ABSTRACT
Most Melanesian societies, apart from those in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea, have been in contact with Europeans for at least a century. They have experienced many changes in economy and social organization during this time and their precontact patterns of movement have been progressively modified. To reconstruct behaviour before European contact and to establish similarities and dissimilarities between traditional and contemporary mobility requires a detailed knowledge of particular peoples. This paper is concerned with the Ndi-Nggai of west Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands (Fig. 5.1), among whom sixteen months’ fieldwork was conducted from January 1971 to May 1972 (Bathgate 1973, 1975, 1978b). Its central argument is that, from decade to decade and from one generation to another, the dynamics of population movement reflect the complex interplay between intrinsic traditional and extrinsic modern forces; and that, at any point in time, neither set of forces is completely determinant.
