ABSTRACT
Melanesians are generally strongly attached to their places and to the entire land-and-seascape. Because of differences in people’s ways of life this attachment is differently perceived, articulated and institutionalised. However, different societies share some fundamental common grounds: their paths and places are not part of some pre-given natural medium or abstract conceptualisation – the ‘space’ of a map, for example – that could be easily dissociated from their bodily engagement with the landscape. To the contrary: space, time, history and kinship as abstract concepts simply seem to be too remote from people’s inter-relational emplaced reality to be useful in tracing Melanesians’ life-worlds.
