The Netherlands and Oceania: a summary of research

Abstract

There is a considerable quantitative difference between the research conducted since World War I1 by Dutch anthropologists and linguists in West New Guinea and their activities in and pertaining to other areas in Oceania, whose relations with The Netherlands were few if, in most cases, any.A few studies were made on genera1 subjects relating to one of the sub-areas of Oceania or to Oceania as a whole, such as the origin of the Polynesians and the problem of prehistoric migrations and the peopling of Oceania.In addition field research was done in Melanesian areas -Papua New Guinea, New Britainand in Fiji, as wel1 as among the Australian Aborigines.Dutch demographers, however, whose activities in the Pacific area originally were also restricted to West New Guinea, afterwards occupied themselves with other parts of Oceania to a much higher degree than anthropologists and linguists.Demographic research was conducted in a number of regions in Melanesia, in Fiji and in Polynesia.The publications by anthropologists, linguists and demographers will be dealt with in three separate sections.2In each of these sections the list of publications will be preceded by an Introduction.The availabIe material for the bibliographies was selected according to relevance and accessibility, which implies that publications put out for internal use, stencilled reports, letters to editors of newspapers, and the like, were not included.3This applies also to b o k reviews.Articles with reference to other publications, the so-called review articles, on the other hand, are mentioned.In addition to printed publications, films of ethnographic interest made by Dutch researchers are listed.As regards the classification of rthe bibliographical data, there was a choice out of three possibilities, viz. a regional classification, a subject one, and an author one.A regional classification would have implied a division of the bibliography int0 a number of separate sections each listing the material dealing with a given single region and headed by the name of that region, viz.West New Guinea, the main-island part of Papua New Guinea, the other Melanesian islands, etc.For a subject classification the subject of each book or article would have been the decisive criterion for inclusion.Here one could imagine sections with such headings as 'monographs as the outcome of field research', 'publi-2 The anthropological bibliography aIso lists a few articles in the field of archaeology.These are the outcome of research carried out in a few scattered places in West New Guinea by anthropologists who had not been trained in that discipline and for whom this research was a side-line to their anthropo-logica1 activities.These articles will therefore be mentioned within the framework of the authors' anthropological publications.3 An exception was made for the mimeographed Bibliographie van Nederlands-Nieuw-Guinea b y Klaas W. Galis.

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