Foale, Simon (2021) Book Review of "Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity" by Ann Elias. London, UK, Duke University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9781478004462. Journal of Pacific History, 56 (2). pp. 206-207.

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Abstract

[Extract] As someone who has been diving on coral reefs since the 1960s and who has spent much of his career thinking about what they mean to different groups of people, particularly in the Pacific, it was impossible for me to turn down a request to review Ann Elias’s fabulous history of coral reefs’ rise to the almost mythic status they now occupy in the Western imagination. A childhood spent snorkelling on reefs in the Solomon Islands (then the ‘British Solomon Islands Protectorate’) led me to an early career as a marine scientist, but a PhD project focusing on traditional ecological knowledge of Solomon Islander fishers, co-supervised by anthropologist Martha Macintyre, quickly undermined the deeply colonial environmental values I grew up with – a set of values that Elias historicizes brilliantly in her book. Consequently I found myself in furious agreement with virtually all of Elias’s argument, some aspects of which Macintyre and I have also explored in our work on photographic representations of biodiversity and eco tourism in the Western Pacific, though much of its empirical foundation was new to me.

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