Chris Ballard is a Fellow in Pacific History at The Australian National University in Canberra. He has conducted long-term research as an archaeologist, historian and anthropologist in Papua New Guinea, Indonesian Papua and Vanuatu. His current research interests include land reform in Vanuatu, the history of racial science in Oceania, and indigenous historicity and cultural heritage in the Pacific. His publications include edited and co-edited collections on anthropology (Fluid Ontologies, 1998; Myth and History in the New Guinea Highlands, 1999), agriculture (Agricultural Intensification in New Guinea, 2001; The Sweet Potato in Oceania, 2005), history (Historical Perspectives on West New Guinea, 1999; Race to the Snow, 2001; Foreign Bodies, 2008), and mining (Mining and Mineral Resource Policy in Asia-Pacific, 1995; The Ok Tedi Settlement, 1997).

Pascale Bonnemère is a member of the Centre of Research and Documentation for Oceania team (CREDO, Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Océanie) based in Marseilles, and Director of research at the National Centre of Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS). She has been engaged in long-term fieldwork among the Ankave-Anga of Papua New Guinea since 1987. Her published works include Le pandanus rouge: Corps, différence des sexes et parenté chez les Ankave-Anga (1996) and, with Pierre Lemonnier, Drumming to Forget: Ordinary Life and Ceremonies among a Papua New Guinea Group of Forest-Dwellers (2007), as well as the edited volumes Women as Unseen Characters: Male Ritual in Papua New Guinea (2004) and, with Irène Théry, Ce que le genre fait aux personnes (2008).

Françoise Douaire-Marsaudon is an anthropologist, a Director of research at the National Centre of Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS) in France, and a member of the Centre of Research and Documentation on Oceania (Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Océanie, CREDO-Maison Asie-Pacifique) in Marseilles. Her research interests include the formation and transformation of political systems in Polynesia (Tonga, Wallis and Futuna) and their relationship with the construction of the person (self, body, gender and sexuality), processes of Christianisation and relations between memory and history. Among her publications are: Les premiers fruits: Parenté, identité sexuelle et pouvoirs en Polynésie occidentale (Tonga, Wallis et Futuna), Paris, CNRS Editions, Editions de la MSH, 1998; The Kava ritual and the Reproduction of Male Identity in Polynesia, in Monique Jeudy-Ballini and Bernard Juillerat eds., People and Things. Social Mediations in Oceania, Durham, Carolina Academic Press, 2002; The Changing South Pacific. Identities and Transformations, Canberra, Pandanus Publications, RSPAS and ANU, co-edited with Serge Tcherkézoff, 2005; and Grand-mère, grand-père. La grandparentalité en Asie et dans le Pacifique ed., Aix-Marseilles, Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2008.

Bronwen Douglas is Senior Fellow in Pacific and Asian History at The Australian National University. Her major research interest is in the history of race, especially the interface of metropolitan discourses, field encounters, and local agency in the representation and classification of indigenous Oceanian people. She is the author of Across the Great Divide: Journeys in History and Anthropology (1998); editor of Women's Groups and Everyday Modernity in Melanesia (2003); and co-editor of Tattoo: Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and the West (2005) and Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940 (2008).

Margaret Jolly is Professor and Head of the Gender Relations Centre in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University. Her work has focused on gender and sexuality across the Pacific, in the context of exploratory voyages, Christianity, the politics of tradition, nationalisms and feminisms and visual anthropology. Her major books include Women of the Place (Harwood 1994), Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure (Chicago 1997, with Lenore Manderson), Maternities and Modernities (Cambridge 1998) and Borders of Being (Michigan 2001, both with Kalpana Ram). Recently she published Re-membering Oceanic Masculinities for The Journal of the Contemporary Pacific (January 2008) and papers on the politics of commemorating “discoverers” like Quirós and Cook. She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa (1998), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris (2001, 2009), Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Océanie/Centre of Research and Documentation for Oceania (CREDO), Marseilles (2001, 2008–09), and the University of California at Santa Cruz (2001–02).

Pierre Lemonnier is a Director of research at the National Centre of Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS) at the Centre of Research and Documentation on Oceania/Centre de Recherches et de Documentation sur l’Océanie (CREDO, Marseilles) and he teaches at the University of Provence. After having conducted repeated field research among the various Anga groups of Papua New Guinea, he chose an Ankave valley for long-term anthropological fieldwork where he regularly returns. He has published books on the anthropology of technology including Elements for an Anthropology of Technology (1992) and Technological Choices (1993); and has also published on the anthropology of Papua New Guinea including Guerres et festins (1990); Le sabbat des lucioles (2006); and with Pascale Bonnemère, Drumming to Forget: Ordinary Life and Ceremonies among a Papua New Guinea Group of Forest-Dwellers (2007).

Isabelle Merle, historian and member of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS, IRIS, Paris), is a specialist in Pacific History and has worked intensively on British and French colonial history in the Pacific since the 1990s, especially regarding Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia and French Polynesia. Experiences coloniales. La Nouvelle Calédonie. 1853–1920 (Paris, Belin, 1995), her published PhD, focused on the “fabric” of the French settler society in New Caledonia in the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth century. She then turned her attention to a comparative exploration of indigenous status and conditions across Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, and French Polynesia, focusing on land problems, legal status and derogatory regimes (such as the Regime de l’indigénat in French colonial contexts). In 2006, she introduced and published in French the two volumes of Watkin Tench’s Australian experiences: Botany Bay. La fondation de l’Australie coloniale (Anacharsis, Marseilles). In collaboration with Eric Wittersheim, Merle is currently writing a volume for a world collection published by the German Publisher, Fisher World History entitled, Australia, New Zealand and Oceania.

Mark S. Mosko is Professor of Anthropology in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University. Over the last thirty-five years, he has conducted four years of ethnographic research among the North Mekeo peoples of the Central Province of Papua New Guinea. He is author of Quadripartite Structures: Categories, Relations and Homologies in Bush Mekeo Culture (Cambridge UP, 1985) and numerous journal articles and chapters exploring North Mekeo symbolism, ritual and religion, social organisation, chiefly leadership, personhood, gift exchange, and change. He is co-editor (with Fred Damon) of On the Order of Chaos: Social Anthropology and the Science of Chaos (Berghahn 2005). His most recent volume, Gifts that Change: Personal Partibility, Agency and Christianity in a Changing Melanesian Society (Berghahn, forthcoming) adapts recent theoretical developments in the ethnography of Melanesian sociality to the analysis of historical transformation.

Serge Tcherkézoff is Professor of Anthropology at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) of Paris-Marseilles (the French Institute of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences). He has co-founded, with Maurice Godelier and Pierre Lemonnier, the Centre of Research and Documentation for Oceania/Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Océanie (CREDO), organised by the National Centre of Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS), EHESS, and University of Provence. After working on African ethnography in the 1970s, he has been engaged in fieldwork in Polynesia from the early 1980s. Besides his publications on the theory of anthropology and holism since the early 1980s, and on the transformations of Samoan society in the 1980–90s, his more recent books bring together the results of his field studies and an ethnohistorical critique of European narratives about early encounters in Polynesia.

Darrell Tryon is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, at The Australian National University. He has published extensively on the languages and sociolinguistics of the region, including his Comparative Austronesian Dictionary (1995), Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication (1997) (with Stephen Wurm & Peter Mühlhäusler) and Pacific Pidgins and Creoles (2004) (with Jean-Michel Charpentier).