ABSTRACT

The study of gender and sexuality in Melanesia has long been structured in terms of the theoretical concerns of anthropology as a discipline. The first specific study of the subject was Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929). Malinowski maintained that the matrilineal structure of kinship in the Trobriand Islands, in which the mother’s brother was an authority figure, meant that Freud’s ‘Oedipus complex’ was not a universal psychological phase in human development, but a product of a specific kinship system and the social relationships it generated.