PROLOGUE

In this chapter, I focus on Melanesian religion, but it is well to recall that many of the early pioneering ethnographic studies in anthropology were in fact undertaken in the Pacific region. Bronislaw Malinowski's early researches in the Trobriand Islands, Margaret Mead's classic writings on Samoa and Manus, Gregory Bateson's stimulating study of the Naven ritual among the latmul, and Raymond Firth's exemplary studies of the people of Tikopia are all well known and noteworthy (Malinowski 1922, 1974; Mead 1928, 1930; Firth 1940; Bateson 1980).

It is beyond the scope of the present study to discuss the religions of Oceania, which includes both Australasia and the Pacific Islands, a region of the world that was once romantically known to Europeans as the ‘south Seas’. Anthropological studies of the region were influenced by both the colonial encounter and this fascination with the strange and exotic, and local cultural concepts such as mana and tapu soon became a constituent part of the comparative study of religion. Durkheim's monumental study, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915), was also based on ethnographic data derived from the Australian Aborigines. But in this chapter, I focus specifically on Melanesia. (For useful studies of the religions of Australia and Oceania, more generally, see Goldman 1970; Berndt 1974; Elkin 1977; Charlesworth, Morphy, Bell, and Maddock 1984; Swain and Trompf 1995; Mageo and Howard 1996).