TORBEN MONBERG

Torben Monberg is currently the “dean” of Pacific (and perhaps all) anthropologists in Denmark. He has done path-breaking ethnographic work on Polynesian outliers in the Solomon Islands: particularly Bellona, but also Rennell and Tikopia. His contributions are primarily ethnographic rather than theoretical, but his ethnographic writings on Bellona are genuinely remarkable, rivaling Firth’s on Tikopia for depth, breadth, and empathetic insight. The amount of indigenous textual material that he and his Danish colleagues have published is unparalleled, at least among the Polynesian outliers. Among Monberg’s publications are From the Two Canoes: Oral Traditions of Rennell and Bellona (with Sam Elbert, University of Hawai‘i Press, 1965), The Religion of Bellona Island (National Museum of Denmark, 1966), Mobile in the Trade Wind: The Reactions of the People of Bellona Island toward a Mining Project (National Museum of Denmark, 1976), and Bellona Island Beliefs and Rituals (Pacific Islands Monographs Series No. 9, University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991).

Monberg has attended a number of ASAO meetings and participated in several multi-year sessions. ASAO publications to which he has contributed include Incest Prohibitions in Micronesia and Polynesia (special issue of the Journal of the Polynesian Society, 1976); Leadership and Change in the Western Pacific (in honor of Raymond Firth; Athlone, 1996); and Spirits in Culture, History, and Mind (Routledge, 1996). Monberg is virtually unique in both having assembled a distinguished team of researchers to conduct a comprehensive study of Bellona’s cultural and natural environment, and having paved the way for an almost uninterrupted line of Danish researchers who have made Bellona perhaps the most thoroughly documented of all the western Polynesian outliers. Among the scholars who followed Monberg to Bellona is Rolf Kuschel who has, himself, attended several ASAO meetings and participated in a number of our sessions.

Richard Feinberg, Kent State University (September 2000 Newsletter)