MELANESIAN CULTURE

the beliefs and practices of those indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands grouped as Melanesia. The islands include (generally from west to east) the island of New Guinea, the Admiralty Islands, and the Bismarck and Louisiade archipelagoes; the Solomon Islands and the Santa Cruz Islands; New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands; Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides); Fiji; Norfolk Island; and numerous smaller islands. Melanesian is an old anthropological category that has been rendered somewhat obsolete by developments in prehistory and linguistics. It groups together the dark-skinned, frizzy-haired populations of the southwestern Pacific and characterizes them culturally in terms of Neolithic root-crop economies, highly developed systems of exchange, generally small-scale and nonhierarchical polities, and diversity in social structure. As a culture area, Melanesia can be reexamined in the light of modern evidence. The vast continental island of New Guinea and the islands that form an arc from its eastern end down toward the southeastthe Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides (the state of Vanuatu), and New Caledoniarepresent a meeting ground of two cultural traditions and populations. The earliest, for which the term Papuan provides the best label, is ancient: Papuans occupied the Sahul continent (now partly submerged) at least 40,000 years ago. As hunting-and-gathering peoples whose ways of life were adapted to tropical rain forest, they occupied the equatorial zone that, after sea levels rose at the end of the Pleistocene glacial period, became the vast island of New Guinea. Modern descendants of these early populations speak languages belonging to a number of different families. They are categorized as Papuan (see Papuan languages). Perhaps partly through indirect contact with developments in Southeast Asia, Papuan peoples developed one of the earliest agricultural complexes in the world (perhaps 9,000 years old, contemporaneous with the dawn of agriculture in the Middle East). Evidence indicates that they domesticated root crops and sugarcane and may have kept domestic pigs. By 5,000 years ago agricultural production in parts of the New Guinea Highlands was marked by systems of water control in agriculture and associated pig husbandry, both of which became intensified over subsequent millennia. About 4,000 years ago seafaring peoples bearing a Southeast Asian cultural tradition must have been moving in areas north of New Guinea; by 3,500 years ago they had occupied parts of the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago. Their presence is marked by the appearance of the distinctive pottery and associated tools and ornaments of shell that define the Lapita culture. They apparently spoke a language of the Austronesian family (see Austronesian languages) related to languages of the Philippines and the Indonesian archipelago. This early language is labeled Proto-Oceanic: from it are descended the languages of central and eastern Micronesia and Polynesia; the languages of the Solomons, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia; and many of the languages of coastal eastern New Guinea, adjacent islands, and much of the Bismarck Archipelago. The speakers of Proto-Oceanic, who had a maritime orientation and sophisticated seagoing technology, probably had a system of hereditary chiefs with political-religious authority and elaborate cosmogonies and complex religious systems that were not unlike those recorded in western Polynesia. The Bismarck Archipelago east of New Guinea was already occupied by speakers of Papuan languages (whose earliest settlement has been dated to 30,000 years ago). The dark-skinned, woolly-haired populations anthropologists have classed as Melanesian that now occupy the Bismarck Archipelago and the arcs of islands extending to the southeast (the Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia) represent the mixing of cultural traditions and biological heritages of Papuan and Austronesian peoples. The mixing may have taken place largely within the zone of the Bismarcks prior to the settlement of the islands to the southeast (although the exact process and relative contributions of these historical populations is debated). A great deal of economic interchange took place between a Southeast Asian complex based on root- and tree-crop cultivation and on maritime technology and the already well-developed Papuan agricultural and technological systems. It is probable that an interchange of other cultural traditions, from social organization to religion, took place as well. Some Austronesian-speaking communitiesperhaps ones that retained their maritime orientationappear to have remained relatively isolated from intermarriage and cultural interchange. Linguistically, in the interchange between Papuan and Austronesian peoples the latter were clearly dominant. Almost all languages spoken by dark-skinned peoples in the Pacific east of the Bismarcks are classed as Oceanic Austronesian, although some (especially those of the eastern tip of New Guinea and adjoining islands, but perhaps also those of the Santa Cruz Islands, southern Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and the Loyalty Islands) reflect extensive Papuan borrowings. The languages spoken by dark-skinned peoples of the southeastern Solomons and northern and central Vanuatu are closely related to the languages of Polynesia and central and eastern Micronesia. The zone east of New Guinea can be characterized as island, or seaboard, Melanesia, to contrast it with the Papuan-speaking zone of the continental island of New Guinea itself. Melanesian has sometimes been used in a narrow sense to label the dark-skinned peoples speaking Austronesian languages, in contrast to Papuans. More commonly, Melanesian has been used in a more inclusive sense, to label both. Little evidence has been found to identify the earliest settlers of the zone of island Melanesia south and east of the Bismarcks. It seems likely that the Solomons chain was settled by Papuan-speaking populations following the early occupation of the Bismarcks. The islands to the southeast of the Solomonsthe Santa Cruz group, Banks Islands, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, and the Loyaltiesare separated by much larger gaps of open sea, and they may well have been unoccupied prior to the arrival of Austronesian-speaking peoples in the Bismarcks. The pioneer settlers of large zones of island Melanesia may have been speakers of Austronesian languages who represented the genetic and cultural fusion described above, and others, contemporaneous with them, who had remained relatively isolated from intermarriage and cultural interchange with Papuan speakers. In the period from 3,500 to 3,000 years ago the latter established coastal communities and associated trade systems in the southeastern Solomons, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, and Fiji. Long-distance trade, particularly of shell ornaments and obsidian, suggests that these widely spread communities characterized by the Lapita pottery tradition were linked politically. The settlement of eastern Micronesia by speakers of Oceanic languages, perhaps from the Solomons, apparently took place in this period. Fiji apparently was initially colonized by Lapita-making peoples and later was settled by dark-skinned, culturally Melanesian peoples after Fiji had been a springboard to the settlement of western Polynesia. The spread of this Lapita tradition from Fiji into Samoa and Tonga fits closely with the evidence of the initial breakup of a linguistically reconstructed Proto-Polynesian. Although the prehistory of most of island Melanesia remains little-documented, some evidence suggests that the cultural, linguistic, and political fragmentation that prevailed at the time of European penetration, with a half-dozen languages and cultures often represented on a single island, is partly a product of devolution in the past 2,000 years. More hierarchical regional political systems and concomitant trade systems seem to have fragmented and devolved, with progressive involution, the replacement of trade by exchange, the disappearance of political hierarchy (except in some coastal zones), and the separation of language or dialect groups as results. The causes of these transformations, perhaps including internecine warfare and the spread of diseases (of malaria in particular), remain unclear. These changes were accelerated by European penetration, which further disrupted trade systems, intensified intercommunity warfare by supplying firearms, thinned populations by introducing diseases and indentured labour, and eroded traditional authority systems. The island Melanesia described by anthropologists reflects both long-term devolution and recent disruption. Although the mix of Austronesian and Papuan cultural elements varies in different parts of island Melanesia, in many ways the classification of these peoples and their cultures along with Papuan-speakers as Melanesiansin contrast to the Micronesians and Polynesiansdoes violence to the ethnological, linguistic, and archaeological evidence. The Melanesians of northern Vanuatu and the southeastern Solomons speak languages very closely related to those of Polynesia and eastern Micronesia. Culturally, they are in many ways more closely related to these other Austronesian-speaking peoples than to the Papuans of interior New Guinea. The Melanesians' religious systems, for example, incorporate such concepts as mana and, in the Solomons, tapu. A further complexity is that the region has emerged not only into the modern world but also into the community of nations: Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji constitute separate nation-states; western New Guinea (Irian Jaya) is a province of Indonesia; and the indigenous peoples of New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands are locked in a struggle for independence with French settlers and the French government. Additional reading H.C. Brookfield, Melanesia: A Geographical Interpretation of an Island World (1971), is a comparative survey of geography. R.J. May and Hank Nelson (eds.), Melanesia, Beyond Diversity, 2 vol. (1982), presents general information. An excellent summary is Ann Chowning, An Introduction to the Peoples and Cultures of Melanesia, 2nd ed. (1977). On material culture, B.A.L. Cranstone, Melanesia: A Short Ethnography (1961), remains useful. A fine study of a particular people is Marie Reay, The Kuma: Freedom and Conformity in the New Guinea Highlands (1959). Syntheses and collections of papers on aspects of society and culture in New Guinea include Paula Brown, Highland Peoples of New Guinea (1978); Paula Brown and Georgeda Buchbinder (eds.), Man and Woman in the New Guinea Highlands (1976); Andrew Strathern (ed.), Inequality in New Guinea Highland Societies (1982); Jerry W. Leach and Edmund Leach (eds.), The Kula: New Perspectives on Massim Exchange (1983); R.M. Glasse and M.J. Meggitt (eds.), Pigs, Pearlshells, and Women: Marriage in the New Guinea Highlands (1969); Gilbert H. Herdt (ed.), Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea (1982), and Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (1984); Dan Jorgensen (ed.), Concepts of Conception: Procreation Ideologies in Papua New Guinea (1983); Paula G. Rubel and Abraham Rosman, Your Own Pigs You May Not Eat: A Comparative Study of New Guinea Societies (1978); and C.A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities (1982). Other works include Michele Stephen (ed.), Sorcerer and Witch in Melanesia (1987); L.L. Langness and John C. Weschler (eds.), Melanesia: Readings on a Culture Area (1971); Marilyn Strathern (ed.), Dealing with Inequality: Analysing Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond (1987); P. Lawrence and M.J. Meggitt (eds.), Gods, Ghosts, and Men in Melanesia: Some Religions of Australian New Guinea and the New Hebrides (1965); and Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia, 2nd ed. (1968).