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Critchlow (Margaret) and William Rodman Papers
MSS 0795
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Contributing Institution:
Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla 92093-0175
Title: Margaret Critchlow and William Rodman Papers
Creator:
Critchlow, Margaret, 1947-
Creator:
Rodman, William L.
Identifier/Call Number: MSS 0795
Physical Description:
3 Linear feet
(3 record cartons and 2 oversize folders)
Physical Description:
.048 GB
of digital files
Date (inclusive): 1969-1995
Abstract: The papers of Margaret Critchlow and William L. Rodman, anthropologists and professors, specializing in law, politics, economics,
family and kinship in Melanesia, specifically the Republic of Vanuatu. The collection includes field and research materials
relating to six research trips to the Republic of Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides) between 1969 and 1995.
Languages:
English
.
Scope and Content of Collection
The papers of Margaret Critchlow and William L. Rodman, anthropologists and professors, specializing in law, politics, economics,
family and kinship in Melanesia, specifically the Republic of Vanuatu. The collection includes field and research materials
relating to their six research trips to the Republic of Vanuatu (formerly The New Hebrides) between 1969 and 1995.
Arranged in three series: 1) FIELDWORK I, 2) FIELDWORK II, and 3) DIGITAL FILES.
Margaret Critchlow met William Rodman in 1967 while Rodman was a PhD student at the University of Chicago studying male rank
and leadership, and Critchlow was a newly admitted MA student in Political Science. They married and embarked on their first
research trip together, travelling to Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides) from 1969-1971. They were the first anthropologists
to intensively study a well-established working graded society in the northern New Hebrides. Rodman completed his dissertation
based on their research, entitled "Men of Influence, Men of Rank: Leadership and the Graded Society on Aoba, New Hebrides"
and received his PhD in 1973.
MARGARET CRITCHLOW
Margaret Critchlow was born in 1947 and grew up in Maryland near the Chesapeake Bay. She attended private school in southern
Virginia where she demonstrated early interest in political activism by protesting segregation at school. Critchlow went on
to study Political Science at Goucher College in Maryland. In 1967 she met William Rodman, a PhD student at the University
of Chicago who was studying male rank and leadership who introduced her to both anthropology and Melanesia. She first travelled
to Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides), assisting Rodman in his research, from 1969-1971. Among her introductory fieldwork
was a genealogy collection, surveying elderly women of the area.
In 1972 Critchlow moved to Hamilton, Ontario for Rodman's tenure at McMaster University and began pursuing her masters in
1974, mentored by Dr. David Counts an expert in socioeconomic anthropology of New Britain. Critchlow's master's thesis "Spheres
of Exchange in a Northern New Hebridean Society" is based on her observations on Ambae Island in Vanuatu during their research
expedition in 1970-71.
Critchlow conducted her doctoral fieldwork from 1978 to 1979, surveying land holdings in Longana, Ambae Island, Vanuatu. Her
doctoral thesis "Customary Illusions" explored the use of mystifications in land possession and productivity. After receiving
her doctorate, Critchlow taught at the University of Waterloo. She returned to Vanuatu in 1982 on a Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council (SHRCC) grant and studied consumer behavior. Her research focused on the social construction of space - the
dynamics of constructed space and landscape and their effects on concepts like power and culture. She also conducted evaluative
photo elicitation research in Ambae on assessing the quality of a potential living space.
In 1985, Critchlow studied CUSO's (Canadian University Service Overseas, currently known as CUSO International) involvement
in fisheries development on the island of Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu. This was an evaluation research-based project, focusing
on the beneficiaries and effects of the development project. She published
Deep Water: Development and Change in Pacific Village Fisheries (1989) based on this research.
During the moratorium on expatriate researchers in Vanuatu lasting from 1985-1994, Critchlow studied non-profit rental cooperative
housing in Canada and produced, along with with Matthew Cooper, the book
New Neighbours: A Case Study of Cooperative Housing in Toronto (1992). Critchlow also published "Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality" in
American Anthropologist (September 1992), one of her most frequently cited works.
In 1993 Critchlow began researching
Houses Far from Home: British Colonial Space in the New Hebrides, and co-edited along with Jan Rensel
Home in the Islands: Housing and Social Change in the Pacific which explores houses as socially-constructed containers which reflect and influence their inhabitants' values and behavior.
Critchlow conducted oral history interviews along with Will Stober, a Birmingham-born historian with extensive experience
researching colonial life and administration in the New Hebrides, of British and French ex-colonial civil servants and officials.
The interviews were primarily conducted in the United Kingdom and probed for information about the qualities of the houses
and memories connected to their houses.
Critchlow returned to Vanuatu in 1995, examining the old colonial homes and their current state and usage by the locals. The
cumulative work of the interviews and fieldwork resulted in
Houses Far from Home: British Colonial Space in the New Hebrides published in 2001. Also in 2001, Critchlow convened a workshop funded by SHRCC, interviewing twenty-one Ni-Vanuatu women
who were former house girls (domestic workers). The women gave testimony of their time working under British, French, Chinese,
and Vietnamese masters. Critchlow subsequently received a Rockefeller fellowship in 2002 to write about her findings.
House-Girls Remember: Domestic Workers in Vanuatu was published in 2007.
In addition to her teaching and research, Critchlow was the President of the Canadian Anthropology Society from 1993-1994
and in 2017 was awarded the Weaver-Tremblay Award from the Society. In 2010, she established the Canadian Senior Cohousing
Society, a non-profit development company and cohousing advocacy group. Construction was completed in 2016 and the Harbourside
Cohousing became the first senior-oriented co-housing property in Sooke, British Columbia, where Critchlow lives today.
[Biographical information for Margaret Critchlow compiled from: La série « Les Possédés et leurs mondes » est une production
de la revue Anthropologie et Sociétés et du Département d'anthropologie de l'Université Laval, en partenariat avec la revue
Anthropologica et la Société Canadienne d'anthropologie (CASCA). September 28th, 2016 (Sooke, Canada)]
WILLIAM RODMAN
William ("Bill") Rodman was born in 1943 in Philadelphia into a family for whom travel was both a passion and a profession.
His father was an Agricultural Attaché specializing in Latin America, and Bill spent much of his early life in South and Central
America. He graduated from high school in San Jose, Costa Rica. In 1965, Bill's father was posted to Australia, and Bill
entered the University of Sydney. There, he majored in anthropology, and conducted his first fieldwork as the junior member
of a four month archaeological expedition to the wild and desolate northwest coast of Tasmania.
At the University of Sydney, one of Bill's professors was Michael Allen, an anthropologist who had conducted research on the
developed western side of the island of Aoba in the New Hebrides. Anthropologists had never undertaken long term research
on East Aoba, where "kastom" was still a vital part of political and social life.
After he received his undergraduate degree from The University of Sydney in 1968, Rodman entered the graduate program in anthropology
at the University of Chicago. He completed his Master's degree, entered the doctoral program, and, with Margaret Critchlow,
his research partner and wife, conducted 16 months of fieldwork on East Aoba. The focus of his research was the "graded society",
a men's association in which rank is achieved by killing and exchanging tusked boars. In 1978, Rodman became the adopted son
of Mathias Tariundu, a chief of high rank in the rank association. Rodman has taken rank twice in the graded society and
was given the title and name
moli dal ure, "Wild Orange That Travels around the Islands."
In 1980, the New Hebrides became the independent nation of Vanuatu and the people of Aoba renamed their island "Ambae". Bill
Rodman and Margaret Critchlow made six fieldtrips to New Hebrides/Vanuatu between 1969 and 1995 and lived in the country for
a total of over three and a half years.
Rodman taught in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada for 36 years, from 1972 until 2008.
His publications on Vanuatu include studies of local politics and law, the graded society, colonialism and its consequences,
and sorcery and healing. His current theoretical interests include critical approaches to interpretive anthropology, the
construction of identity, and interdisciplinary approaches to narrative in the human sciences.
He has published articles in a number of major anthropological journals, including
American Anthropologist, American Ethologist,
Journal of Anthropological Research, and
Oceania. His publications include "When Questions are Answers: The Message of Anthropology, According to the People of Ambae, first
published in
American Anthropologist in 1991, and then re-published five times in successive editions of
The Dolphin Reader. Other representative publications include "Outlaw Memories: Biography and the Construction of Meaning in Postcolonial Vanuatu,"
in P. Stewart and A. Strathern's
Identity Work: Constructing Pacific Lives, ASAO Monograph No. 18 (2000) and "Lost and Found in Translation: An Education in Narrative in Fieldwork and the Classroom,"
in
Interchange: A Quarterly Review of Education (2007).
In 1992, Rodman won both the McMaster Student Union's Social Sciences Teaching Award and the Overall Teaching Award for McMaster
University. He was the 1996 W.C. Desmond Pacey Lecturer at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton and St. John.
He is a Fellow of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania and a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology
at McMaster University.
Margaret Critchlow and William Rodman Papers. MSS 795. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library.
Acquired 2017.
COLLECTION STORED OFF-SITE. ALLOW ONE WEEK FOR RETRIEVAL OF MATERIALS.
Publication rights are held by the creator of the collection.
Margaret Critchlow Papers. MSS 794. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library.
Additional materials created by William Rodman and Margaret Critchlow may be found in their
online collection of photographs.
Additional materials created by William Rodman and Margaret Critchlow may be found in their online collection of photographs.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Anthropology -- Research -- Vanuatu
Ethnology -- Vanuatu
Families -- Vanuatu
Kinship -- Vanuatu
Vanuatu -- Politics and government -- 20th century
Vanuatu -- Economic conditions -- 20th century
Critchlow, Margaret, 1947- -- Archives
Rodman, William L. -- Archives