ABSTRACT
The late Bernard Narakobi described a moment at an airline counter in colonial Papua New Guinea when he was pushed aside so someone else could get priority. He referred to the person as a ‘non-Melanesian’. The Melanesian Way could be found all across the region that Westerners had happened to call Melanesia. As a work of reference, The Melanesian World offers up-to-date results of research undertaken by scholars from diverse disciplines. A stepping stone is found in non-Melanesian writing that allows its concepts and conceptualisations to be informed, or rather de-formed, by what is inferred as Melanesian thought. Non-Melanesians, for their part, might take it as an empirical field of phenomena that are simultaneously discrete and relatable, whether the phenomena are religious, aesthetic, economic, agricultural, biomedical, or the like, enabling them to collate certain elements that could then be re-cast with comparative insight.
