DEBORAH GEWERTZ and FREDERICK ERRINGTON

For 20 years, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington have collaborated in writing books and essays about the contemporary Pacific, as it experiences market penetration. Two of their co-authored concern the Chambri, the group Deborah Gewertz studied for her dissertation and that Gewertz and Errington have continued to study as Chambrians become exposed to tourism and other contexts of monetization (Twisted Histories, Altered Contexts), migrate to towns (Emerging Class in Papua New Guinea, CUP 1999). Twisted Histories, Altered Contexts received honorable mention in the Victor Turner Prize awarded for the Society for Humanistic Understanding (1991). Articulating Change in the Last Unknown, a collection of essays by Gewertz and Errington that was published in the Comaroffs' series at Westview Press called “Studies in the Ethnographic Imagination,” is one of the most challenging collections of essays on the Pacific islands to has been published in the last 15 years. In Yali's Question, a volume in the prestigious Lewis Henry Morgan series (Chicago 2004), the two focus on Ramu Sugar Limited, and widen their scope, from PNG nationals to these and expatriate entrepreneurs, plantation managers, and the rest, producing an ethnography of considerable complexity. In the process, they inaugurated a critique of Jared Diamond's representations of the Pacific islands and approach to analyzing them. Their argument with him is one that is familiar from political economic analysis: the reason whites have more cargo than blacks—are richer than blacks-must be sought in the racialized power asymmetries world history has created.

There are three themes in these collaborative projects: 1) the intersection of political economy and culture; 2) change and its complexity (at root neither exogenous nor endogenous but somehow both); and 3) the need, in describing and analyzing the contemporary Pacific, to capture multiple perspectives, often across the color bar. Their books are accomplished “experimental ethnographies” striving to find new ways of talking about local-global articulations, their dynamics, and “the complexity of actual lives” (as Errington puts it in his web profile for Trinity College). As such, they point the way for others attempting to respond as humanistically inclined Pacific island scholars to the critique of area studies, “interpretation,” structuralism, functionalism, and single-sited research.

Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington have also written single-authored texts. Gewertz's first book, Sepik River Societies (Yale 1983), was one of the first contributions to Pacific island studies to focus on a region rather than a particular culture. She was also one of the first to edit an anthology on historical anthropology (History and Ethohistory in New Guinea [1985], with E. Schieffelin). Cultural Alternatives and a Feminist Anthropology (first published as a single-author work in 1987, CUP) tackled feminist anthropology. (It was revised and published two years later in paperback under the authorship of Gewertz and Errington.) Gewertz also edited Myths of Matriarchy Reconsidered in 1988. Errington's two single-authored books are Karavar: Masks and Power in a Melanesian Ritual (Cornell 1974), a classic study of a body of Melanesian ritual, and Manners and Meaning in West Sumatra (Yale 1984).

Naming Gewertz and Errington as Honorary Fellows in 2010 would be extremely timely. This is the year that Cheap Meat (UC Press) will be published. Cheap Meat is yet another experimental ethnography one that required research among meat processors, importers, exporters, and consumers in the Western Pacific, including Australia, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, and Fiji. It is also the year that The Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology, a collection Gewertz edited with James Carrier and published by Blackwell, will be published.

Apart from the books, Gewertz and Errington have published many single- and coauthored articles. They are both distinguished professors at their respective institutions. Since 1994, Gewertz has been G. Henry Whitcomb Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College. Errington, now retired, was a distinguished professor at Trinity College. They have received research funding from NEH, NSF (two awards), Wenner- Gren, and ACLS. In the volume and quality of publications, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington, easily one of the most productive academic couples in Anthropology today, rival and even surpass many who have been honored with the ASAO honorary fellowship in the past. Additionally, year after year they have graced us with their presence at our annual meetings and made lively, intelligent, and provocative contributions to the various sessions. Naming them Honorary Fellows of ASAO would be fitting and timely.

Submitted by Aleta Biersack