This book is focused on one significant set of themes in Melanesian religious life, but it also goes some way towards providing an introductory guide to the phenomenology and history of religions in the most ethnographically complex part of the globe. Melanesia still harbours over one quarter of humanity's known and discrete religions, and this work supplements my Melanesian Religion (1991) as another kind of overview. Retributive logic is so crucial an aspect of Melanesian culture, and of such universal significance, that a general study of it is long overdue. While the varied indigenous ‘pre-contact’ expressions of retributive actions and principles require careful analysis and comparatively more space, there is now a pressing need to assess how the emergence of new religious movements (especially the so-called ‘cargo cults’) and the impact of the ‘great traditions’ (particularly Christianity) have affected this side to Melanesian life.

The research involved quarrying at an enormous granite cliff of wondrous yet multiveined materials. I can only hope that the splinters I have chipped off during fifteen years of labour will illustrate and make sense of the massive imbroglio. When James Frazer eked out his thirteen-volume Golden Bough (1890–1936) and Eduard Westermarck his two-volume tome on the Origin and Development of Moral Ideas (1906), neither of them had any idea that the southwest Pacific contained the most complicated anthropological jigsaw puzzle on the earth's face.