The Melanesian World

Eric Hirsch, Will Rollason, Eric Hirsch, Will Rollason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367730673
• eBook ISBN: 9781315529677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The 'Melanesian world' assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

The challenge of Melanesia

Eric Hirsch and Will Rollason

Villagers from the Marovo Lagoon in the Solomon Islands have for the past couple of years been experiencing unparalleled high-tide flooding and saltwater inundation of a natural freshwater spring. Knowledge from their ancestors said that winds came and ceased after so many moons. From this knowledge follows all other things, such as tides, rain, fish in the sea, and so on. Because of this, everything has its times and the ancestors knew how to mark those times. This knowledge was passed on to the current generation who, until recently, could see all this with their own eyes. But now people are not sure – the weather is not straight any more. People from the Marovo Lagoon are, on occasion, given cause to wonder whether the ancestors tricked them and whether matters were ever as straight as they were led to believe (Hviding and Borrevik).¹

The inhabitants of Marovo Lagoon have a story that accounts for how their lagoon was created by a giant ogre in the past. The ogre’s wife could not sleep due to the waves crashing on the exposed island. The ogre took the seashore and dragged it away from the island to form the raised barrier reef which is the defining topographic feature of the lagoon. If this account is compared with the analyses of geologists and coral reef scientists, it represents in compressed time how the lagoon was formed through the combination of seismic forces and coral reef building. People in the region are acquainted with strong seismic forces and do not take for granted that seashores, reefs and seaways remain unchanged from one generation to the next. They are also now aware of the tropes of ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ and these are used as one of several local explanations for such changes. Older people with a lifetime of experiences of earthquakes and rising and sinking sea levels question the very idea of ‘climate change’, as in their experience they never knew what was coming next. As one Marovo Lagoon resident asserted, ‘We can’t worry too much about it here, for we know that all of a sudden an earthquake can make our land rise, or sink! We never know what comes next’.

On the one hand, then, steady sea level rises are associated with global warming and this is widely recognised throughout the Melanesian region. For the people of the Marovo Lagoon, the effects of climate change are now a current reality affecting their daily lives. On the other hand, Melanesians have always dealt with droughts, flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and tropical storms, and islanders have developed their own schemes of prediction and adjustment honed from thousands of years of living in the Pacific Ring of Fire, and the current effects of global warming are just one more thing that they are adapting to, based on this extensive knowledge.

The example of climate change illustrates one of the important themes that emerges from the diverse contributions to this volume. Climate change cannot be made sense of unless it is understood as a worldwide phenomenon. Although global warming caused by carbon emissions is overwhelmingly created by industrialised countries, it profoundly affects Melanesian peoples and other remote coastal and island inhabitants who have had no part in its origins. At the same time, it is impossible to understand the experience of climate change unless it is examined in a local context and with reference to local ideas. From one perspective the islands that make up the world of Melanesia are little different from other so-called Third World contexts. People endure inadequate healthcare, patronage politics, shanty towns, domestic violence, environmental degradation due to resource extraction, and now climate change. They have also been missionised by numerous Christian churches, their lands are part of conservation projects, and many partake in Ponzi money schemes. From a different perspective, all of these issues common to Third World peoples (among others) have a distinctiveness in the Melanesian world. How to manage the relationship between these two perspectives on Melanesia is one of the key issues this volume raises.

In this introduction, we consider the relationship between these perspectives. First, we discuss our definition of ‘Melanesia’ for the purposes of this volume. Second, we explore the significance of different approaches to Melanesian distinctiveness, or conversely, what the region and its people share with others, for the development of social science. We attend especially to anthropology because of the well-known cultural and linguistic diversity of the region which has been largely investigated by anthropologists. Third, we discuss a series of key thematic and practical issues – gender, sexuality and kinship, the impact of Christianity on the region, and the role of images of mobility and connection in a wide array of contexts. We use these issues to illustrate how the dilemma between the distinctiveness or generality of Melanesia is evident in everyday life. A dilemma of this kind, however, is potentially crippling. Without a way of bringing its two arms – ‘Melanesian distinctiveness’ and ‘Third World generality’ – into some relation it threatens to become a gulf between entirely different paradigms with little to say to one another. To avoid such an impasse, fourth, we suggest attending to the ways in which Melanesians mobilise particular forms of action in definite undertakings, attempting to move social life in the direction of their interests. These forms are, of course, located, and enacted in culturally specific ways. The extent to which Melanesia will appear distinctive or as a reflection of broader problems will depend on how the people involved (including scholars) value or exploit the cultural specificity of these undertakings in relation to more expansive horizons.

DEFINING ‘THE MELANESIAN WORLD’

For the purposes of this volume, we consider ‘the Melanesian world’ to consist of the following contemporary political entities: Papua New Guinea (PNG), West Papua, Torres Strait Islands, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia. All of these contemporary political units were previously the colonial possessions of various European powers. In the interests of clarity and simplicity, in this introduction, and throughout the volume, we use contemporary designations wherever possible, using the historical names of colonial entities only where absolutely necessary. This is particularly important with regard to the designation ‘New Guinea’, which we use to refer to the island of New Guinea, the landmass occupied by PNG and West Papua. We do not use New Guinea, unless explicitly stated, to refer to the German, Dutch and British colonies that at various times and in different languages were called ‘New Guinea’, or the Australian Territory of the same name.

A similar terminological problem exists for what we call ‘West Papua’. By West Papua, we intend the western half of the island of New Guinea, which was annexed by Indonesia in 1962 (see Firth, Quanchi). In administrative terms, this latter region is currently composed of two provinces, Papua and West Papua (Papua Barat) which were formed out of a single province, first called Irian Jaya, and then Papua. Indonesian rule has often been extremely abusive of indigenous Papuans, and opposition to it has been both widespread and vocal (and sometimes violent). As a result, names for the western half of the island of New Guinea are politically charged and the use of one name or another signals political alignment either with the Indonesian government or with Papuan independence activists. West Papua is the designation favoured by activist opponents of Indonesian rule on the island of New Guinea, and we follow that usage here, despite the potential for confusion with West Papua Province, the Indonesian administrative entity.²

Temporally, the chapters in the volume examine the Melanesian world back to the first evidence of human occupation in the region, some 49,000 years ago. They are, however, mainly focused on the present and recent history. Contributors attend closely to the period since the expansion of European influence and colonialism into the region at the end of the nineteenth century, and the bulk of the volume considers contemporary issues. Indeed, in many respects the idea of the contemporary moment operates as a kind of ‘meta-frame’ for the Melanesia that is the subject of this book and enables the connections that our contributors establish between different kinds of human activity.

In spatial terms, it is difficult to place boundaries around Melanesia. Geographically, both the eastern and western boundaries of Melanesia can be drawn in different ways. Fiji to the east is often included (see Brookfield and Hart 1971) but has also been excluded (see Strathern 1988). Hauʹofa (2008: 39, n.1) excludes Fiji from Melanesia ‘for geographic and cultural reasons’. In a similar manner, western areas of Indonesia, including Maluku, North Maluku and East Nusa Tenggara, could come within the boundaries of Melanesia given their proximity to the island of New Guinea, related Austronesian origins (see below) and the similarity of indigenous cultural life but are rarely included (see Firth, this volume).

The dimension of time also makes the definition of a Melanesian world problematic. What is now Australia and New Guinea was a single landmass for roughly three fourths of the period of human habitation. Even after the postglacial division, when the Torres Strait land bridge was flooded, the two land masses are only separated by 100 kilometres of sea. It is very likely that there has been unbroken human traffic between them for thousands of years (see Rumsey 2001). Indeed, as Summerhayes, reviewing the archaeological evidence of human habitation, and Rumsey, discussing linguistic diversity, both note, people we now think of as ‘Melanesians’ have historical connections far to the west and east. The Austronesian languages that are now common in Melanesia were introduced by seafaring people, probably from Taiwan, around 3,500 years ago. These people journeyed through the Malay Archipelago and into Polynesia and crossed the Indian Ocean to arrive in Madagascar. Such wide-ranging connections were clearly significant as recently as 300 years ago, when sweet potatoes from Central or South America were introduced almost certainly through contacts with Polynesians. Once in Melanesia, they fuelled the development of the dense populations and exchange systems in the New Guinea highlands that so captivated twentieth-century ethnographers (Bourke).

These connections and entanglements have equally been a feature of more recent times. It is well documented, for example, that Polynesian missionaries from Samoa and neighbouring islands who were initially converted by European missionaries were brought to Melanesian islands to teach the gospel in village settings (Barker). It was thought by European missionaries that Polynesians would be better adapted to village life and able to engage with Melanesians in their domestic contexts. While Polynesians travelled to Melanesia, Melanesians from different islands were brought to Australia and Fiji as indentured labourers, often staying for several years (Quanchi). In short, as many of the chapters in this volume record, the boundaries between the Melanesian world and neighbouring ‘worlds’ were sites of recurrent crossings and transformations (cf. Thomas 2010). From a material and historical point of view, the Melanesian world is not a world unto itself.

Thus, any definition involves carving ‘Melanesia’ out of a larger expanse of similar places – Fiji, Indonesia, and so on – and shutting off certain connections, to Australia and latterly China and Southeast Asia, for example (see Bellwood, Fox and Tryon 2006 [1995]). This is necessarily an arbitrary exercise that itself relies on earlier, equally arbitrary definitions that have given us the notion of Melanesia in the first place. The merits of any definition of Melanesia from this perspective must be given by its capacity to help to solve and identify problems. Thus, we can argue that our Melanesia consists in a large area in which the indigenous cultures that are the main subject of the contributors to this book are quite closely related and similar. To include Fiji would have been to introduce excessive complexity, especially in the relation between indigenous and Indo-Fijians, in a context in which we already must grapple with the profound political and social differences between the independent Melanesian states of PNG, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, and the very different, non-independent entities, West Papua, Torres Strait Islands and New Caledonia. From this point of view, our restricted Melanesia has the merit of a certain (limited) coherence.

This discussion emphasises the interested nature of definitions of Melanesia. Quanchi, in his historical overview (and 2006), remarks how the name given to the passage around the eastern tip of PNG, the China Strait, reflects Europeans’ limited interest in the region. New Guinea and its associated archipelagos was significant because it was on the way to China, and the town of Samarai, for a brief period, flourished because of its proximity to this trade route. This underscores the fact that the ‘Melanesia’ we receive from history is the product of European colonial interests, as well as subsequent geo-political alignments in the region. Scholars, foreign as much as Melanesian (see Narakobi 1983; Moutu 2011), bring their own interests to Melanesia, and the alternative approaches to defining the region sketched here, as well as their limitations, reflect this fact. Our definition should therefore be understood as provisional. We hope that it will enable readers to come to grips with the questions and choices that the study of Melanesia presents.

We have divided this volume into a series of thematic sections. The volume opens with two parts, constituting a set of six chapters covering topics of considerable breadth. These can be read as contributions to their respective fields in their own right, but also serve to provide context for the more tightly thematised contributions later in the book. The first three chapters aim to provide a historical context for Melanesia. These chapters contextualise this large region in terms of its prehistoric past (Summerhayes) and the key influences that have affected its peoples over a period of nearly 150 years, covering the colonial and post-colonial periods (Quanchi), and with a chapter devoted to Christian missionisation (Barker), which has played a very important role in political and social developments in the region (see Timmer; Eriksen and MacCarthy). This trio, which aims to provide context in time, is followed by another whose purpose is to introduce readers to key thematic concerns in the region, operating at right-angles, if you like, to the historical material. The chapters of this section serve three related purposes. The first is to introduce the reader to the geo-political context of Melanesia and its relations with some of the major powers in the region (Firth). The second is to introduce the remarkable linguistic diversity of Melanesia which accounts for a large percentage of the world’s languages (Rumsey). Finally, to present an overview of Melanesian social life, largely from the perspective of anthropological knowledge of the region (Timmer). This will show how the broad thematic topics raised in the remainder of the volume are influenced by regional variation and common trends (including socio-cultural life, history and missionisation).

Following this opening material, the body of the volume is given over to chapters treating key contemporary issues in Melanesia. The choice of topics in these chapters is, of course, selective and interested, reflecting recent patterns of scholarship on the region and the availability of contributors. Given the problems of defining Melanesia and debates about the region’s significance (see below), it was necessary to choose topics that did not prejudge what is understood by the ‘Melanesian world’. Therefore, we proposed topics that are somewhat ‘neutra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Maps of the Region and its Language Groups
• Chapter One Introduction: The challenge of Melanesia
• PART I HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• PART II GEO-POLITICAL, LINGUISTIC AND REGIONAL OVERVIEWS
• PART III ECONOMY AND LIVELIHOOD
• PART IV GOVERNMENT, POLITICS AND PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS
• PART V RELIGION, CHURCH, RITUAL AND EXCHANGE PRACTICES
• PART VI ART, MATERIAL CULTURE AND CULTURAL HERITAGE
• PART VII DEVELOPMENT AND RESOURCES
• Index
• Index of Language Groups