Talk:Trobriand Islands

Government station vs. village of hereditary paramout chief

It's inappropriate to refer to Losuia merely as the main settlement of Kiriwina. Its the government station, and in a population of traditional indigenous landowners, it's quite a different thing. It would be better to distinguish between Losuia, the government station and seat of the Kiriwina-Goodenough electorate and Kiriwina government council, as against Omarakana, the village of the hereditary paramount chief.

In general there are some basic research into the history and current life of Kiriwina would help make this more relevant to readers.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.54.55.86 (talk • contribs) 15:13, May 6, 2005 (UTC)

If you feel a change is needed, feel free to make it yourself! Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone (yourself included) can edit any article by following the Edit this page link. You don't even need to log in, although there are several reasons why you might want to. Wikipedia convention is to be bold and not be afraid of making mistakes. If you're not sure how editing works, have a look at How to edit a page, or try out the Sandbox to test your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. — Trilobite (Talk) 14:27, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Society

The following was taken from the incest article and should probably be incorporated: For example, Trobriand Islanders prohibit both sexual relations between a man and his mother, and between a woman and her father, but they describe these prohibitions in very different ways: relations between a man and his mother fall within the category of forbidden relations among members of the same clan; relations between a woman and her father do not. This is because the Trobrianders are matrilineal; children belong to the clan of their mother and not of their father. Thus, sexual relations between a man and his mother's sister (and mother's sister's daughter) are also considered incestuous, but relations between a man and his father's sister are not. Indeed, a man and his father's sister will often have a flirtatious relationship, and a man and the daughter of his father's sister may prefer to have sexual relations or marry. Anthropologists have hypothesized that in these societies, the incest taboo reinforces the rule of exogamy, and thus ensures that social ties between clans or lineages will be maintained through intermarriage. The Jade Knight 06:37, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Malinowski

This diff ripped out this...

Less 'scientific' interest followed after Malinowski's later The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929) which, somewhat incorrectly, painted the islands as a sexual utopia where teenagers are free to experiment with sex, women rarely know the father of their children, and during the yearly Yam Festival groups of women rape men.

and replaced it with this:

His descriptions of the Kula exchange system, gardening, magic and sexual practices, all classics of modern anthropological writing, prompted many foreign researchers to visit the societies of the island group and study other aspects of their cultures.

...which is, strictly speaking, "correct" but manages entirely omit both reasons why Malinowski's writings were so controversial. I'm not an anthropologist, but perhaps somebody more familiar with the subject could give a nutshell summary of the whole saga? Jpatokal 09:17, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

This diff ..... your change made this article far less readable, people come here for a racy read. ~ — Preceding unsigned comment added by AndrewHart500 (talk • contribs) 10:32, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

Trobriander understanding of sex and pregnancy.

Under the People topic it says: Even today, the Trobriand Islanders refuse to believe in the link between sex and pregnancy, instead believing that women are infused with spirits from the nearby island of Tuma, where people's spirits go after they die. Some believe this is because the yam, a major food of the island, includes chemicals whose effects are contraceptive, so the practical link between sex and pregnancy is far less clear to the islanders.[1]

This statement is an oversimplification of the Trobrianders understanding of sex and pregnancy, in her ethnography The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea Annette B. Weiner talks about this topic “With exposure that quite a few Trobrianders have had to primary and secondary education, many villagers now are well acquainted with the biological facts of procreation. Yet even among those who attend school, not all reject completely such traditional beliefs, which they often use to their own advantage.” (Weiner 1988:5)

Weiner, A. B. (1988) The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Thompson/Wadsworth Publishing Company. ISBN 0030119197

--Chortle316 14:07, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

move to Kiriwina Islands?

If the official name is Kiriwina Islands, shouldn't Kiriwina Islands be the main article page, with Trobriand Islands redirecting to it (instead of the other way around, as it is now)? — eitch 15:27, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Trobriand Islands is far better known in English, I get 6x more Google hits for the term. Jpatokal (talk) 03:45, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I actually get a much bigger difference than that. However:

-A quick look at the results shows that several of the pages call them Trobriand because WP does.

-No matter what, we're talking about very very few hits — so Trobriand may be better known than Kiriwina, but neither is well known in the first place

If it's true (hopefully someone knows — I can't find a good reference) that the name is officially Kiriwina, then Trobriand is not only no longer the name, but a tip of the hat to colonialism.

This is going to come up in other articles, I'm sure, so I'm moving the question over to the guidelines discussion page.

It seems clear to me that "Trobriand Islands" is the "widely accepted English name" of WP:NCGN. Thanks to Malinowski's work, the islands are far better known than the average PNG archipelago; I get ~70,000 hits for them, compared to (say) all of 517 for the St. Matthias Islands. Jpatokal (talk) 05:02, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

The Trobriand of Papua New Guinea

Should this not be incorporated into the main page on the Trobriand Islands? It is not so well written and there is quite a bit of duplication.Roundtheworld (talk) 14:10, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

false beliefs "magic"?

are false beliefs, even ones that have to do with the supernatural, all to be categorized as "magic"?

"A Trobriand woman is thought to be pregnant when an ancestral spirit enters her body and causes conception. Even after a child is born, it is the mother's brother, not the father, who presents a harvest of yams to his sister so that her child will be fed with food from its own matrilineage, not the father's.[2]"

Malinowski himself wrote one of the best works on the subject, and the distinction, "Magic, Science and Religion," in which he demonstrates that religion is not a subcategory of magic, but is distinct from it.

Keep in mind that appeals to dictionary definitions can easily lead one astray, since they are based on how people, including subgroups, use words.

Religious people hardly ever categorize their beliefs as "magic," but instead it tends overwhelmingly to be non-believers who do so, and not specialists in the field, either. the word is used pejoratively by atheists, instead, often with the conscious intention to stigmatize religious beliefs.

To use one of Malinowski's many distinctions, the belief that spirits cause pregnancy is not magic, by definition, because magic always practical, that it, it is performed to fulfill some specific human desire. On the other hand, the belief that spirits cause pregnancy is theoretical in contradistinction to practical. it explains something that seems to happen that is beyond human control.

instead, it mythological, although of course witchcraft and magic have explanatory mythologies, too.

For this work how did you find reliable sources especially when pertaining to Malinowski's researchKiralopez13 (talk) 16:39, 6 February 2019 (UTC).

2601:18A:8100:9BDA:BCED:49C8:EA7D:53FA (talk) 21:40, 19 August 2015 (UTC) Michael Christian