ABSTRACT
Pacific: Melanesia Melanesia is a group of islands in the Southwest Pacific. Although its boundaries are not entirely agreed, it corresponds approximately to the territories of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji. It also includes the Torres Straits Islands, which are part of the Australian state of Queensland, and the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya (the western part of the island of New Guinea). During the second half of the nineteenth century, the different parts of Melanesia were claimed by Britain, Germany, France, Holland and Australia, and this situation changed little in its essentials until post-colonial states began emerging in the 1970s. The interior of the island of New Guinea, with the largest population in Melanesia, was not brought under external control until after World War II. A few, small ‘uncontacted’ groups probably still remain in the remoter parts of the New Guinea Highlands. Throughout most of the history of ethno-
graphy in Melanesia, the two dominant themes of research in this region have been exchange and gender. These have provided the encompassing rubrics under which other important aspects of Melanesian society have tended to be studied, and have been the two fields in which research in Melanesia has made its greatest contributions to anthropology. Signs of a new formulation of the central issues in Melanesian studies have begun to appear only recently, with the emergence of an interest in the politics of tradition and the construction of ethnicity.
