Trobriand Islands
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The Trobriand Islands (today officially known as the Kiriwina Islands) are a 170 mi² archipelago of coral atolls off the eastern coast of New Guinea. They are situated in Milne Bay Province in Papua New Guinea. Most of the population of 12,000 indigenous inhabitants live on the main island of Kiriwina, which is also the location of the government station, Losuia. Other major islands in the group are Kaileuna, Vakuta and Kitava. The group is considered to be an important tropical rainforest ecoregion in need of conservation.
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[edit] Geography
The Trobriands consist of four main islands, the largest being Kiriwina island, and the others being Kaileuna, Vakuta and Kitava. Kiriwina is 25 miles long, and varies in width from 2 to 8 miles. In the 1980s, there was around sixty villages upon the island, containing around 12,000 people, whilst the other islands were restricted to a population of hundreds. Other than some elevation on Kiriwina, the islands are flat coral atolls and "remain hot and humid throughout the year, with frequent rainfall."[1]
[edit] People
The people of the area are mostly subsistence horticulturalists who live in traditional settlements. The social structure is based on matrilineal clans who control land and resources. People participate in the regional circuit of exchange of shells called kula, sailing to visit trade partners on seagoing canoes. In the late twentieth century, anti-colonial and cultural autonomy movements gained followers from the Trobriand societies. When inter-group warfare was forbidden by colonial rulers, the islanders developed a unique, aggressive form of cricket.
Although an understanding of reproduction and modern medicine is widespread in Trobriand Society, their traditional beliefs have been remarkably resilient, The real cause of pregnancy is always a baloma, who is inserted into or enters the body of a woman, and without whose existence a woman could not become pregnant; all babies are made or come into existence (ibubulisi) in Tuma. These tenets form the main stratum of what can be termed popular or universal belief. If you question any man, woman, or even an intelligent child, you will obtain from him or her this information. In the past, many held this traditional belief because the yam, a major food of the island, included chemicals (phytoestrogens and plant sterols) whose effects are contraceptive, so the practical link between sex and pregnancy was not very evident.[2]
[edit] Language
The language of the Trobriand peoples is Kilivila, though various different dialects of it are spoken amongst each different tribe. It is an Austronesian language, although has the distinction of having a complex system for classifing nouns. Foreign languages are less commonly spoken, although by the 1980s at least, Melanesian pidgin and English was occasionally spoken by Trobrianders. The term "Trobriand" itself is not Kilivilan, it was instead devised by French explorers.[3]
Drawing upon earlier work by Bronislaw Malinowski, Dorothy D. Lee's scholarly writings refer to "non-lineal codifications of reality." In such a linguistic system, the concept of linear progress of time, geometric shapes, and even conventional methods of description are lost altogether or altered. In her example of a specific indigenous yam, Lee explains that when the yam moves from a state of sprouting to ripeness to over-ripeness, the name for each object in a specific state changes entirely. This is because the description of the object at different states of development are perceived as wholly different objects. Ripeness is considered a "defining ingredient" and thus once it becomes over-ripe, it is a new object altogether. The same perception pertains to time and geometric shapes.[citation needed]
[edit] Food
In Trobriand society, it is taboo to eat in front of others; as Jennifer Shute noted, "the Trobrianders eat alone, retiring to their own hearths with their portions, turning their backs on one another and eating rapidly for fear of being observed."[citation needed] However, it is perfectly acceptable to chew betel nuts, particularly when mixed with some pepper plant and slaked lime to make the nut less bitter. The betel nut acts as a stimulant and is commonly used amongst Trobrianders, causing their teeth to often appear red.[4]
[edit] History
The first European visitor to the islands was the French ship Espérance in 1793; the ship's navigator Bruni d'Entrecasteaux named them after his first lieutenant, Denis de Trobriand. The first European to settle in the Trobriand islands was a Methodist minister who moved to the island of Kiriwina in 1894. He was followed a decade later by colonial officers from Australia who set up a governmental station nearby, and soon a small colony had begun to be set up by foreign traders on the island. Then in the 1930s, the Sacred Heart Catholic Mission set up a settlement containing a primary school nearby. It was following this European colonisation that the name "Trobriander" was legally adopted for this group of islands.[5]
The first anthropologist to study the Trobrianders was C.G. Seligman, who focused his emphasis on the Massim people of mainland New Guinea. Seligman was followed a number of years later by the Polish Bronislaw Malinowski, who visited the islands during the First World War. Despite being a citizen of the Austro-Hungerian empire, which was at war with Australia which then controlled the Trobrians islands, he was allowed to stay.[6] His descriptions of the kula exchange system, gardening, magic and sexual practices, all classics of modern anthropological writing, prompted many foreign researchers to visit the societies of the island group and study other aspects of their cultures. The psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich drew on Malinowski's studies of the islands in writing his The Invasion of Compulsory Sex Morality and consequently in developing his theory of sex economy in his 1936 work Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf.
In 1943, troops landed on the islands as a part of Operation Cartwheel, the Allied advance to Rabaul. In the 1970s, some indigenous peoples formed anti-colonial associations and political movements.
[edit] References
[edit] Books by Malinowski about the Trobriands
- Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)
- The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929).
- Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935).
[edit] Other books about the Trobriands
- The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea (1988) by Annette B. Weiner
- The Happy Isles Of Oceania (1992) by Paul Theroux
[edit] Trobriand Islands in popular culture
- The Trobriand Islands were mentioned in an episode of Married...With Children when Bud Bundy was studying them for an Anthropology final.
- The Trobriand Islands were features in an episode of Worlds Apart on National Geographic Channel
[edit] References
- ^ Weiner, Annette B. (1988). The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. p. 10–11.
- ^ Isabella Tree, "Culture Shock: In the Trobriand Islands the annual yam festival is more than just ordinary.", TravelIntelligence.com
- ^ Weiner, Annette B. (1988). The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. p. 11.
- ^ Weiner, Annette B. (1988). The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. p. 21–22.
- ^ Weiner, Annette B. (1988). The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. p. 11.
- ^ Weiner, Annette B. (1988). The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. p. 1–4.
[edit] External links
- Trobriand Islands Online
- Sorcery and Seduction The Art of Influence in the Trobriands — A travel story about the Trobriands by Roderick Eime
- [1] Lineal and Non-Lineal Codifications of Reality by Dorothy Lee
- Trobriand Islands rain forests (World Wildlife Fund)
- Malinowski fieldwork photographs of the Trobriand Islands (1915–18) held at London School of Economics Archives
Coordinates: 8°40′S 150°55′E / 8.667°S 150.917°E
