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The Sweet Potato in Oceania: A Reappraisal, edited by Chris Ballard, Paula Brown, R Michael Bourke, and Tracey Harwood. Ethnology Monographs 19, Oceania Monograph 56. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh; Sydney: University of Sydney, 2005. ISBN 0-945428-13-8; viii + 227 pages, tables, figures, maps, photographs, index. US$43.65.
As ethnobotanist Douglas Yen tells us in the concluding chapter of this hefty volume, academic discussion about the dispersal of the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) in Oceania may be traced back to the 1786 doctoral thesis of the younger Georg Forster (De Plantis Esculentis Insularum Oceani Australis), who, in reviewing the economic botany of Cook's voyages, attributed to sixteenth-century Spanish voyagers the introduction of this American crop into the Philippines and the East Indies. But Forster left without comment the source of the varieties in Tahiti and "the Southern Ocean." Over the intervening centuries, much comment has been offered about the mechanisms and chronology of the sweet potato's dispersals throughout Oceania. In recent decades the principal foundation for continuing research on the sweet potato in Oceania has been the work of Yen himself, whose 1974 publication, The Sweet Potato and Oceania: An Essay in Ethnobotany (Bernice P Bishop Museum Bulletin 236), the volume under review honors in retrospect. And the debate that has surrounded Yen's depiction of the threepart hypothesis of the dispersal of the sweet potato, from Mexico and northern South America into farthest Oceania, remains an important theme.
This book grew out of the 2002 annual meeting of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO), where thirteen papers were presented at a working session intended to review the status of knowledge about the sweet potato in Oceania since the publication of Yen's study almost thirty years earlier. The volume that resulted from that beginning contains eighteen chapters, all of which respond through various topics and levels of specificity to the concern with recent developments in Oceanic sweet potato research. General fields of knowledge dealt with include the agronomic, botanical, oral historical, archaeological, geographic, and ethnographic. As the editors acknowledge, an obvious absence is any detailed coverage of recent genetic research and the molecular analysis of variation, although several of the authors mention recent DNA research in passing. The editors agree, generally, that to be definitive these...