ISBN : 9782296113039
ON THE HISTORICAL REALITY OF CULTURAL DISTINCTIONS IN OCEANIAIAN C. CAMPBELL
The Conventional Partition of Oceania
Oceania is conventionally divided into three parts in a classification
attributed to the French explorer Dumont D'Urville in the 1830s. Nomenclature
remained loose and was inconsistently applied for most of the nineteenth century,
but by the beginning of the twentieth the distinctions between Melanesia, Polynesia
and Micronesia were generally accepted and with a marked consistency in the
recognition of where the boundaries should fall. Places on the margins such as the
Gilbert Islands and Fiji were classified consistently, in these cases, as Micronesian
and Melanesian respectively. For most of the following century, the tripartite
division was an article of faith among all types of people who had anything to do
with Oceania. It was as much populist and political as it was ethnographic. In the
later part of the twentieth century, however, it was occasionally called into question
by anthropologists who in looking at margin