The classic reference work that provides annually updated information on the countries of the world.

The classic reference work that provides annually updated information on the countries of the world.

WATRIAMA AND CO (the title echoes Kipling's STALKY AND CO!) is a collection of biographical essays about people associated with the Pacific Islands. It covers a period of almost a century and a half. However, the individual stories of first-hand experience converge to some extent in various ways so as to present a broadly coherent picture of 'Pacific History'. In this, politics, economics and religion overlap. So, too, do indigenous cultures and concerns; together with the activities and interests of the Europeans who ventured into the Pacific and who had a profound, widespread and enduring impact there from the nineteenth century, and who also prompted reactions from the Island peoples. Not least significant in this process is the fact that the Europeans generated a 'paper trail' through which their stories and those of the Islanders (who also contributed to their written record) can be known. Thus, not only are the subjects of the essays to be encountered personally, and within a contextual kinship, but the way in which the past has shaped the future is clearly discernible. Watriama himself features in various historical narratives. So, too, certain of his confreres in this collection, which is the product of several decades of exploring the Pacific past in archives, by sea, and on foot through most of Oceania.

This book is the first comprehensive description of the Manambu language of Papua New Guinea and is based entirely on the author's immersion fieldwork. Manambu belongs to the Ndu language family, and is spoken by about 2,500 people in five villages: Avatip, Yawabak, Malu, Apa:n, and Yambon (Yuanab) in East Sepik Province, Ambunti district. Manambu can be considered an endangered language. The Manambu language has many unusual properties. Every noun is considered masculine or feminine. Feminine gender - which is unmarked - is associated with small size and round shape, and masculine gender with elongated shape, large size, and importance. The Manambu culture is centered on ownership of personal names, and is similar to that of the Iatmul, described by Gregory Bateson. After an introductory account of the language and its speakers, Professor Aikhenvald devotes chapters to phonology, grammatical relations, word classes, gender, semantics, number, case, possession, derivation and compounding, pronouns, morphohology, verbs, mood and modality, negation, clause structure, pragmatics, discourse, semantics, the lexicon, current directions of change, and genetic relationship to other languages. The description is presented in a clear style in a framework that will be comprehensible to all linguists and linguistically oriented anthropologists.

The Ecology of Papua provides a comprehensive review of current scientific knowledge on all aspects of the natural history of western (Indonesian) New Guinea. Designed for students of conservation, environmental workers, and academic researchers, it is a richly detailed text, dense with biogeographical data, historical reference, and fresh insight on this complicated and marvelous region. We hope it will serve to raise awareness of Papua on a global as well as local scale, and to catalyze effective conservation of its most precious natural assets. New Guinea is the largest and highest tropical island, and one of the last great wilderness areas remaining on Earth. Papua, the western half of New Guinea, is noteworthy for its equatorial glaciers, its vast forested floodplains, its imposing central mountain range, its Raja Ampat Archipelago, and its several hundred traditional forest-dwelling societies. One of the wildest places left in the world, Papua possesses extraordinary biological and cultural diversity. Today, Papua’s environment is under threat from growing outside pressures to exploit its expansive forests and to develop large plantations of oil palm and biofuels. It is important that Papua’s leadership balance economic development with good resource management, to ensure the long-term well-being of its culturally diverse populace.

This book, first published in 1949, is the original and key survey of the stages which preceded the use of coins as the medium of exchange, and of the objects that coins displaced, objects which for want of a better name are here called primitive money. It examines in detail the primitive monies of the world, monies from far in the distant past, and monies still in use today. It is the essential reference source on the many different objects used as currency.