Michael Scott

My area of study is Oceania with a primary focus on Melanesia. Since 1992 I have been conducting fieldwork in the nation-state of Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific. The people with whom I work, the Arosi, live mainly on the island of Makira.

Currently, my chief theoretical interests lie in anthropological approaches to questions of being (ontology), including classic ethnographies of indigenous cosmologies and contemporary developments such as the 'new animism', 'perspectivism', 'relationalism', 'non-dualism', and the study of human-nonhuman relations. In recent and forthcoming publications, I contribute critical analyses to debates within the anthropology of ontology, exploring, for example, the relationalist assumptions implicit in much of the literature in this subfield.

Additionally, I am engaged in a comparative study of wonder as both an index and an instrument of ontological crisis and transformation. This project emerges from talk among my Arosi consultants that their island, Makira, may contain a marvellous subterranean urban-military complex, but also tracks the pursuit and production of wonder in modern Euro-American contexts, including anthropology itself.These projects reflect my continued development of analyses introduced in The Severed Snake, an ethnographic and historical exploration of what I term the poly-ontological cosmology of Arosi and its relationship to place-making and the indigenization of Christianity.

I am interested in supervising research on topics such as: contemporary, historical, and anthropological cosmologies and ontologies; wonder and the re-enchantment of modernity; religion; indigenous Christianities; human-nonhuman relations, especially human-land relations; myth-making; ethnogenesis; 'cargo cults'; personhood, sociality, and relatedness.

During the academic year I co-organize the monthly Melanesia Research Seminar at the British Museum.

Expertise Details

• Oceania; Melanesia; anthropological approaches to questions of being (ontology); cosmology; religion; wonder; myth-making; indigenous Christianities; personhood; sociality; and relatedness; place-making; ethnogenesis