ASAO Special Publications and Distinguished Lectures

Abstract

The Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO)’s Distinguished Lectures, an annual custom that took shape from earlier occasional special talks, sparked its Special Publications series with the publication of Marshall Sahlins’s lecture, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom in 1981. Special Publications have been edited by Ivan Brady, Deborah Gewertz, and Lamont Lindstrom. Lectures and Special Publications were married more firmly when an ASAO Board decision limited the series to publishing only Distinguished Lectures. This arrangement decayed after a number of years when no Distinguished Lecture came available for publication. The journal Oceania instead agreed to publish ASAO’s Distinguished Lectures as feature articles in its November issues, and the Special Publication series was discontinued. In this paper I review the history, highlights and lowlights, of these two ASAO enterprises.