First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Development agencies have for years been seeking a successful universal response to deprivation. Sparked by controversy and debate, the most recent trend is to look for solutions among 'local' or 'indigenous' populations. Nevertheless, resources continue to be wasted in ill-conceived, centrally-imposed schemes that have not only failed to improve matters in lesser-developed countries but have often made them worse. In such instances it is not local knowledge that is problematic, but development agencies' total misinterpretation of it as just one more 'approach' that can be applied...

Melanesia has always been a popular fieldwork site for anthropologists, including Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead. Many of the most important theoretical contributions to anthropology were first formulated with reference to Melanesian studies. This book is intended for undergraduate students with some grounding in the issues and ideas that inform the discipline. It will be useful at an introductory or intermediate level for undergraduate studies in general anthropology, or for courses on Pacific cultures.

This book offers a clear and absorbing account of social change in Melanesia since the arrival of Europeans, covering the colonial period and the history of the new postcolonial states. It discusses economic and technological change, urbanization, the development of the modern state--and the often violent reactions to these dramatic transformations. The book also considers the dilemmas of development that threaten the environment.

This book offers a clear and absorbing account of social change in Melanesia since the arrival of Europeans, covering the colonial period and the history of the new postcolonial states. It discusses economic and technological change, urbanization, the development of the modern state--and the often violent reactions to these dramatic transformations. The book also considers the dilemmas of development that threaten the environment.

A Place Against Time is an ethnographically focused environmental study of Montane, New Guinea, where people were among the world's first to cultivate crops some ten millennia ago, and where today an enduring agricultural condition continues. It arranges its account of climate, vegetation topography and geology according to their relationship with the soils of the region occupied by Wola speakers in the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea, in the Western Pacific. This book breaks new intellectual ground as an ethno-environmental investigation with a soils perspective,...

Melanesia has always been a popular fieldwork site for anthropologists, including Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead. Many of the most important theoretical contributions to anthropology were first formulated with reference to Melanesian studies. This book is intended for undergraduate students with some grounding in the issues and ideas that inform the discipline. It will be useful at an introductory or intermediate level for undergraduate studies in general anthropology, or for courses on Pacific cultures.