Introduction

The Trobriand Islands are a cluster of coral atolls which lie some 100 miles due north of the eastern tail of Papua New Guinea. The Trobriand Islands were named by the French explorer D'Entrecasteaux in 1793, but it was Bronislaw Malinowski who placed them firmly on the anthropological map. More than forty years after its completion, Malinowski's Trobriand corpus remains the most famous, if not the most copious and exhaustive, ethnography in the anthropological literature. The Trobrianders have occupied a place in the limelight of academic debate and enjoyed fame out of all proportion to the numbers or the size of the miniscule islands. Anthropological literature is testimony to the fact that, for all Malinowski failings, his memory is still remarkably green. Malinowski viewed the Trobriands as a natural laboratory, and his writings depict its people as dwelling in a timeless limbo - an ethnographic present innocent of colonial contamination.