The Things We Value takes as its subject the creativity and cultural heritage of Solomon Islands, focusing on the kinds of objects produced and valued by local communities across this diverse country in the south-west Pacific. Combining historical and interpretive analyses with personal memories and extensive illustrations, the contributors examine such distinctive forms as red feather-money, shell valuables, body ornaments, war canoes, ancestral stones and wood carvings. Their essays discuss the materials, designs, manufacture, properties and meanings of artefacts from across the country. Solomon Islanders value these things variously as currency, heirlooms and commodities, for their beauty, power and sanctity, and as bearers of the historical identities and relationships which sustain them in a rapidly changing world. The volume brings together indigenous experts and leading international scholars as authors of the most geographically comprehensive anthology of Solomon Islands ethnography yet published. It engages with historical and contemporary issues from a range of perspectives, anthropological and archaeological, communal and personal, and makes a major new contribution to Pacific Islands studies.

Tradition, Trade, and Woodcarving in Solomon Islands is a fieldwork based anthropological study of woodcarving and the development of handicraft trade in the South Pacific archipelago. It explores the Melanesian culture of Gatokae from the Western Solomons and the Polynesian culture of Bellona from the southeastern Solomons alongside the multicultural national capitol Honiara where much of the handicraft trade concentrates. The book integrates historical anthropological methods with sociological, visual and artistic approaches to analyze the contemporary context of woodcarving art and trace. The highly original work in richly illustrated, and includes a digital photo archive on an accompanying CD-ROM.