Oral Tradition Volume 5, Number 2-3May 1990
About the Authors
John D. Waiko
John Dedemo Waiko is Director of the Institute of Applied Social and Economic Research, a position to which he is seconded as Professor of History from the University of Papua New Guinea. His publications include studies of Binandere tradition and its textual analysis, and of the history and politics of Papua New Guinea.
Ineleo Tuia
Ineleo Tuia was until recently Community Officer for the Tokelau Research Project of the Epidemiology Unit, Wellington Hospital. As a leader in the Tokelau community, he has done much to ensure the continuing vitality of Tokelau traditional arts in New Zealand.
Allen Thomas
Allen Thomas (School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington) is an ethnomusicologist whose work encompasses Asian and Pacific research, teaching, and performance. Since 1980 he has been researching the traditional music of the Tokelau community in New Zealand and in the Tokelau Islands.
Wendy Pond
Wendy Pond has been translating Tongan poetry for twenty years, working with Tupou Posesi Fanua and other poets in Tonga and in New Zealand, where there is a large resident Tongan population. She has been a guest editor of Tonga’s literary magazine, Faikava. An independent scholar, she is currently attached to the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington, discerning systematic principles of Maori and Austronesian classifi cation of the insect fauna.
Teaea Parima
Teaea Parima is Mangaian and has lived on the island for most of his life. He is currently completing a Bachelor of Science degree and teaching at a high school on Mangaia.
Marivee McMath
Marivee McMath, an independent scholar with an interest in Mangaian culture and history, spent ten months on Mangaia in 1971 and 1973-74 as a graduate student at the University of Otago, researching the relationship between ecology and myth. Since this time she has had a close relationship with the Cook Islands community in New Zealand.
Margaret Orbell
Margaret Orbell is Reader in the Department of Maori at the University of Canterbury. She specializes in Maori and other Polynesian poetry, imagery, and mythology. Her most recent works are The Natural World of the Maori (1985) and Hawaild: A New Approach to Maori Tradition (1985).
Judith Huntsman
Judith Huntsman is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland and former editor of the Journal of the Polynesian Society. Her research involvement with Tokelau and Tokelauans spans over 20 years, and, in collaboration with Antony Hooper, she has published numerous historical and ethnographic articles about these tiny Polynesian atolls. A historical ethnography of Tokelau is now in preparation which combines local traditions (or accounts) and the writings of outsiders with ethnographic research to probe the differences among the three atolls, and their relations with one another and the world beyond.
Raymond Firth
Raymond Firth is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of London. He collected songs and other traditional oral material on his fi rst expedition to Tikopia in the Solomon Islands in 1928-29, and on several subsequent visits. He has published about a half-dozen volumes and many articles on aspects of Tikopia ethnography, incorporating much oral tradition, and has recently completed a general book on Tikopia songs to be published by Cambridge University Press.
Ruth Finnegan
Born in Northern Ireland in 1933, Ruth Finnegan studied classics at Oxford, followed by social anthropology, then fieldwork and university teaching in Africa. In 1969 she joined the Open University where she is now Emeritus Professor. Her books include Oral Literature in Africa (1970), Oral Poetry (1977/1992), Literacy and Orality (1988), Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts (1992), South Pacific Oral Traditions (joint ed., 1995), Communicating (2002), and The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa (2007).
Steven Feld
Steven Feld is Director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. His research on the intersection of verbal and musical genres among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea is discussed in Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, which appeared in a second revised edition in 1990, and in numerous articles.
Christian Clerk
Christian Clerk teaches social anthropology for the extramural services of London University and City University. His special interests lie in the anthropology and history of Polynesia. He carried out fi eld research in the Cook Islands for his doctoral thesis, The Animal World of the Mangaians (University of London, 1981), and has published articles on ethnozoology and on myth. He is Secretary of the Pacific Islands Society of the United Kingdom and Ireland, for which he has recently prepared the UK and Ireland Pacific Research Register.
James Carrier
James and Achsah Carrier studied Ponam Island society in 1979 and returned to the island repeatedly in 1980 and 1986, when they were teaching at the University of Papua New Guinea. They have written extensively on many aspects of Ponam society, and their Wage, Trade and Exchange: A Manus Society in the Modern State was recently published by the University of California Press.
Achsah Carrier
James and Achsah Carrier studied Ponam Island society in 1979 and returned to the island repeatedly in 1980 and 1986, when they were teaching at the University of Papua New Guinea. They have written extensively on many aspects of Ponam society, and their Wage, Trade and Exchange: A Manus Society in the Modern State was recently published by the University of California Press.
