ABSTRACT
The purpose of social anthropology is to understand how people understand their world, there is a double hermeneutic: anthropologists construct templates to provide access to the templates that others, mainly Melanesians and missionaries - construct to make their world meaningful. In Melanesian studies, the author understands, morality needs a boost, because the actions of Big Men wheeling and dealing to build up a following in what looks like a neoclassical free market seem to fit so readily into the advantage template that the moral significance of what they do has been overlooked. At first reading there is one basic and unambiguous value: amity and moral equivalence, against which Big Men sin. This is an abiding problem at the level-two/level-one interface. The Robbins "split" between ethics and politics, said to be characteristic of modern Western societies, has been transferred from level two templates to level one and mistakenly visited on the Melanesians.
