Melanesian Peoples

In 1832 Jules Dumont d'Urville, a French naval officer and explorer, proposed to the Geographical Society of Paris that the Pacific be divided into Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia. The three names have been in use ever since. His criteria were not the same in each case: Micronesia was defined by the size of the islands, Polynesia by their number, and Melanesia by the appearance of the inhabitants, the name meaning the black islands. That is the basis of this grouping and the atlas states it on the row.

The area it covers, New Guinea, the Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji, is among the most linguistically diverse places on earth: more than a thousand languages, belonging to Austronesian and to a large number of unrelated families collectively called Papuan for want of anything better. There is no common ancestry and no common culture. The category survives because it is administratively convenient, because regional institutions have grown up around it, and because a name in use for two centuries is hard to dislodge, not because anything holds it together. Fiji sits awkwardly inside it, having been assigned to Melanesia on appearance while its language belongs with the Polynesian group's nearest relatives, which is as clear a demonstration as the scheme offers that its criteria and the evidence do not line up.

Two things brought this region a disproportionate share of attention in the study of religion, and both are worth handling carefully. The first is the movements that colonial administrators labelled cargo cults, which arose in various places from the late nineteenth century and intensified around the Second World War, and which anticipated the arrival of goods and a transformed order. The label was dismissive, it lumped very different movements together, and specialists have largely abandoned it: what it covered was in most cases a serious religious and political response to an overwhelming intrusion, and reading it as bewilderment at aeroplanes says more about the observer. The second is sorcery.

Belief in sorcery and witchcraft is widespread across the region, and accusations have led to violence, including killings, which national governments, churches and local organisations are actively working on. The atlas records that as a present social and legal matter rather than as ethnographic colour, because it is one. Neither subject is what religion in Melanesia mainly consists of. The area holds a large number of distinct traditions and a very substantial Christian population, and both of those are the ordinary case.