This study focuses on fibre skirts (liku) and associated tattooing (veiqia) worn by indigenous Fijian women in the nineteenth century, highlighting the link between clothing and the adorned human body and the ongoing relevance of museum collections and archives.

Busilmin. If you can imagine the end of the world, Busilmin is it. Busilmin brings the definition of isolated to life. It is this isolation, this remoteness, that defines existence in the depths of the rainforest. Death is life. Life is death. Survival is the bridge. It is into the heart of this seclusion that Mission Aviation Fellowship chooses to fly; into depths of this need that we conveyed our very young family. Out of this beautiful land that we departed with our much older family, and a lifetime of near-unbelievable memories. This is not about planes. The aircraft are only the scenery for the tale. These are the stories of our years in Papua New Guinea. All families have stories. The backdrop for our narrative is the end of the world, and that brings a unique flavour to these accounts. The Sibilanga pig. The bullet at Aiyura. Crocodiles. Rainbows. Strange food. Places with stranger names. All with one thing in common: unpredictable, unforeseen, unanticipated, unexpected.

A two-volume collection of folktales that were published in Papua New Guinea's Wantok newspaper. The two-volume collection presents the complete set of 1047 folktales that were originally published from 1972 through 1997 in Tok Pisin.

Like Fire chronicles an indigenous movement for radical change in Papua New Guinea from 1946 to the present. The movement’s founder, Paliau Maloat, promoted a program for step-by-step social change in which many of his followers also found hope for a miraculous millenarian transformation. Drawing on data collected over several decades, Theodore Schwartz and Michael French Smith describe the movement’s history, Paliau’s transformation from secular reformer and politician to Melanesian Jesus, and the development of the current incarnation of the movement as Wind Nation, a fully millenarian endeavour. Their analysis casts doubt on common ways of understanding a characteristically Melanesian form of millenarianism, the cargo cult, and questions widely accepted ways of interpreting millenarianism in general. They show that to understand the human proclivity for millenarianism we must scrutinise more closely two near-universal human tendencies: difficulty accepting the role of chance or impersonal forces in shaping events (that is, the tendency to personify causation), and a tendency to imagine that one or one’s group is the focus of the malign or benign attention of purposeful entities, from the local to the cosmic. Schwartz and Smith discuss the prevalence of millenarianism and warn against romanticising it, because the millenarian mind can subvert rationality and nourish rage and fear even as it seeks transcendence. ‘Like Fire consummates remarkable longitudinal ethnographic research on the Paliau Movement in Papua New Guinea, pursued from the 1950s into the 1990s by Theodore Schwartz, with Michael French Smith as his sometime assistant, and updated by Smith in 2015. The theoretical arguments are highly provocative and the book is well written and fascinating throughout. Like Fire poses important questions about the driving forces and contours of Pacific Island history and the place in it of cargo cults and other millenarian movements.’ —Aletta Biersack, Professor Emerita, University of Oregon ‘Like Fire synthesises old, but inaccessible, and new material on an important and long-lasting indigenous Melanesian movement, while making extensive use of the wider literature on cargo cults and millenarianism. I find the theorising in this book both very original and an important contribution to the debates on Melanesian religion, cargo cults, and millenarianism more generally. As the authors state, the topic of millenarianism has great relevance because of its ubiquity in the contemporary world.’ —Ton Otto, Professor of Anthropology, Aarhus University, Denmark, and James Cook University, Australia

"Larry W. Jones has written over 3,500 song lyrics with island based themes. Most are in the sytle of the "hapa haole" return-to-paradise tradition of the golden years of Territorial Hawaii"--Volume 7, title page verso

From the earliest accounts of contact with Europeans, Polynesians have been perceived as sensual and sexual beings. By the late 1800s, publications, lectures and stage plays about the Pacific became popular across Europe, and often contained exotic and erotic components. This book details the fusion of truth and fiction in the representation of Pacific Islanders, focusing on the sexualization of Polynesians in American cinema and other forms of mass communications and commercial entertainment. With messaging almost subliminal to American audiences, the Hollywood media machine produced hundreds of tropical film titles with images of revealing grass skirts, scanty sarongs, female toplessness and glistening exposed male pectorals. This critical filmography demonstrates how the concept of "sex sells," especially when applied on a large scale, shaped American social views on Polynesian people and their culture. Chapters document this phenomenon and an annotated filmography of sexualized tropes and several appendices conclude the book, including a glossary of Polynesian terms and a film index.