Anthropology in the Pacific
pp. 110-111 · Read in the full issue
Two New Books Reviewed
npWO additions to the study of an thropology of the South Pacific, have just come from the Oxford Publishing Company, Melbourne. They are “Social Anthropology in Melanesia,” by Professor A. P. Elkin, Professor of Anthropology, Sydney University; and “Social An thropology in Polynesia,” by Dr. Felix M.
Keesing, Professor of Anthropology, Stan ford University, USA.
Both volumes are issued under the auspices of the South Pacific Commission, and are based on research made by the authors for the Commission.
Professor Elkin’s book reviews work done in Melanesia by scientists, missionaries and administrators, and deals with his own work in parts of the region. His thesis is the study of the problem of social and cultural change in all its aspects. Contributions so far made to this study, he says, have been either the planned collection and recording of cultural and social phenomena, or the study of cultures as integrated, or at least interrelated, wholes.
Anthropology, Professor Elkin says, is no longer antiquarian; it is dynamic, and concerned with culture and social structures as a process which is subject to ascertainable laws. He considers that governments responsible for native peoples and the changes which are coming upon them, as well as missionary authorities, should insist on anthropological research
of the kind he recommends, and then act upon it.
Further research is, he considers, needed in localities and amongst peoples where, pre-war, sound research on a functional basis was done by trained anthropologists.
The practical problem is to know what sort of things and what sort of changes can be introduced without causing dis ruption of a people’s life and organisation,
and the conditions under which sura changes can be successfully made.
Professor Elkin describes as “critics; regions” those communities that hav recently passed through a crisis, tM indirect effect of contact. Outward signs of this are depopulation, cargo cults ann similar movements. Depopulation s s symptom mainly of direct attack on thl social structure by the withdrawal o
native labour from village, social, family and economic life; by interference with the accustomed diet or by spread of new diseases. The second symptom, more subtle, arises from the adaptation which the natives decided they have to make to the European, his demands, ideas and power—the adoption of a “double life.”
TAR. KEESING’S book reviews the larger amount of research and study that have been made in the more sophisticated Polynesian areas, and gives an extensive bibliography of literature about Polynesia since European settlement. In the past 30 years, he says, anthropologists have become increasingly dissatisfied with descriptive or “historical” ethnology alone; adding that it misses out some of the dimensions of cultural study, most im portant both for contemporary science and practical application. The need for taking full account of the local settings, of customs and thought among the islanders has, he says, become axiomatic in relation to planning for welfare and development.
He appeals (and in this joins Professor Elkin) for research and study that will »pply itself more closely to matters affect ing the present-day conditions of the Polynesians, and get away from origins of migration, stone-age technologies and now largely obsolete religions which pre >ccupied earlier anthropologists.
Each book is priced at 27/6.