Salül

 In the real world my name is Carlos Mondragon. I am an anthropologist and historian specialising in the study of Island Melanesia, and more specifically the archipelago of Vanuatu, in the South West Pacific. Overall, I have interdisciplinary interests which cut across anthropology, politics, history and cultural production in Oceania and the broader Asia-Pacific region. During the past decade, I have carried out five stints of ethnographic fieldwork in the Pacific Islands. However, I have also had some experience studying rural societies (mostly mobile pastoralists) in the Tibet Autonomous Region. This second sociogeographical region of interest was first approached during a brief stint (two 4-month terms) at Tibet University, where I first began to pick up the rudiments of the Tibetan language. 

Salül is an informal name given to white people (literally it means “white man”) in the language of Lo-Toga, which is one of the two related Austronesian languages that are spoken in the Torres Islands. The Torres Islands are a very small group of islands located in the northern border of Vanuatu, and are home to almost 1,000 people. The bulk of my ethnographic fieldwork and friendships have evolved in the village of Lunharigi, on Loh island (that’s me, below, canoeing across a saltwater lagoon with William Collins, the fieldworker for the Cultural Centre on Loh).

The title of this blog is intended, on one hand, in playful reference to the way in which a particular small-scale society categorises those persons who do not belong to any given local lineage, have no specific ancestry and no apparent territorial identity; on the other, it speaks to a more serious issue which has to do with exoticisation and distance, which are two of the themes that I hope to touch upon throughout the duration of this blog.

For more information regarding my work, visit my webpage (currently available only in Spanish).