xi Under these circumstances and with the pressures to function as nation-state in the modern sense, it is easy to see how a text like Layard’s takes on far greater significance as a tool for nation-building or a bulwark of resistance against it.

Malakula is located in Vanuatu’s central Malampa Province, and covers 2,041 kilometres. Dense forests and rugged mountainous terrain separate its communities, and it has a constellation of offshore islands, including Uripiv, Atchin, Wala, Vao, and the Maskelynes. Malakula’s 23,000 inhabitants speak over thirty distinct languages. It is home to the Small Nambas and Big Nambas tribes, well known for their penis sheaths, ceremonial dances, and sand labyrinth drawings. Some villages still practice skull-binding. In this context interpretations of Layard’s text become a way for these often fragmentary or diverse elements to be harmonised and decoded.

Despite the title of the book, Stone Men of Malekula only covers a limited aspect of Malakulan culture, insomuch as Layard was primarily interested in the distribution of a “Megalithic culture” in the islands. A lengthy section is devoted to the Maki, the ceremonial religious complex incorporating megalithic structures, and considerable attention is given to the “section system” (social administrative structure, village courts and customary law). Both of these Malakulan institutions are discussed in terms of broader cultural distribution and development, but very little attention is given to, for example, land tenure or child-rearing practices. Layard’s meticulous documentation of rituals, songs, and social systems did much to inspire future generations of ethnographers to see indigenous knowledge systems as complex and internally coherent, and not merely exotic curiosities. There is considerable charm in the way he combines personal reflections with analytical cultural evaluation.

Layard treats the standing stones of the islands not just as symbols, but as locuses of authority and sites of political and cultural struggle, arguing that their material forms actively constitute a kind of cultural knowledge and social status. Just as interesting, however, are Layard’s connections with avant-garde and literary circles. His friendships with writers like W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood meant that his ideas filtered back into and influenced Western culture, helping to subtly shame modernist explorations of identity, ritual and myth. In some ways Layard may be credited with influencing the “reflexive turn” in the arts and anthropology, where the observer, introspective and ambiguous, becomes part of the story themselves.

Layard’s main conclusions were that the stone platforms, dolmens and carvings of the Maki ceremonial complex were not merely architecturally functional, but deeply symbolic of social hierarchy, ancestral continuity, and spiritual power. He reflected on the scarcity of readily available stone, the difficulty and skill required to work it, and the manpower needed to construct the complex. He argued that the traditional section system, which divided up the society of Vanuatu into moieties or clans, was based on cosmic dualism and the balancing of oppositional forces in ritual and cosmological kinship. He drew attention to the similarities between Malakulan funerary and megalithic ritual, and those of Mediterranean and Near-Eastern cultures, leaving open the possibility of shared, universal archetypal structures.

In the history of ethnology and anthropology Layard is significant as one of the first to adopt participant observation in his approach. He immersed himself, admittedly with limited fluency, in the language and daily local life of Vao. This would eventually become foundational. His blending of ethnography with Jungian dream-psychoanalysis is, perhaps, more contentions, and makes him a bridge of sorts between James George Frazer’s late Victorian pursuit of mythic archetypes in The Golden Bough (1890),^xii and the work of later symbolic and interpretive anthropologists like Géza Róheim, Clifford Geertz, David M. Schneider, Victor Turner and Mary Douglas. The New Zealand classicist Edward “Ted” Jenner (1946-2021) was fascinated by Layard’s book, and late in his career was inspired to explore the similarities between Virgil’s Aeneid, Orphic beliefs and Malakulan mortuary traditions.^xiii Jenner was particularly interested in Layard’s use of the Jungian collective unconscious to explain these examples of parallel cultural evolution, although some have seen this aspect of Layard’s work as bordering on pseudo-archaeological “hyperdiffusionism” - the idea that certain historical technologies or ideas were developed by a single people or civilisation and then spread to other cultures.^xiv Jung’s own approach to exploring the human subconscious has distinctly shamanistic and animistic elements to it, which makes him something of a bridge between indigenous and Western ideas.

Reading Layard on Malakula, one must continually resist the urge to see parallels with the Western traditions. His description of the dead of high rank being ferried to the island of Ambrym, the isle of the dead,^xv chimes with the Charon ferrying the dead across the Styx in Greek mythology, or King Arthur taken to the Island of Avalon. His descriptions of the layout of the islands carries with it the grandiloquent authority of the Classical geographers, before suddenly surprising you with a tonal shift into the intimate aside of poetic travelogue:

If in the cool season, we may now rest a while on any one of these beaches, watching the still splendour of the tropic noon or, at low tide, minute blue fishes swimming in the pools. Small girls, perhaps, will pass looking for shellfish on the reef, or an occasional old woman seat herself beneath a shady tree on the shore side to plait.^xvi

Layard frequently adopts this first-person narrative in his descriptions: “As we go up from the beach we shall have the opportunity first of observing native dress.”^xvii It provides much of the charm of his book. Like a Victorian traveller Layard acts as companionable guide, giving the reader a sense of being physically present in Vanuatu. The book is also an excellent repository of cultural technology, because of its detailed descriptions and contexts. Consider, for example, its description of the penis sheath.^xviii Layard’s analysis of the highly complex nature of Vao’s social organisation gives readers some insight into the fragmentary identity of Vanuatu as a whole. He notes:

In order properly to understand the meaning of these phenomena it is necessary first to examine the social organisation of Vao not as a unit in itself, but as part of the larger unit formed by the Small Islands as a whole.

Despite considerable differences in language, in the regulation of kinship and in ritual, and the not infrequent wars that break out between them, the inhabitants of all these and of the adjacent promontories recognise a common cultural bond. There is, however, no political cohesion. Nor, in the absence of chiefs, is there any centralised form of control or common action.^xix

It is difficult to resist making comparisons to the Lyotardian postmodern fragmentation of traditional social hierarchies,^xx or the anarchic, decentralised nature of social media, and perhaps to understand Malakula is to understand the potential evolutionary dynamics of Western culture. There is nothing new under the sun.

Layard is also very good at making the spiritual and magical realities of the islands feel immanent and alive, helped greatly by the inclusion of stories. These are another aspect of the text that make it of immense utility to the indigenous peoples of Malakula:

Codrington also mentions a vision experienced by a native after the death of the last heathen chief of Walurigi, in North-East Oba. This man’s son had become a Christian so could not succeed to the chieftainship. When the chief died, “a certain man attempted to take his place. He went into the late chief’s sacred haunt …in which he used to have intercourse with ... spirits, and he declared that he heard someone whistle to him there. He told the people also that afterwards in the night, he felt something come upon his breast, which he took in his hands and found to be a stone in the shape like the distinguishing part of a valued kind of pig.”^xxi

In this context, the “distinguishing part” is the genitals of the Naravé pig, uniquely bred in northern Vanuatu where a small percentage of the males are born intersex. These pigs are regarded as status symbols and have a significant role in the representation of power and authority. The pseudo-hermaphroditism of the pigs is caused by a deficiency of the mitochondrial cytochrome P450 enzyme 17α-hydroxylase (CYP17A1), resulting in very low 17α-Hydroxypregnenolone levels.^xxii An analysis of the pigs’ mitochondrial DNA in 2006 revealed that they are descended from Southeast Asian pigs brought to the island by the Lapita people about 3000 years ago.^xxiii Vanuatu continues to contribute to the advancement of human knowledge across the board.

III.

In an episode of the original series of Star Trek called “A Piece of the Action,” the Starship Enterprise visits a planet previously contacted a century earlier, only to discover that the inhabitants have recreated their entire society using as a model a book left by the previous mission, a book called Chicago Mobs of the Twenties. The result is a quasi-parodic planet-wide imitation of 1920s American gangster culture, complete with Tommy guns, fedoras and turf wars.^xxiv In universe this is cited as one of the reasons for the creation of the Prime Directive. One wonders if Star Trek’s creator Gene Rodenberry, having flown in the Pacific during the Second World War, might have been thinking of cargo cults, or that each isolated Pacific island might be an alien planet unto itself, barely known to Europeans. The episode is sometimes cited as a fictional example of “accidental ethnogenesis”.^xxv Such things do play out in the real world, particularly in the Pacific.

My referring to this episode may seem indulgent, but its themes of cultural contamination and willing wholescale cultural reset on a similar premise are quite pertinent. The Norwegian anthropologist Thorgeir Kolshus, working north of Malakula on Vanuatu’s Mota Island, was highly critical of the practice of bringing anthropological texts and missionary memoirs to island communities and repatriating them, questioning the ethics of it, and noting the disruption of traditional knowledge hierarchies and negative effects to social cohesion should the local people defer to the authority of such texts.^xxvi Judith McDonald in her paper “Tikopia and What Raymond Said” (2000), looks specifically at how the works of New Zealand anthropologist Sir Raymond Firth (1901–2002) have become the definitive cultural guide for the people of that Polynesian outlier among the otherwise Melanesian Solomon Islands.^xxvii One might also look to what unfolded in the 1950s and 1960s when the French Communist Party circulated copies of The Communist Manifesto on the island of Ouvéa in French New Caledonia. Marx’s writings were interpreted by some Kanak groups as a prophecy that the Party would return to grant them wealth and power.^xxviii Personally I think Marx would have abhorred this, but some Marxist theorists have attempted to interpret cargo cults as a kind of proto-political response to cultural disruption and inequality brought about colonialism.^xxix

The degree to which indigenous communities come to regard these texts as almost “biblical” (and all the baggage that implies considering how Christianity was assimilated in those communities—^xxx) is deeply relevant to what anthropologist Heidy Geismar has to say in her essay about the samizdat-like dissemination of bootleg copies of Stone Men of Malekula among the Malakulans themselves.^xxxi As an ethnographic archive, Geismer argues that these versions of Layard’s fieldwork have evolved beyond a historical, and inevitably biased, record of the past, into, like a physical Bible, a kind of fetish imbued with spiritual power in its own right. Just off the northeastern coast of Malakula, on the islands of Vao and Atchin, the physical form the book takes—a hefty, illustrated tome—is perceived as giving the text an authority that belies its partial and selective contents. Photocopies, translations, and oral retellings of the text circulate on Malakula itself, fuelling land disputes, leadership claims, and debates over kastom (customary law and tradition). Indeed, in some contexts, Layard’s book has become kastom.

Stone Men of Malekula is not regarded by these communities as a static document, but rather a living text that continues to be shaped and interpreted by local politics, engaged with both reverently and critically. It is used to assert indigenous knowledge while also challenging anthropological authority. Geismar highlights how Layard’s uneven coverage, favouring Vao over Atchin, has led to resentment and rivalry between Vao and Atchin islanders, and driven the Tojan people of Atchin to pursue access to Layard’s unpublished materials.^xxxii This is an extension of James Clifford’s and George Marcus’ postcolonial critique of “writing culture”, which insists that ethnographies are not objective windows into other cultures but rather literary constructions shaped by narrative choices, rhetorical strategies, and the position of the author.^xxxiii Scholars like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha have emphasised the “epistemic violence” of representing the Indigenous as Other through Western intellectual frameworks.^xxxiv

As we have noted, the indigenous perspective on Stone Men of Malekula is not monolithic. It is a dynamic mix of reverence, critique, appropriation, and resistance. The book is both a cultural resource and a symbol of colonial authority, and its legacy continues to shape how ni-Vanuatu communities assert identity, negotiate power, and engage with their past. That said, however, one cannot simply beam down to Malakula like James Tiberius Kirk to correct old or offer new interpretations to the locals. Past attempts to introduce new readings of Layard have had mixed results at best, and at worst have led to significant tension. Kolshus’ assertion that such texts should effectively be embargoed from these communities is not helpful either, as it presumes, patronisingly, that these communities cannot manage their own histories. Science fiction novelist and father of the Cyberpunk genre, William Gibson, (if I return to science fiction themes in my discussion a lot, it is because these things often feel science-fictional), says in his short story “Burning Chrome” that, as regards technology, “The street finds its own uses for things.”^xxxv The same can be said of historical ethnographic texts: the Islands find their own uses for things. Indeed, sometimes the repatriation of these fragmentary histories can be balm from Gilead in healing old colonial wounds. Rod Edmond, in his book Migrations: Journeys in Time and Place (2013), writes about returning the 1884 diary of his Presbyterian missionary ancestor, the Rev. Charles Murray, to Ambrym Island, east of Malakula. ^xxxvi That this return took place with no obvious negative outcomes, suggests much depends on context, the nature of the document, and how it is presented to the local community.

IV.

Malakula continued to have a potent influence on European thought. Tom Harrisson (1911-1976), working with the Big Nambas between the wars, wrote Savage Civilisation (1937), a genre-defying blend of first-person ethnography, travelogue, and political critique, navigating between poetic and polemic, kava and cannibalism, and drawing on Layard’s work.^xxxvii Layard reviewed Savage Civilisation, writing of it that, “the book unfolds itself, as an Elizabethan drama with scenes, short and long, trenchant sketches of black and white kaleidoscopically mixed.”^xxxviii Harrisson would go on to found the Mass Observation movement in the UK, based on his experiences observing the Big Nambas and Layard’s observational approach. In the 1950s and 1960s, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), a canonical figure in structuralism and modern anthropology, was also fascinated by Melanesian cultures, especially those of Malakula, though whereas Layard was introspective and psychological, Lévi-Strauss was motivated by mapping external structures, and his work moulding generations of anthropologists and semioticians. Arthur Bernard Deacon (1903-1927) was a brilliant Cambridge anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in Malakula in the late 1920s. His early death did not prevent his becoming influential and his notes were posthumously edited by A. C. Haddon were published as Malakula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides (1934).^xxxix This text would prove of great significance in the development of British structural-functional anthropology, especially in relation to kinship studies.

In one way or another, all these writers look back to Layard. Ethnographic texts like Stone Men of Malekula are not merely relics of a Pacific culture or scholarly methodology. Their repatriation and dissemination through oral, physical, and now digital means, is a deeply and deliberately political act with the potential to heal, divide, or utterly transform communities. The extraordinary journey of texts like Layard’s from colonial libraries, where it was a tool in the kit of imperialism, to the uses found for it in village hands, underscores the vast importance of dialogue, diplomacy, transparency and respect when texts are ‘returned’ to the islands they describe. As the body politic of Vanuatu continues to evolve along with its geopolitical context, digital platforms and community engagement with see Layard’s text take on whole new dimensions, allowing the document to be a fully living one shaped by, and for, the peoples to whom it most rightfully belongs.

_

FOOTNOTES:

i^ Layard, John. Stone Men of Malekula: Vao, London: Chatto and Windus, 1942.

ii^ Godefroy, Jean. “Une Tribu tombée de la lune”, Bulletin trimestriel de l'Association Amicale des Anciens Élèves. Institution Libre de Combrée. Angers, 1932-1934; also in Les Missions catholiques. Lyon and Paris, 1933; Une Tribu tombée de la lune. Edited by A. Landès. Lyon and Paris, 1936.

iii^ Layard 1942, 751-753.

iv^ For biographical sources see: MacClancy, Jeremy. “Layard, John Willoughby”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; Geismar, Haidy and Anita Herle: Moving images. John Layard, fieldwork and photography on Malekula since 1914, Adelaide: Crawford House Publishing, 2010; John Willoughby Layard Papers MSS 0084. Special Collections & Archives, University of California San Diego Library. Readers of Bislama may wish to consult John Layard long Melakula 1914–1915, Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2009.

v^ Plunkett, S. J. “Nina Frances Layard, Prehistorian (1853–1935)”, in (eds) William Davies and Ruth Charles, Dorothy Garrod and the Progress of the Palaeolithic, Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1999, 242–262; White, Mark and S. Plunkett. Miss Layard excavates: a Palaeolithic site at Foxhall Road, Ipswich, 1903-1905, Bristol: Western Academic & Specialist Press, 2004.

vi^ McDiarmid, Derry, “John Layard: the divided man” in (ed) Sue McDiarmid, Century of Insight, London: Routlege, 2013.

vii^ Layard, George Somes. Peter Clement Layard, London: John Murray 1919.

viii^ Layard, John. The Lady of the Hare, A Study in the Healing Power of Dreams, London: Faber and Faber,1944.

ix^ Layard, John. Celtic Quest: Sexuality and Soul in Individuation, Revised, Zurich: Spring Publications, 1985.

x^ Lawson, Stephanie, “'Melanesia': The History and Politics of an Idea”, The Journal of Pacific History, Vol. 48, No. 1, March 2013, 1-22.

xi^ Osiievskyi, Yevhenii and Mark Bonta, “From Black Magic to Black Flags: Social Uses and Symbolic Lexicons of Cycads in Vanuatu” ¸ Journal of Ethnobiology, Vol. 43, issue 4, 2023; Morgan, Wesley. “Overlapping Authorities: Governance, Leadership and Accountability in Contemporary Vanuatu”, Journal of South Pacific Law, 2013; Nimbtik, Gregoire. “The Struggles of Adoption and Adaptation in the Governance Space of Vanuatu: The Incorporation of Jifly Authority and Kastom Governance into the Legal-Rational System”. In: Lahai, J., Ware, H. (eds) Governance and Societal Adaptation in Fragile States. Governance and Limited Statehood. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; Nolan, Anna et. al. Vanuatu Kastom Governance Partnership, Annual Report to AusAID, 2010.

xii^ Frazer, James George, The Golden Bough, London: Macmillan and co, 1890.

xiii^ Jenner, Edward, “The Journeys of the Dead from Malekula and the Small Islands and their relevance to Aeneid VI and Greco-Roman Mythology”, Percutio 10, 2016.

xiv^ Layard did draw parallels between Malekulan culture, the Near East and Egypt, and flirted with some diffusionist ideas, however his interest was mainly in a kind of psychological universalism. Some pseudo-ethnologists have attempted to use Layard’s writings to support the idea of direct contact with the Old World, or even the supposed sunken lost continent of Mu hypothesised by James Churchward (1951-1936) – the “Atlantis” of the Pacific – in an attempt to connect Monolithic constructions in Vanuatu, Tonga, Pohnpei and Rapa-Nui.

xv^ Layard 1942, 5.

xvi^ Ibid, 40.

xvii^ Ibid, 42.

xviii^ Ibid, 42.

xix^ Ibid,, 53.

xx^ See: Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

xxi^ Layard 1942, 263.

xxii^ Pacchioli, David, “Pigs in Paradise”. Penn State University Research News, December 31, 1996.

xxiii^ Lum, J. Koji; McIntyre, James K.; Greger, Douglas L.; Huffman, Kirk W.; Vilar, Miguel G. “Recent Southeast Asian domestication and Lapita dispersal of sacred male pseudohermaphroditic ‘tuskers’ and hairless pigs of Vanuatu”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 103 (46), 2006, 17190–17195.

xxiv^ “A Piece of the Action.” Star Trek: The Original Series, season 2, episode 17, written by David P. Harmon and Gene L. Coon, directed by James Komack, aired January 12, 1968, on NBC.

xxv^ Geraghty, Lincoln. Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007, 1-28, 83-104.

xxvi^ Kolshus, Thorgeir Storesund. Purism, Syncretism, Symbiosis: Cohabiting Traditions on Mota, Banks Islands, Vanuatu. Cand. Polit. thesis, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, 1999, iv-ix, 157-178; “The Technology of Ethnography: An Empirical Argument Against the Repatriation of Historical Accounts.” Journal de la Société des Océanistes, no. 133, 2nd semester 2011, 299–308.

xxvii^ Macdonald, Judith. “The Tikopia and ‘What Raymond Said.’” In Ethnographic Artifacts: Challenges to a Reflexive Anthropology, edited by Sjoerd R. Jaarsma and Marta A. Rohatynskyj, 107–123. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000.

xxviii^ Guiart, Jean. “Cargo Cults and Political Movements in Melanesia.” In Politics in Melanesia, edited by Marion W. Ward, 185–214. Canberra: University of the South Pacific and ANU Press, 1974, 198-201.

xxix^ Worsley, Peter. The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia. 2nd ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1968, 147-236.

xxx^ Niko Besnier noted that only portions of the New Testament reached Nukulaelae, and for a period, a form of Christianity was practiced there based on this “radically incomplete text”. Besnier, Niko. Literacy, Emotion, and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 38.

xxxi^ Geismar, Heidy. (2009). “Stone Men of Malekula on Malekula: An Ethnography of an Ethnography.” Ethnos, 74(2), 199–228.

xxxii^ Ibid, pp. 199-219. Cf. Geismar, Heidy. “Photographs and Foundations: Visualizing the Past on Atchin and Vao.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, no. 1 (2009): 92–115, 100-103.

xxxiii^ Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, 1-26.

xxxiv^ Cf. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978, 6-7, 32-33, 94-95; Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 280-295; Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994, 66, 94-96, 162.

xxxv^ Gibson, William. Burning Chrome. New York: Arbor House, 1986, 196.

xxxvi^ Edmond, Rod. Migrations: Journeys in Time and Place. Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams Books, 2013, 81-156.

xxxvii^ Harrisson, Tom, Savage Civilisation, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1937.

xxxviii^ Layard, John. “Savage Civilisation”, Man 37, 1937, 134–135.

xxxix^ Deacon, Arthur Bernard, Malekula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides, London: George Routledge and Son, 1934.