"Urban(e) Tannese: Local Perspectives on Settlement life in Port Vila, Vanuatu"

The below is quoted directly from an email circulated by the Center for Pacific Islands. For more on the exhibit, click on the image at right:

East-West Center Seminar in connection with the exhibit 'Port Vila: Mi Lavam Yu'
Cosponsored with the Department of Anthropology, UHM

"Urban(e) Tannese: Local Perspectives on Settlement life in Port Vila, Vanuatu"

by Lamont Lindstrom
Department of Anthropology, University of Tulsa

12 noon Friday September 2, 2011
East-West Center Art Gallery

Significant rural-urban migration has characterized the postcolonial Melanesian states including Vanuatu. Over the past 30 years, most people who once lived in Samaria village (Tanna Island) have moved to squatter settlements that ring Port Vila, Vanuatu's capital town. Life history interviewing of migrants now living in Port Vila's Blacksands and Ohlen neighborhoods document peoples' participation in urban life and how this participation is shaping a new urbanity in Vanuatu.

Lamont Lindstrom is Kendall Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa.  He is the author of Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond, Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific and has also published on the work of Martin and Osa Johnson, kava, chiefs and governance, Pacific War ethnohistory, and written a dictionary and grammar of Kwamera language (Tanna, Vanuatu). Several of his photographs are featured in EWC's current exhibition, 'Port Vila: Mi Lavam Yu'

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For further information, please contact Bill Feltz, EWC <feltzb@eastwestcenter.org>

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