ABSTRACT
Kingmaker, power behind the throne, office-bearer, president, lord, paramount, are all terms for leadership types that nestle comfortably in the lexicon of political science discourse on the nationstate. Images conjured up by these terms recall types of authority in early Western, Islamic and Asian civilizations largely defined by Max Weber. An Africamst's view of leadership and change in the Western Pacific inevitably invites comparisons that extend beyond such obvious differences as territorial and demographic scale. The anthropology of leadership in the Western Pacific has been informed more by Raymond Firth's description of Pa Fenuatara and Malinowski's chief of Omarakana than by Max Weber's types of authority said to be found in bureaucratic and patriarchal structures. The Western Pacific perhaps never was an ocean mass dotted with islands of paradise. The Trobriand Islands, made famous in the annals of ethnographic research by Malinowski, were also not spared from European invasions.
