Where is melanesia

For more than 30 years, the Institute has documented grammars and lexicons of New Guinea dialects. And most importantly, the overwhelming proportion of Papua New Guinea people are still village dwellers in their traditional land; most of their languages will continue to be spoken and transmitted for the time being. The resilience of Melanesian cultures, and their capacity to absorb new elements into their cultural repertoire, continues to compel the attention of anthropologists.

In the s, Australian anthropologist Peter Lawrence wrote of the now-famous "cargo cults. They attributed to westerners a superior form of cult and magic and tried to appropriate it. Cargo cults were the sporadic outbreak of communal ritual innovation in this regard, but the cargo cult as a more enduring feature of Melanesian cultural innovation represented the deep-seated capacity of local Melanesian traditions to borrow new concepts and infuse their cult life with the power of external knowledge.

The cargo cult remains a feature of communal cosmology throughout Melanesia and, as Tony Regan shows in his account of the Bougainville rebellion, has played a key role in local people's perception of their disadvantage with respect to the Panguna mine.

Politically, Melanesia is notable for its benign attitude toward the West. With the exceptions of New Caledonia, which Denis Monnerie discusses in his contribution, and West Papua, which is still engaged in a struggle for independence from Indonesia, as Eben Kirksey and Diana Glazebrook remind us in their contributions, no legacy of colonial brutality or wholesale appropriation of land or labor served to radicalize a generation of Melanesian leaders.

Residents of Vanuatu have, however, made strenuous efforts to reassert kastom customary, pre-Colonial village law and practice against the cultural influence of the English and French. Kastom, as Tim Curtis notes in his contribution, is a political statement of traditional Vanuatuan culture's role in contemporary nation-building. Further, as Tony Regan shows in his contribution on the Solomon Islands, the struggle between ethnic groups looms large in western Melanesia, a function of the way in which the idea of a sovereign national state has influenced local aspirations toward autonomy and cultural distinctiveness.

Stuart Kirsch and Mike Wood remind us that some of the most pressing problems now receiving increasing international attention are the environmental concerns of indigenous populations faced with large-scale logging and resource extraction projects on their lands. Papua New Guinea is heavily dependent on the income from foreign-owned resource projects. Some multinational resource companies such as Chevron and Placer, and smaller companies such as Oil Search, have taken seriously1 the idea of a stakeholder-constituted forum for planning local development and securing an economic future for local landowners.

The body has always represented a kind of art canvas for Melanesians. Many adorn themselves with tattoos, paint their faces and bodies, wear various headdresses or wigs, and don unique costumes. The cultures in Melanesia have been influenced by colonial rule, and so modern Western styles such as shorts or t-shirts can easily be found in many parts of Melanesia. Religious worship in pre-colonial Melanesia generally centered on the importance of ancestors, or more specifically, the ghosts or spirits of those ancestors.

Traditional Melanesian religious practices involve praying, making sacrifices, and rituals involving so-called magic or spells. Two important concepts in Melanesian religion are the concepts of M ana , which means efficacy or potency, and T apu , which means sacred or forbidden. Traditional Melanesian society lacked full-time religious leaders, so those who acted as priests or magicians traditional Melanesian spirituality incorporated magic were no different than others who performed regular, daily activities.

The arrival of Europeans radically changed Melanesian society. Firstly, the encroachment of the European powers resulted in radical religious changes, such as the advent of so-called cargo cults.

These were cults formed by people who believed that their ancestors were withholding material goods from Europe. They set about destroying old ceremonial objects and prepared themselves morally, socially, and logistically for the arrival of vast quantities of European goods. Secondly, the introduction of Christianity led to fundamental changes in Melanesian societies. These same schools and missions also trained Melanesian missionaries and evangelists. Thirdly, as was the case during the European colonization of the Americas, Europeans introduced new diseases to Melanesia, for which the local population had no immunity.

Many Melanesians succumbed to these diseases. In addition, the European powers exacerbated the warfare between local groups by providing firearms to warring parties. Indigenous political, economic, and trade structures collapsed and were replaced by colonial administrations and economic infrastructure.

For example, virtually the entire region is now accessible by modern transportation networks. Urbanization in the region abounds, and with it, the growth of shantytowns on the outskirts of cities, which are a common sight in developing countries, as more Melanesians leave their traditional rural communities to find work and educational opportunities in urban centers. Christianity is now the prevailing religion in Melanesia.

In fact, Melanesians are among the most devout Christians on Earth. Christianity has been able to spread and maintain a hold on the local population in part because the people charged with spreading the faith had knowledge of local languages and customs.

The economics of Melanesia have also changed through Western influence. For better or worse, the region is now part of the global economy. Multinational corporations and mass industry have made their way into the region. Logging and mining, for example, are important industries in Melanesia. Like various explorers before them, the makers of The Sky Above, The Mud Below found that the past can be a foreign country in an almost literal sense.

Yet the region was among the first to develop agriculture. Papua New Guinea is considered the most linguistically diverse country in the world. This work by the Papuan artist Cecil King Wungi reflects this complexity. Here, the Pacific islands are divided into broad, race-based subregions, which gloss over the minutiae of cultural and linguistic diversity. Ideas of racial superiority were inherent in the division between Melanesia and Polynesia.

The Melanesian islands were also ranked according to their perceived similarity to Polynesia, with Fiji often preferred due to its history of contact with Tonga. An oyster shell, or kin in the Melpa language spoken in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, is mounted on resin coloured with red ochre. Like the tabua — the polished teeth of sperm whales found in Fiji — kin are an important currency used in trade and diplomacy.

Noticing that westerners regularly received shipments of cargo, a belief emerged among the islanders that performing certain rituals, such as building a runway, would also yield such riches. The exact origins of the cargo cult phenomenon are unclear, but they became well known after the Second World War.