This book studies the Hahalis Welfare Society, a Bougainville movement which worked for many years to maintain and reform traditional practices and to retain a degree of autonomy in a world of rapid political change and economic dependency. The first extended ethnography of Buka published in nearly sixty years, this book will be of particular interest to Melanesian specialists.

This is a long-term ethnographic study of the Hahalis Welfare Society (a Bougainville movement which worked for many years to maintain and reform traditional practices and to retain a degree of autonomy in a world of rapid political change and economic dependency). The study points beyond the established cargo-cult theory in anthropology and expands the concept of culture as an outcome of historical practice, conscious analysis, human passions and political struggle. The dialectical relationship between traditional and contemporary forms of power as described through Buka experience breaks down Western categorical barriers that seem to isolate the past from the present, the personal from the political and the local form the global. The narrative explores these themes against the background of colonial and post-colonial government, missionisation, politics of ritual, litigation and legitimacy, and the Bougainville assertion of independence.