ABSTRACT
For decades Kwaio people from the mountains of eastern Malaita in the Solomon Islands have been loudly declaring their disdain for foreign and modern ways. Today, rather than despairing over their community’s inability to become adequately modern, these Kwaio are more likely to express humiliation at their failure to remain fully traditional. They typically contrast themselves unfavorably, not with progressive neighbors, but with their own venerable forebears, ‘the big people of the past.’ These concerns are long-standing and have been made explicit in regular community meetings to ‘straighten out kastom’ by drafting legalistic codes of behavior that emphasize rigid interpretations of ancestral taboos. Kastom is a Melanesian Pidgin word (from English ‘custom’) that, at its most basic, refers to ideologies and activities formulated in terms of empowering indigenous traditions and practices, both within communities of varying levels of inclusivity, and as a stance toward outside entities. Kastom has long been an influential concept in Melanesia, especially in island Melanesia, where it has been a key political concept and symbol for well over fifty years. In this paper I explain how kastom has meshed with aspects of Kwaio culture to profoundly change peoples lives.
