Lost passports? Disconnection and immobility in the rural and urban Solomon Islands

Abstract

Anthropologists have documented the dense “trans-island” ties between rural and urban life in contemporary Melanesia. In exploring dilemmas of mobility and belonging in Solomon Islands, this article focuses on anxieties about the ways that these geographically expansive networks are shrinking - anxieties expressed through jokes and laments about “losing passports”. Drawing on interviews and published memoirs, it tracks the stories of two Malaitan families who migrated for economic opportunities in the late 1950s: one followed a well-trodden path to the Western Solomons to work on a copra plantation on Ranongga; the other family followed new paths to the rapidly developing the post-World War ..