ABSTRACT
Melanesia was primarily an anthropologically defined region; the name itself is anachronistic, derived from early colonial definitions of racial difference. Melanesian anthropology has always been concerned with change. The relatively late colonization of the southwest Pacific ensured that, while prevailing anthropological theories might be fairly ahistorical, things were changing before ethnographers’ eyes. One of the historical realities that had been neglected somewhat by anthropologists was Christian missionaries throughout the region, who had been implicitly dismissed as agents of inauthenticity and destroyers of tradition. The anthropological study of gender relations has a long history in Melanesia, especially in Papua New Guinea, and early studies such as those by Malinowski and Mead have influenced debates about sex and gender in the discipline more generally. Criti.
