‘We were married after three years at opposite ends of the world.... We then, too rapidly for comfort, made off in a snowstorm for the South Seas.... All this we imprudently did in our late forties.’ Thus Muriel Jones introduces her account, originally published in 1974, of how she came to start her married life in the Solomon Islands, ‘whose impact was traumatic, perhaps just because we were not in our first youth or innocent of other tropical experience’. ‘St Peter’s College was the only thing at Siota’; there was no store and the only post office on the island ‘was so difficult of access that I never visited it ... we ourselves did most of the postal business – quite informally – at our end of the island’. It is not surprising that even high-ranking visitors tended to arrive looking like ship-wrecked sailors. ‘If one was ill enough to see a doctor one was, on the whole, too ill to be subjected to several hours of sun or rain in an open boat and a probable night en route.’ There is, too, the account of the old lady whose family, on her death, wanted to bury her in a coffin instead of the customary mat. ‘Poor old lady; at the end of all these exertions, the coffin with her in it stood in the church for the funeral, uneasily supported on two rickety small tables from our sitting room, mutely exhorting us to STOW AWAY FROM BOILERS.’ Muriel Jones tells the unusual story of her five Melanesian years, of the impact of Christianity on a pagan people, of her husband’s college and its move to another island, of the students, the islands and their animals and exotic vegetation, of the islanders (nine-tenths of whom live in communities ranging from twenty to two hundred people) and of their changing way of life. Her story takes one about as far as it is possible to go from an urban civilisation and in telling it she reveals the resources of her own character.

In much of Melanesia, the process of social reproduction unfolds as a lengthy sequence of mortuary rites - feast making and gift giving through which the living publicly define their social relations with each other while at the same time commemorating the deceased. In this study Robert J. Foster constructs an ethnographic account of mortuary rites in the Tanga Islands, Papua New Guinea, placing these large-scale feasts and ceremonial exchanges in their historical context and demonstrating how the effects of participation in an expanding cash economy have allowed Tangans to conceive of the rites as 'customary' in opposition to the new and foreign practices of 'business'. His examination synthesizes two divergent trends in Melanesian anthropology by emphasizing both the radical differences between Melanesian and Western forms of sociality and the conjunction of Melanesian and Western societies brought about by colonialism and capitalism.

This volume provides an ethnographic account of courtship, marriage and family life among the people of the Trobriand Islands.

A prominent scholar surveys the special place of Melanesia in our understanding of human cultural variation

"This book marks the first time that anthropologists systematically studies cross-cultural variation in homosexual behavior in a non-Western culture area. Gilbert Herdt has provided a substantial new introduction for the paperback edition"--