Tall tales of tradition : Solomon Island Kastom stories in transition

Historical conditions of colonialism, and more recently, the emergence of a post-colonial state and urbanization, have brought about rapid socio-cultural change in the Solomon Islands, characterized by heterogeneity and the influx of new cultural products. Throughout this process, notions of tradition have emerged, iterated largely through the multivocal category of kastom which is fundamentally construed in opposition to notions of Christianity and modernization. This thesis examines how these changes have affected stories, specifically a group of narratives called "kastom stories," told by students in the urban setting, and how these narratives have become a space for tradition to be stated and created. Notions of genre are explored to discover how such an amalgam of stories as that of the kastom stories regarded here could be considered as a group. I examine story structures to understand how elements from diverse sources could become integrated to the stories, and look at transformations which, in distanciating the stories from their original socio-cultural context of production, serve to recontextualize them in their present socio-cultural setting