Western
Melanesia, comprising New Guinea, Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides),
New Caledonia, and the Solomon Islands, has long been one of the most
ethnographically investigated regions of the Fourth World. Although the
coastal areas have been the sites of contact with European and other
Pacific Island cultures since well before the 20th century, many peoples
of the rugged and remote interiors, particularly on the island of New
Guinea (now politically divided into the independent Commonwealth
country of Papua New Guinea in the east and the Indonesian province of
Irian Jaya or West Papua in the west), were first directly contacted
only after the Second World War. During the 1950s, anthropologists had
an unprecedented opportunity to bring modern social analytical
techniques to societies that were only then encountering--and under the
mildest of conditions--the presence of European colonizers.
The cultural variation in Melanesia, particularly in Papua New
Guinea, is unique in the history of human societies. Residents of Papua
New Guinea, who number nearly 4 million today, speak one-quarter of the
world's languages, around 800 distinct tongues. Many of these languages
are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people and many are in danger of
disappearing altogether with the spread of two common languages, English
and New Guinea Tok Pisin. Fortunately, the Summer Institute of
Linguistics, an adjunct to the country's Christian missions, has done a
great deal of linguistic work in Papua New Guinea. For more than 30
years, the Institute has documented grammars and lexicons of New Guinea
dialects. The Department of Linguistics in the Research School of
Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University has also
accumulated linguistic data on many Melanesian languages. 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 1950s, Australian anthropologist
Peter Lawrence wrote of the now-famous "cargo cults." Cargo cults were
the Melanesians' attempt to explain, in their own cultural terms,
Western dominance in material wealth and technology. 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. These
attempts, however encouraging, must be balanced against notable failures
in Melanesia, both political (Bougainville) and environmental (the Ok
Tedi Mine).
Papua New Guinea has been labelled a "weak state," in which the
practices and structures of governance, particularly in remote areas,
are tenuous at best. Because of its lack of resources and personnel, the
Papua New Guinea government is inclined to cede to resource extraction
companies responsibility for the maintenance of social order and the
provision of services in such regions. Although resource companies bring
to local communities increased opportunities for income, training, and
employment, as well as improved educational and health services, they
also bring less desirable influences.
Holly Wardlow describes the spread of HIV and other sexually
transmitted diseases, an increasingly serious problem in Papua New
Guinea today. Anthropologists have focused on Papua New Guinea as an
area where sexual activity, both homosexual and heterosexual, was a
critical component of ritual and initiatory practices in many places and
where gender dichotomies are still salient in everyday life. The effect
of STDs on societies in which the sexual act is of such signal cultural
significance is a threat not only to the physical wellbeing of these
communities but to their cultural values as well.
Three of this issue’s contributions concern West Papua, perhaps the
most politically volatile region in Melanesia today, particularly in the
wake of East Timor's success in gaining independence from Indonesia.
Poorly armed, small in numbers, and without the resources to take
advantage of international communication channels, the West Papuan
secession movement (OPM) has nevertheless attracted international
attention for its cause--Melanesian independence from Indonesia.
Indonesia's interest in the region's vast mineral wealth, however, will
likely preclude West Papuan independence.
Despite the political, economic, and physical hazards brought about
by Melanesia's increasing exposure to a global world, local communities
have responded in ways that augment and enhance their cultural identity
and uniqueness. Eager to embrace western modes of life, they
nevertheless insist on doing so within the framework of their customary
laws and their still profound attachment to their ancestral lands. The
constitutional protection afforded their cultural laws in the
independent countries of Melanesia is the most secure bulwark against
threats to their cultural survival.
1. These companies are submitting proposals to the PNG government to
address issues of landowner political instability in oil project area.
James Weiner received his Ph.D. in anthropology from The
Australian National University in 1984. He conducted fieldwork among the
Foi of Papua New Guinea for more than three years. He has been lecturer
in anthropology at The Australian National University and the
University of Manchester and professor of anthropology at the University
of Adelaide. Author of four books and many articles on the Foi, he now
works as an independent consultant in Australia. He can be reached at james.weiner@anu.edu.au.
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