Books are journeys. But unlike more ordinary forms of travel, points of departure and arrival are often not so easily fixed. One starting place for the present work can be located in December 1974 when I first went to the Solomon Islands to undertake research on the island of Santa Isabel for a doctoral degree in cultural anthropology. After spending a year and a half in the Solomons, I returned to write up my work in a dissertation titled “Big Men and Church Men: social images in Santa Isabel, Solomon Islands” (1978, University of California, San Diego). Despite many unexpected turns and twists, I managed in the dissertation to carry through with my initial plan to examine shared images of important or prestigious people, suggesting that such images are a kind of focal point for changes taking place in society.

However, with the benefit of hindsight and subsequent periods of research on Santa Isabel (in 1984, 1987 and 1988), I became increasingly dissatisfied with that work. One reason for the dissatisfaction was the sense that I had somehow not done justice to the wonderful stories that people tell about their society and about the past, especially as personified in ancestors and other historic figures.