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Culture and History in the Pacific is a collection of essays originally published in 1990. The texts explore from different perspectives the question of culture as a repository of historical information. They also address broader questions of anthropological writing at the time, such as the relationship between anthropologists' representations and local conceptions. This republication aims to make the book accessible to a wider audience, and in the region it discusses, Oceania. A new introductory essay has been included to contextualize the volume in relation to its historical setting, the end of the Cold War era, and to the present study of the Pacific and indigenous scholarship. The authors of Culture and History in the Pacific include prominent anthropologists of the Pacific, some of whom - Roger Keesing and Marilyn Strathern, to name but two - have also been influential in the anthropology of the late 20th and early 21st century in general

Culture and History in the Pacific is a collection of essays originally published in 1990. The texts explore from different perspectives the question of culture as a repository of historical information. They also address broader questions of anthropological writing at the time, such as the relationship between anthropologists' representations and local conceptions.
This republication aims to make the book accessible to a wider audience, and in the region it discusses, Oceania. A new introductory essay has been included to contextualize the volume in relation to its historical setting, the end of the Cold War era, and to the present study of the Pacific and indigenous scholarship.
The authors of Culture and History in the Pacific include prominent anthropologists of the Pacific, some of whom – Roger Keesing and Marilyn Strathern, to name but two – have also been influential in the anthropology of the late 20th and early 21st century in general.

Different national traditions define disciplines in different ways, and ethnology, folklore, and anthropology are separated in the Finnish university system. The great divide between the more universally oriented anthropological research and the local, especially Eastern and Northern European ethnological traditions is sometimes conceptualized by defining the latter as nationalist. The emergence of Finnish and Finno-Ugric studies in Finland complicates the difference in a way that is relevant to urgent questions of globalization and its relationship to cultural diversity. At the same time this emergence raises important questions about the significance of ethnographic knowledge. Historically oriented ethnological and folkloristic studies in Finland have formulated a multidisciplinary approach analogical to the four anthropological fields for research into the history of Finnish and Finno-Ugric cultures and languages. Researchers have used the accumulated data in new and novel ways, which has opened up perspectives instead of limiting them to the field of area studies. The development of Finnish ethnographic studies clearly demonstrates the necessity of comparison and the comparative perspective.

The powerful individualist and subjectivist turn in anthropology - a turn that cannot be easily separated from larger political processes of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism - is one factor resulting in notions of the social and of society as becoming little else than empty shells of small or no analytical value. The essays presented here, all by leading anthropologists, take a variety of positions on the matter of the retreat of the social. All demonstrate that if anthropology and other social sciences are to fulfill the task of a critical understanding of the diverse realities in which we all must live, these disciplines will find it impossible to so do without a strong concept of the social