ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the institutional worlds of public health and biomedicine in Melanesia. Anthropologists have come to know Melanesia as a culturally distinct region in part through the relational concepts of personhood, the body and health that are evinced in its peoples’ everyday social and cultural practices. Understandings, widely held across Melanesia, that the body indexes social relationships and that a person’s ill-health or misfortune usually originate in another person’s acts or intentions (whether a sorcerer, wronged spirit, or envious kinsman), have provided a useful foil for biomedical understandings of disease as originating in nature, and revealed the cultural foundations of biomedical knowledge in Euro-American conceptualisations of the body. Ethnographic literature that noted Melanesian people’s readiness to adopt biomedical knowledge practices alongside, or through subtle accommodations with, traditional medicine also made a significant contribution to early models of medical pluralism and syncretism in medical anthropology. But it is only fairly recently that social scientists have begun to attend to the distinctiveness of Melanesian biomedical knowledge practices in their own right, and the institutional and national imaginaries and social orders that emerged alongside them.
