'Are'are Erotic

The apostrophes in the name are glottal stops, and they matter: 'Are'are is a word, a language and a people, and the spelling keeps the sound. The 'Are'are are the people of southern Malaita, the most populous island in the Solomon Islands. Their land runs from the coasts up into the forested interior, and a related community lives across the water at Marau Sound on the eastern end of Guadalcanal. Their language belongs to the Southeast Solomonic branch of Oceanic. It is one link in a chain of related Malaitan languages, with Kwaio speakers to the north and Sa'a speakers on Small Malaita to the south. Solomons Pijin fills the gaps between them.

If outsiders know one thing about the 'Are'are, it is usually the music. Their bamboo panpipe ensembles play in several parts at once, with their own tuning and a detailed vocabulary for talking about sound. In the 1970s the Swiss ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp recorded them and wrote about them, and those recordings carried the music far beyond Malaita. The tradition never became a museum piece: Narasirato, an 'Are'are panpipe band, has toured internationally.

Shell money sits at the center of social life. Strings of shell beads change hands at marriages and in settling disputes. Above all, they change hands at funerals, where the ties a person built in life are paid out and closed. The French anthropologist Daniel de Coppet spent decades with 'Are'are communities and understood the whole society through these exchanges. Leadership in the old days rested on two very different figures: a peacemaker who ran feasts and brokered settlements, and the ramo, a fighter who could kill to collect a bounty paid in shell money.

In the late 1800s, Malaita supplied a large share of the laborers recruited, often by force, for plantations in Queensland and Fiji. Many who came home brought Christianity with them. The biggest break came after World War II. Maasina Rule, the anti-colonial movement that reorganized much of Malaita around its own chiefs, councils and written custom, began in 'Are'are country in 1944, and its name comes from an 'Are'are word for brotherhood. British authorities jailed its leaders, but it is remembered as an early moment of political self-assertion in the Solomons.

Most 'Are'are today are Christian, spread across several churches. Customary rules about land, descent and exchange still decide who belongs where. Families grow taro, yams and sweet potato, raise pigs for feasts, and many split their lives between the village and wage work in Honiara.