Working Session: Villages and Their Alters in Melanesian Social Worlds
Organizers: Courtney Handman and Rupert Stasch

A large number of participants in this session were unable to come to the recent ASAO meeting and the scheduled Working Session was cancelled as a result. However, many session participants circulated very thoughtful and substantial papers by email. Despite the Alexandria setback, the session organizers would like to reconvene as a Symposium at the Honolulu meeting, with a view to moving the collaborative phase of the project forward at a good pace, whether it is heading toward nucleated or dispersed publication. The organizers will be in touch with existing session participants in coming weeks about a timetable for circulation of materials, including completion of initial paper drafts by late October. (We will need a suite of seven papers and participants who are able to commit to Honolulu by November 1st if we are actually going to attain Symposium standing.) Persons interested in the possibility of newly joining the session are encouraged to contact the organizers, so that we can share draft materials about the main ideas of the session that have already been in circulation among our group.

Courtney Handman, Reed College, Dept. of Anthropology, 3230 SE Woodstock Blvd., Portland, OR 97214, USA; <chandman@reed.edu>

Rupert Stasch, Dept. of Anthropology - 0532, UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla CA 92093-0532, USA; <rstasch@ucsd.edu