...independence had settled in Guadalcanal around the capital city Honiara. The attacks eventually resulted in the evacuation to their home islands of approximately twenty thousand settlers. Although quickly dubbed 'ethnic tension', the conflict emerged less from primordial animosity between Malaitans and Guadalcanal people, who had peacefully coexisted for generations, and more from the interplay of government corruption and criminal activities with the resentment felt by many Guadalcanal people at land alienation and their unequal opportunities within a post-colonial economy (Kabutaulaka 2000). On 5 June 2000, a Malaitan militia united with a faction of the Solomon Islands police force to take over the national armoury, depose the constitutionally elected government, and take the Prime Minister hostage.

In the tense days following the coup, many Solomon Islanders attempted to find a nonviolent solution to the national crisis. Rather than asserting the prerogatives of opposed 'ethnic' groups, they called on Malaitan and Guadalcanal militants to recognize their shared Christian faith and citizenship in the Solomon Islands. Particularly important in this movement was a group of Honiara women from various church and secular organizations who formed 'Women for Peace' (Pollard, this issue). Speaking as 'mothers of the nation' in radio broadcasts and newspaper articles, Women for Peace pleaded for an end to the fighting. They crossed road-blocks on the edges of town to hold prayer meetings with militants on battlefields, during which they implored them to remember their own mothers and sisters and to see one another as brothers. These actions inspired a temporary reconciliation and members of the opposed militias embraced and shed tears. Women for Peace orchestrated exchanges of store-bought goods for garden produce between Malaitan women living in town and Guadalcanal women living outside. They visited official representatives of both the Guadalcanal and Malaita militias to call for a peaceful and a democratic resolution of the crisis (Fugui 2001; Liloqula and Pollard 2000; Pollard 2000). (1)

In the days, weeks, and months following the coup, everyone from militia spokesmen to High Commissioners lamented the fact that women had not been involved earlier in peacemaking efforts in Guadalcanal. A New Zealand representative, for example, even suggested that if his government decided to send in troops they would align themselves with organizations like 'churches and women's groups' (Solomon Star, 27 June 2000). In the Solomons and throughout the Pacific Islands, there are good reasons why outside agents might want to mobilize Christian organizations, and particularly women's Christian organizations, for their own purposes. Not only is a church the centre of nearly every village community in Solomon Islands but churches also link local communities in island-wide, provincial, national, and regional networks. As Bronwen Douglas has argued, women's groups in Melanesia 'articulate the local with wider spheres in contexts where the state is locally absent or invisible' (2000:6). Yet, women's groups and church groups are not primarily institutions of governance their primary goals have little to do with either formal government politics or planning development projects. (2)

The project of harnessing local institutions and actors to meet external agenda is not new but what has changed is the kind of local institutions thought relevant to governance. After the Second World War, British colonial officials attempted to transform indigenous political arrangements into instruments of colonial government: they designated chiefs as headmen and encouraged efforts to codify 'custom' as law. In recent years, international agencies and non-government organizations (NGOs) have tended to turn away from quintessentially political, public, and male-dominated institutions to apparently non-political, domestic, or religious institutions in which women figure significantly. One thing has not changed, however: local actors may harness outside institutions for purposes often counter to the aims of colonial, postcolonial, or global agents of government. In this paper, I focus on moments of appropriation in which Solomon Islands women and men use translocal institutional forms--whether a colonial Christian mission or a United Nations (UN) protocol for human rights--for their own local projects of community-making.

My main purpose is to understand the vision of community that was being articulated by the Honiara women in June 2000. It is a vision of community grounded in the ideology and practice of Christian fellowship. In the Solomons, fellowship brings diverse people together for common interests which include but are not limited to worship. To place this distinctive vision of community in a particular ethnographic and historical context, I consider one women's fellowship grouping: the United Church Women's Fellowship (UCWF) in Ranongga Island, (3) a small island on the far western edge of the New Georgia group in the Western Province of Solomon Islands (see Map 4). (4) Two characteristics of community in Ranongga are particularly noteworthy. First, it has an overtly performative quality: we might say that community is the explicit goal, not the ground of politics. Second, it is expansive and inclusive: Ranonggans place a high value on drawing outsiders into productive relationships. This second characteristic has been noted elsewhere in other Melanesian islands where local processes of social reproduction are explicitly oriented toward forging larger networks of exchange and interaction (see Munn 1992 and other studies of kula in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea). Europeans, Australians, and Americans working in the Solomons tend to equate villages with communities and there is a deeply-rooted scholarly tendency to oppose individualistic modern Westerners to communalist traditional Melanesians (Douglas 2002:8-9, 25-6). However, Ranonggans themselves think that community is very difficult to achieve. Bringing individuals together for collective projects is the explicit goal of much rhetoric and action--without such work it is thought that people just 'follow their own thoughts'. Collectivity thus is an ideal that must be periodically reenacted. As I shall demonstrate, the Ranongga UCWF has been particularly effective in this endeavour. The success derives in part from certain long-standing cultural patterns: women have always been important in drawing outsiders into local groups. Furthermore, the bureaucratic organization of women's fellowship has offered new opportunities for Ranonggan women to engage in productive interactions with others from the larger region, nation, and even internationally.

This distinctive model of community does not map easily on to those that ground the theories of national citizenship which emerged in the era of European decolonization and continue to define the way that scholars and policy-makers think of nation-states and ethnic groups. John Kelly and Martha Kaplan (2001:1-29) have recently highlighted the importance of World War Two as a turning point from a world of empires to a world where nation-states are the only thinkable sub-global political units: 'Decolonization was an entry, with considerable baggage, into a new world order with its own delimiting determinations for civil and political practices, its own rigid protocols for delimiting the scope and realm of collected political will' (2001:5). The contemporary delimitations and protocols of UN-era nation-states forbid violent assertions of political will like those of the Guadalcanal and Malaitan militants. Yet they may also leave little room for the kind of community that is enacted through fellowship in Christian Solomon Islands societies.

Notions of citizenship, ethnicity, and nation-statehood pre-suppose communities which are imagined as bounded units that, in an ideal world, would map neatly on to delimited territories. The problem is to map a particular group adequately on to a territory or ensure that communities are represented within a larger national or international polity. In contrast, a community grounded in fellowship is dynamic and unbounded. Though in practice the scope of such a community is limited--e.g., a village women's fellowship in Solomon Islands will bring together people of only one locality and mirror denominational splits in Solomons Christianity--its efficacy depends on the possibility that the entire world is 'one people' under God. Furthermore, the overt and public goal of fellowship is the making of community by bringing together people with different origins, interests, and identities. The articulation of the boundaries between different people within the community receives little attention at least in public--lest this undermine the tenuous achievement of unity. The incongruence between these international and local models of community suggests that harnessing women's Christian groups for purposes of peacemaking, government, or development may be problematic in ways not recognized by the governments, agencies, and NGOs that are now so anxious to harness the effectiveness of such groups for new purposes.

WOMEN IN THE NEW CHRISTIAN WORLD ORDER

The impetus for Christian missionization came from European outsiders but in Ranongga its implementation has been a largely local project. Although kastom, 'custom' or 'tradition' in Pijin, is often considered congruent with Christian moral principles, most Ranonggans and other Christian Solomon Islanders view conversion as a transition from darkness to light and from war to peace (cf. White 1991). Worship of a universal deity implied a radically different form of polity. It was no longer one limited by genealogical relationship, co-residence, and shared veneration of emplaced ancestors but one that, as Ian Hogbin put it in 1958, provided a basis 'for broadening the concept of brotherhood until it embraces not only the inhabitants of neighbouring settlements but also strangers' (Hogbin 1958:182 quoted in Barker 1990:16). Incorporating strangers was an important focus of social life even in pre-Christian Ranongga but in the new world order of Christianity peace and love became public virtues as countervailing principles of warfare and conflict were suppressed. Local histories suggest that women had a particularly important part in ushering in this new world order and have a distinctive...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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