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Edvard Hviding is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, and the founding director of the . He is also an Honorary Adjunct Professor of Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. Hviding is presently the PI and director of the international research project  (funded by the Research Council of Norway’s TOPPFORSK programme for 2018-2025), and since 2020 he has also been the coordinator of the Norway-Pacific Ocean-Climate Scholarship programme (), an ambitious partnership in multidisciplinary PhD education between the University of Bergen and the , funded for 202-2026 by Norad under the Norhed II programme. During 2012-16 Hviding was the scientific coordinator of  (funded by the EU’s 7th Framework Programme), and during 2008-12 he co-directed with Bergen Pacific Studies colleague member Professor Knut Rio the international research programme  (funded by the Research Council of Norway, with 12 participating institutions worldwide). In 2012-13 Hviding was Chair of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania ().

Edvard Hviding’s research record in the Pacific has been ongoing since 1986. He has carried out altogether three and a half years of fieldwork in Solomon Islands, mainly in the Marovo Lagoon of Western Province. He has also travelled and worked in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Cook Islands, New Caledonia, and Hawai’i, and during the 1990s was engaged in a series of regional Pacific projects of fisheries management. In 2003-2010 he was an adviser to UNESCO on education and environment in Solomon Islands, with a particular focus on vernacular environmental education at the interfaces of local and global knowledges.

For his efforts in developing  and research dissemination in the Western Solomons, Hviding was awarded the Silver Medal of the Order of Solomon Islands (S.I.M.) in 2010. His anthropological research covers many interrelated topics in social, environmental and historical anthropology, including fishing, agroforestry and the customary tenure of sea and land; kinship and social organization; the cultural history and languages of New Georgia; colonial encounters; environmental knowledge and epistemology; customary law, leadership and dispossession; and the local manifestations and consequences of globalization. He maintains long-running collaborative research with geographer Tim Bayliss-Smith (University of Cambridge) on the archaeology and history of irrigated taro cultivation and chiefly leadership in the Western Solomons. Most recently Hviding has initiated an interdisciplinary programme of comparative research on vernacular models of, and Pacific diplomacy and policies concerning, changes in environment, weather and climate. As PI and Director of the Ocean States project 2018-2024, he closely follows Pacific regional and United Nations meetings and conferences on ocean and climate diplomacy.

Since 2017 Hviding has been engaged as a regional expert by Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on several high-level delegation visits to the Pacific Islands region, and he has been closely involved as a scientific adviser in numerous diplomatic events in the United Nations context under the auspices of Norway, UNFCCC, UN DESA, Palau and the Pacific group of Small Island Developing States, both in New York and in the Pacific Islands region. His participation so far in these fields of science diplomacy totals about seven months. On this background he was appointed scientific director for the three-year pilot project  Science Advice, a platform mandated for 2018-2021 by the University of Bergen's rectorate and board to develop innovative science-policy channels directed at the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 

Hviding’s publications include about 75 journal articles, book chapters and published conference papers, 10 books, and many published research reports and public outreach pieces. The books include the monographs Guardians of Marovo Lagoon (1996), Islands of Rainforest (2000, with Tim Bayliss-Smith, republished 2019), and Reef and Rainforest: An Environmental Encyclopedia of Marovo Lagoon (2005, revised edition 2011); and the edited volumes Made in Oceania (2011, with Knut Rio), The Ethnographic Experiment (2014, with Cato Berg), Pacific Alternatives (2015, with Geoffrey White), and Anthropology in Norway (2021, with Synnøve Bendixsen).

2026

1993

1990

2019

2018

2011

2016

2017

2003

2024

2021

2014

1999

2025

2020

2001

2006

1997

2015

2007

2023

1998

2013

1994

2009

1996

2010

2000

2004

2005

2012

2008

1989

2022

1991

1992

2002

1995

Selected publications

Books

Bendixsen, Synnøve K.N. and Edvard Hviding (eds.) 2021. Anthropology in Norway: Directions, Locations, Relations. Royal Anthropological Institute Country Series, Vol. 3. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Hviding, Edvard and Tim Bayliss-Smith 2019. Islands of Rainforest: Agroforestry, Logging and Ecotourism in Solomon Islands. London and New York: Routledge. [Reissue of monograph published by Ashgate in 2000]

Hviding, Edvard and Geoffrey M. White (eds.) 2015. Pacific Alternatives: Culture and Politics in Contemporary Oceania. Canon Pyon, Herts.: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Hviding, Edvard and Cato Berg (eds.) 2014. The Ethnographic Experiment: A.M. Hocart and W.H.R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.

Hviding, Edvard and Knut M. Rio (eds.) 2011. Made in Oceania: Social Movements, Cuultural Heritage and the State in the Pacific. Wantage, Oxon: Sean Kingston Publishing. 353p.

Hviding, Edvard 2005. . Knowledges of Nature, No. 1. Paris: UNESCO. 252p. (Second, revised edition published 2011)

Hviding, Edvard (ed.) 2001. Stier, strømmer og steder. Special issue edited by E. Hviding, Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift, 12(1-2), 152p.

Hviding, Edvard and Tim Bayliss-Smith 2000. . Aldershot: Ashgate. 388p.

Hviding, Edvard 1996. . Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 473p.

Hviding, Edvard 1995. Vivinei tuari pa Ulusaghe: Stories and legends from Marovo, New Georgia, in four New Georgian languages and with English translations. Recorded, translated and edited by Edvard Hviding, with assistance from V. Vaguni and others. Bergen: Centre for Development Studies, University of Bergen, in collaboration with Western Province Division of Culture. 88p.

Journal articles and book chapters 

Bendixsen, Synnøve K.N. and Edvard Hviding 2021. Portrait of a Young Discipline? in Anthropology in Norway: Directions, Locations, Relations, S.K.N. Bendixsen & E. Hviding (eds.), 1-15. Royal Anthropological Institute Country Series, Vol. 3. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Mulalap, Clement Yow; Tekau Frere, Elise Huffer, Edvard Hviding, Kenneth Paul, Anita Smith, Marjo Vierros 2020. Traditional Knowledge and the BBNJ Instrument’ Marine Policy, 122, Article 104103. 10p.

Hviding, Edvard 2020. Bronislaw Malinowski: feltarbejde, fortolkning og funktionalisme, in Klassiske og moderne antropologiske tænkere, Kirsten Hastrup (ed.), 175-205. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag.

Hviding, Edvard 2019. Climate change, Oceanic sovereignties and maritime economies in the Pacific, in Climate, Capitalism and Communities: An Anthropology of Environmental Overheating, Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Astrid Bredholt Stensrud (eds.), 171-187. London: Pluto Press.

Hviding, Edvard and Camilla Borrevik 2019. Climate Change in the Islands and the Highlands: Melanesian Manifestations, Experiences and Actions, in The Melanesian World, Eric Hirsch and Will Rollason (eds.), 517-531. London and New York: Routledge.

Hviding, Edvard 2018. The River, the Water and the Crocodile in Marovo Lagoon, in Island Rivers: Freshwater and Place in Oceania,  J.R. Wagner and J.K. Jacka (eds.), 27-58. Canberra: Australian National University Press.

Wagner, John, Jerry Jacka, Edvard Hviding, Alex Mawyer & Marama Muru-Lanning 2018. Introduction: River as Ethnographic Subject, in Island Rivers: Freshwater and Place in Oceania,  J.R. Wagner and J.K. Jacka (eds.), 1-26. Canberra: Australian National University Press.

Hviding, Edvard 2017. Big Money in the Rural: Wealth and Dispossession in Western Solomons Political Economy, in State-building and state formation in the Western Pacific: Solomon Islands in transition?, Matthew G. Allen and Sinclair Dinnen (eds.), 92-105. New York and London: Routledge.

Hviding, Edvard 2016. Europe and the Pacific: Engaging Anthropology in EU Policy-Making and Development Cooperation, in Engaged Anthropology: Views from Scandinavia, Tone Bringa and Synnøve Bendixsen (eds.), 147-166. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan.

Hviding, Edvard 2015. Big Money in the Rural: Wealth and Dispossession in Western Solomons Political Economy. Journal of Pacific History, 50(4): 473-485.

Hviding, Edvard 2015. Non-Pristine Forests: A Long-term History of Land Transformation in the Western Solomons, in Forests of Oceania: Anthropological Perspectives, Joshua Bell, Paige West and Colin Filer (eds.), 51-74. Canberra: Australian National University Press.

Hviding, Edvard 2015. The Western Solomons and the Sea: Maritime Cultural Heritage in Sociality, Province, and State, in Pacific Alternatives: Culture and Politics in Contemporary Oceania, E. Hviding and G. White (eds.), 118-144. Canon Pyon, Herts.: Sean Kingston Publishing.

White, Geoffrey M. & Edvard Hviding 2015. Pacific Alternatives in a Global Context: Dialogues in Oceania, in Pacific Alternatives: Culture and Politics in Contemporary Oceania, E. Hviding and G. White (eds.), 1-23. Canon Pyon, Herts.: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Hviding, Edvard 2015. Adventurous adaptability in the South Sea: Norwegians in ‘the Terrible Solomons’, ca. 1870 – 1930, in Navigating colonial orders: Norwegian entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania, Kirsten A. Kjerland and Bjørn E. Bertelsen (eds), 187-218. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.

Hviding, Edvard 2015. Norwegian Shipping and Landfall in the South Sea in the Age of Sail, in Navigating colonial orders: Norwegian entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania, Kirsten A. Kjerland and Bjørn E. Bertelsen (eds), 173-186. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.

Bayliss-Smith, Tim and Edvard Hviding 2014. Landesque Capital as an Alternative to Food Storage in Melanesia: Irrigated Taro Terraces in New Georgia, Solomon Islands. Environmental Archaeology, 19 (1). DOI: 10.1179/1749631414Y.0000000049

Hviding, Edvard 2014. Les vies des nguzunguzu: Figures de proue de Nouvelle-Géorgie, in L’éclat des ombres: L’art en noir et blanc des îles Salomon, Magali Melandri & Sandra Revolon (eds.), 124-129. Paris: Musée de Quai Branly / Somogy Éditions des Art.

Hviding, Edvard 2014. Modèle de pirogue de guerre, îles de Nouvelle-Géorgie, in L’éclat des ombres: L’art en noir et blanc des îles Salomon, Magali Melandri & Sandra Revolon (eds.), 28-31. Paris: Musée de Quai Branly / Somogy Éditions des Art.

Hviding, Edvard 2014. Across the New Georgia Group: A.M. Hocart’s Fieldwork as Inter-island Practice, in The Ethnographic Experiment: A.M. Hocart and W.H.R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908, Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg (eds.), 71-107. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.

Hviding, Edvard and Cato Berg 2014. Introduction: The Ethnographic Experiment in Island Melanesia, in The Ethnographic Experiment: A.M. Hocart and W.H.R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908, Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg (eds.), 1-43. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.

Hviding, Edvard 2014. Posthumanistiske antropologer? ANTropologiens lukkede rom. Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift, 25(1): 38-42.

Bayliss-Smith, Tim and Edvard Hviding 2014. Taro terraces, chiefdoms and malaria: explaining landesque capital formation in Solomon Islands, in Landesque Capital: The Historical Ecology of Enduring Landscape Modifications, N. Thomas Håkansson and Mats Widgren (eds.), 75-97. New Frontiers in Historical Ecology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Hviding, Edvard 2014. War canoes of the Western Solomons, in The Things We Value: Culture and History in Solomon Islands, Ben Burt and Lissant Bolton (eds.), 103-115. Canon Pyon, Herts.: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Hviding, Edvard 2013. Sciences in the Plural: The UNESCO Environmental Encyclopedia of Marovo Lagoon, Solomon Islands. The Journal of Pacific Studies, 32(2): 128-143.

Bayliss-Smith, Tim and Edvard Hviding 2012. Irrigated Taro, Malaria and the Expansion of Chiefdoms: Ruta in New Georgia, Solomon Islands, in Irrigated Cultivation of Colocasia esculenta in the Indo-Pacific: Biological, Social and Historical Perspectives, M. Spriggs, D. Addison & P. Matthews (eds.), 219-254. Senri Ethnological Studies, 78. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology.

Hviding, Edvard 2012. Compressed Globalization and Expanding Desires in Marovo Lagoon, Solomon Islands, in Returns to the Field: Multitemporal Research and Contemporary Anthropology, Signe Howell og Aud Talle (eds.), 203-229. Bloomington; Indiana University Press.

Rio, Knut M. & Edvard Hviding 2011. Pacific Made: Social Movements between Cultural Heritage and State, in Made in Oceania: Social Movements, Cuultural Heritage and the State in the Pacific, Edvard Hviding and Knut M. Rio (eds.), 5-29. Wantage, Oxon: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Hviding, Edvard 2011. Re-placing the State in the Western Solomon Islands: The Political Rise of the Christian Fellowship Church, in Made in Oceania: Social Movements, Cuultural Heritage and the State in the Pacific, Edvard Hviding and Knut M. Rio (eds.), 51-89. Wantage, Oxon: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Hess, M. S. Robson, F.S. Millar, G. Were, E. Hviding & C. Berg 2009. Niabara - the Western Solomon Islands War Canoe at the British Museum, i Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia, Vienna, 41-46. Los Alamitos, CA.: IEEE Computer Society.

Hviding, Edvard 2009. Eventyrlyst og tilpasningsevne: nordmenn på “de forferdelige Salomonøyene”, ca. 1879-1930, in Kolonitid: Nordmenn på eventyr og big business i Afrika og Stillehavet, K.A. Kjerland & K.M. Rio (eds), 128-166. Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press.

Hviding, Edvard 2006. . International Social Science Journal, 58(1) Issue 187: 69-85.

Hviding, Edvard 2005. Christian Fellowship Church (Solomon Islands), in Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, B. Taylor (ed.), 306-307. London: Continuum Books.

Hviding, Edvard 2004. Fredrik Barth, in Biographical Dictionary of Anthropology, V. Amit (ed.), 33-34. London: Routledge.

Hviding, Edvard 2003 . The Contemporary Pacific, 15:43-73.

Hviding, Edvard 2003. . International Social Science Journal, 55(4) Issue 178: 439-453.

Hviding, Edvard 2003. Disentangling the butubutu of New Georgia: cognatic kinship in thought and action, in Oceanic Socialities and Cultural Forms: Ethnographies of Experience, I. Hoëm & S. Roalkvam (eds.), 71-113. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Hviding, Edvard 2003. Both Sides of the Beach: Knowledges of Nature in Oceania, in Nature Across Cultures: Non-Western Views of the Environment and Nature, Helaine Selin (ed.). Science Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Sciences, Vol. 4, 243-275. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Bayliss-Smith, Tim, Edvard Hviding & T.C. Whitmore 2003. . Ambio, 32: 346-352.

Hviding, Edvard 2000. Usikre møter i det moderne Melanesia. Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift, 11: 53-66.

Hviding, Edvard 1998. Contextual flexibility: present status and future of customary marine tenure in Solomon Islands. Ocean & Coastal Management, 40: 253-269.

Hviding, Edvard 1998. Western movements in non-Western worlds: towards an anthropology of uncertain encounters. Suomen Antropologi / Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 23(3): 30-51.

Hviding, Edvard 1997. Fisheries and coastal resources: knowledge and development, in Environment and Development in the Pacific Islands, B. Burt & C. Clerk (eds.), 123-142. Port Moresby and Canberra: University of Papua New Guinea Press / NDRC, Australian National University.

Hviding, Edvard 1996. Nature, culture, magic, science: on meta-languages for comparison in cultural ecology, in Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, P. Descola & G. Pálsson (eds). London: Routledge, pp. 165-184.

Hviding, Edvard 1995. Maritime travel, present and past, in Marovo, Western Solomon Islands, in Seafaring in the Modern Pacific Islands: Studies in Continuity and Change, R. Feinberg (ed.), 90-113. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press.

Hviding, Edvard and Graham Baines 1994. Community-based fisheries management, tradition and the challenges of development in Marovo, Solomon Islands. Development and Change, 25(1): 13-39.

Hviding, Edvard 1993. . Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 149: 802-824.

Hviding, Edvard 1993. Krigskanoer fra New Georgia - historie, ritualer og myter, in Tomoko - en krigskano fra Salomonøerne, B. Clausen (ed.), 31-42. Roskilde: Vikingeskibshallen. 

Baines, Graham B.K. & Edvard Hviding 1993. ‘Traditional environmental knowledge for resource management in Marovo, Solomon Islands’, in Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Wisdom for Sustainable Development, N.M. Williams & G.B.K. Baines (eds.), 56-65. Canberra: Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University.

Baines, Graham B.K. & Edvard Hviding 1992. Traditional Environmental Knowledge from the Marovo Area of the Solomon Islands, in LORE: Capturing Traditional Environmental Knowledge, Martha Johnson (ed.), 92-110. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. 

Ruddle, Kenneth, Edvard Hviding & R.E. Johannes 1992. Marine resources management in the context of customary tenure. Marine Resource Economics, 7:249-273. 

Hviding, Edvard 1991. Traditional institutions and their role in contemporary coastal resource management in the Pacific Islands. NAGA, The ICLARM Quarterly, 14(4):3-6. 

Hviding, Edvard 1991. A note on research on ‘TURFs’, sea tenure systems or marine property rights and the management of small-scale fisheries, in La Recherche Face à la Pêche Artisanale, J.R. Durand, J. Lemoalle & J. Weber (eds.), Vol. II, 1033-1035. Paris: Editions de l'ORSTOM. 

Hviding, Edvard 1990. Keeping the sea: aspects of marine tenure in Marovo Lagoon, Solomon Islands, in Traditional Coastal Resource Management in the Pacific Basin: An Anthology, K. Ruddle & R.E. Johannes (eds.), 7-44. Jakarta: UNESCO-Regional Office for Science and Technology for Southeast Asia.

Edvard Hviding is the founding director of the based at his university.

He is currently the PI and Director of , funded by the Research Council of Norway’s TOPPFORSK programme for 2018-2024. The Ocean States project has the aim to build new and urgent interdisciplinary analyses of one of the greatest challenges of our time: how Pacific Islanders and their states prepare for, and react to the effects and impacts of climate change, with a focus on the security of their maritime boundaries.

From 2012-15 Hviding was the scientific coordinator of the (ECOPAS), funded by the European Commission's 7th Framework programme. ECOPAS was a multidisciplinary project designed to provide coordination and support to research and policy communities on issues connected to climate change and related processes in the Pacific Islands region, in order to define better options for sustainable development.

During 2008-12 Hviding directed the international research programme with institutional partners in the Pacific (including the national museums of Solomon Islands and Vanuatu), Australia, the United States and Europe. This programme explored the possibilities for building a network of rural fieldworkers in several provinces of the Solomons, including prospects for reviving the cultural sector of the Western Province government. With Dr. Graham Baines, Hviding developed the “Bergen Initiative” after the earthquake and tsunami that hit the Western Solomons in 2007, in an attempt to connect the accumulated, mainly overseas scholarship on the Western Solomons to urgent and more long-term practical needs in that part of Solomon Islands. The establishment of the Western Solomons Research Database, in dialogue with Western Province leaders, was a major outcome of this initiative.

In addition to his leadership and coordination work for the Bergen Pacific Studies group and its research programmes, Edvard Hviding is engaged in the following major research activities:

Vernacular Environmental Education in the Western Solomons. Book project (for UNESCO) that examines the development of a pilot project in vernacular education founded in Hviding’s Environmental Encyclopedia of Marovo Lagoon, and that highlights the impressive written work submitted to the pilot project by students at primary and secondary schools in Marovo and North New Georgia.

Rescuing the Rural: The Christian Fellowship Church as a Rural Development Agent. Book project (with Shankar Aswani) about the recent history of the CFC and the remarkable record of the church as an independent social movement that consistently supported rural development during the years of tension and government collapse. The project builds on the close long-term association of both authors with the CFC, its people and its leaders, also including the knighting of the Rev. Ikan Rove in London in 2005.

Working Relations: The Royal Navy in late 19th-century New Georgia. Book project examining the interactions between the people of New Georgia and the British men-of-war HMS Penguin (which was engaged in surveying the New Georgia island during 1893-95) and HMS Royalist (which engaged in punitive expeditions on several occasions between 1889 and 1894). The project builds on Royal Navy logs and journals, and on recollections and oral history from New Georgia.

Solomon Islands artefacts between museums: the Western Solomons war canoe in contemporary political scenes. Book project (with Graham Baines) about Western Solomons war canoes as museum objects and as objects of various political scenes in today’s Western Solomons and Solomon Islands nation. The project builds on both authors’ long-term familiarity with war canoes and their stories in local circumstances (mainly Marovo and Vella Lavella) and on work at the British Museum.