The European members of the London Missionary Society created a discourse about the pioneering mission to New Guinea that lauded British evangelists as heroes and relegated Polynesian teachers to a secondary status as helpers. This paper explores the connections between this discourse and the more ambiguous archival records that have been left behind in order to suggest reasons for the exaggeration of British heroism in a mission that was largely carried out by Polynesian evangelists. Processes of mimesis (stylistic copying) and appropriation (theft of other peoplefs cultural forms) are analyzed in relation to the construction of human responsibility in the early New Guinea mission, especially in regard to the ways that British missionaries attempted to block their readers back home in England from understanding that Polynesian teachers might be moving from the mimicry of eEnglish stylef evangelism to the assumption of their own style of mission leadership in New Guinea.
Key Words: missionaries; Papua New Guinea; mimesis; Polynesian teachers; discourse; heroism.
Twenty-seven mandibles from precontact sites on three Marshall Islands atolls were examined to determine the presence of post-settlement human interaction between eastern Micronesia and West Polynesia. Some 49% of our assemblage were rocker jaws; that is, they had no antegonial notch and the lower border of the mandible was convex so it rocked to and fro when placed on a flat surface. Rocker jaws are more common (50-90%) among Polynesian populations than anywhere else in the world. The relatively high incidence of rocker jaws in the precontact people living on these Micronesian atolls adds further support to the inferred interaction between eastern Micronesia and West Polynesia suggested by shared artifact styles and linguistic affinities.
Key words: skeletal biology; rocker jaws; Micronesia; Polynesia; Marshall Islands; prehistoric archaeology; interaction; radiocarbon dating.
Urine dipstick screening has clarified the overall health conditions of Melanesians who inhabit four less-modernized societies of Solomon Islands and shows that there is a slight inter-village difference in dietary conditions, which may be prognostic of health transitions in relatively modernized villages.
Key Words: urine dipstick test; community health; urinary tract infection; diabetes; modernization; urinary; pH; dietary habit.
The slash and mulch cultivation practiced mainly for producing bananas in the Great Papuan Plateau of Papua New Guinea is a long standing sustainable agricultural method in the tropical rainforest. Its practice is sustained by the social structure of the longhouse community. Recently, however, this longhouse community has been reorganized into a village community based on household units. Along the social changes, sweet potato cultivation using slash and burn method has become characteristic of their subsistence system. For the purpose of examining the subsistence ecology of the slash and mulch method and comparing with sweet potato cultivation in relation to the social changes, this study analyzes the result of the research conducted twice, in 1993 and 1999, among the Bosavi, one of the populations living in the region.
The results show that products of the slash and mulch method still sustain daily nutritional intake of the Bosavi, while sweet potato is consumed less. However, land productivity of the slash and mulch method is lower than sweet potato cultivation. The results suggest that the social change represented by individualistic tendency is related to high land productivity of sweet potato cultivation, which enables smaller producer units to sustain their production in smaller fields.
Key words: banana; sweet potato; slash and mulch; slash and burn; longhouse community; social change; subsistence system.
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