Top Results for Melanesia

Maurice Godelier is a French anthropologist, born in 1934, who combined Marxist theory with ethnographic fieldwork, most extensively among the Baruya people of Papua New Guinea. His major works include *The Making of Great Men* (1982), which examined male initiation, power, and exchange in Baruya so...

Maurice Leenhardt was a French Protestant missionary and anthropologist who worked among Kanak communities in New Caledonia. His ethnographic research focused on Kanak social organization, religious ideas, language, and responses to Christian mission activity, and he treated local concepts as system...

Bruce Knauft is an American anthropologist known for long-term ethnographic research among the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea. His work examines violence, gender, kinship, ritual, sexuality, exchange, and the social effects of contact with wider institutions and modernity. Books such as Good Company and...

Roy Wagner was an American cultural anthropologist who served as a professor at the University of Virginia. He is best known for his highly original theoretical contributions to symbolic anthropology, most notably outlined in his 1975 book "The Invention of Culture." Much of his ethnographic fieldwo...

Paul Sillitoe is a British anthropologist and professor in Durham University's Anthropology Department. His research examines human-environment relations, local resource management, farming systems, indigenous knowledge, livelihoods, technology, conservation, and ethnoscience, with extensive fieldwo...

Deborah Gewertz is an American anthropologist whose ethnographic work focuses on social life in Papua New Guinea, especially among the Chambri people of the Sepik region. Her research examines exchange, gender, political change, and the ways local communities respond to economic transformation and g...

Reo Fortune was a New Zealand social anthropologist whose fieldwork in Melanesia included research on Dobu in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea. His book Sorcerers of Dobu, published in 1932, described social relations, exchange, religion, and sorcery in Dobuan life and became an important ethno...

Chris Gregory is an Australian economic anthropologist whose 1982 book "Gifts and Commodities" established him as a major theoretical voice in the discipline. The work offered a profound analysis of the distinctions between gift and commodity exchange, drawing heavily on his fieldwork in Papua New G...

Camilla Hildegarde Wedgwood was a British anthropologist and educationist who conducted fieldwork on Manam, a volcanic island off the north coast of New Guinea, in 1932-34. Her research examined the lives of women and children, and she also worked on Nauru. In 1944-45, she served in Australian gover...

Frederick Errington is an American cultural anthropologist known especially for collaborative ethnographic work with Deborah Gewertz. Their research examined social organization, exchange, class formation, economic change, and ideas of modernity in Papua New Guinea, including the effects of colonial...

Hortense Powdermaker was an American cultural anthropologist whose research spanned diverse subjects and geographic locations. She is recognized for applying ethnographic fieldwork techniques, originally trained under Bronisław Malinowski, to study communities ranging from a Melanesian island to a t...

The Bismarck Hawk-Owl (Ninox variegata) is a medium-sized owl species endemic to the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea. Measuring approximately 30–33 cm in length, it features distinctive variegated brown-and-white plumage that provides camouflage in its forest habitat. Unlike many owl specie...

The Kingdom of Fiji was a short-lived sovereign state in the South Pacific that existed from 1871 to 1874. Established under the rule of King Seru Epenisa Cakobau, it was notable as the first unified government of the Fijian islands. The constitutional monarchy struggled with internal conflicts amon...

Charles Gabriel Seligman was a British physician, ethnologist, and anthropologist associated with the London School of Economics. He conducted fieldwork in Sri Lanka, Sudan, and other regions, and wrote about the peoples and cultures of Africa, Melanesia, and the eastern Mediterranean. His 1930 book...

New Caledonia Savanna refers to open grassland and niaouli woodland ecosystems found on New Caledonia, the French Pacific archipelago. Their present distribution and structure reflect substantial human influence, especially repeated burning and land modification, rather than representing an untouche...