In some parts of Melanesia, male-female relationships were polarized. In New Guinea a zone of extreme polarization extended from the Papuan coast (Marind-anim and Asmat peoples) along the southern face of the Highlands (Anga speakers and Papuan plateau peoples) and the high central mountains (Mountain Ok peoples) down into the Sepik. Peoples throughout this zone were preoccupied with ideas about growth and the physical fluids and substances (semen, vaginal fluids, and menstrual blood) that they regarded as agents of reproduction and growth. All of these were seen as inherently powerful and therefore potentially dangerous.

Gender opposition was the basis for this area’s division of labour: as the major food producers for their communities, women ensured the group’s corporeal survival; men ensured the group’s metaphysical survival by engaging in activities meant to control the ineffable, as represented by body fluids and other “strong” substances. These activities emphasized membership in secret single-sex cults in which they practiced ritualized homosexuality, observed elaborate initiation rituals, and celebrated warfare.

Concerns related to reproductive fluids echoed throughout Melanesia in various forms, although relations between the sexes were often seen as complementary rather than conflicting. The central role of women in everyday domestic politics was widely valued and recognized, and in many areas ritual status or local group affiliation was based on maternal as well as paternal links. In addition, women were often accorded importance in ritual and as healers, elders, and ancestors. In the eastern Highlands, gendered cultural traditions included folklore relating to an ancient female power who fell into the hands of men, the physical separation of the sexes, and men’s initiations, cult rituals, use of sacred flutes, and ritualized nose- or penis-bleeding ceremonies (ostensibly in imitation of menstruation). In the Sepik basin, complexes of “pseudoprocreative” ritual accompanied male cult activities.

In the central and western Highlands, where populations were dense and sweet potato and pig production were intensive, men’s lives focused on the politics of extracting female labour, acquiring prestige and power through exchange, and mobilizing armed strength, all of which subordinated their supposed risk of pollution by the female body.

In the Massim area, the reproductive and productive powers of women were represented in social relations and in ideologies of descent and cosmic processes, and in some areas women played prominent parts in certain rituals. Matrilineages (in much of the Massim called susu [“breast” or “breast milk”]) provided symbols of cosmic reproduction as well as physical and social reproduction. While some polarization of the sexes is reported in accounts from the Solomons and Vanuatu, there the sexual segregation of and concerns with ritual pollution seem to have had more to do with the preservation of symbolic boundaries than with inherent dangers attributed to bodily essences.

Kinship and local groups

The societies of precolonial Melanesia characteristically organized themselves into local groups that were based on kinship and descent and linked together by intermarriage. In the usual absence of centralized political institutions, these local groups were relatively autonomous. In most areas they were relatively small, having between 20 and 100 members. In densely settled areas of the New Guinea Highlands and parts of the Sepik River area, however, kinship- and descent-based polities were considerably larger.

Under this system, domestic groups or individuals typically held rights over gardens and cultivated trees, while local kin groups held corporate title to the land itself. That is, land was inherited and held collectively by the descendants of those who initially cleared it. Use rights might then be extended to others. In coastal zones, corporate title might also obtain for reefs or fishing grounds. In many areas the relationship between people and land was conceptualized in terms of chains of descent from a group of founding ancestors, the links of which could be reckoned through the male line (patrilineal descent), the female line (matrilineal descent), or some combination thereof (cognatic descent). Patrilineal descent systems prevail in most of lowland New Guinea, northern Vanuatu, and New Caledonia, and matrilineal descent systems are used in much of the Massim, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands. Nevertheless, considerable variation is found within these areas.

Societies of the central and western Highlands of New Guinea have been described as segmentary patrilineal descent systems. The segmentary structures, or phratries—essentially groups of clans that share a mythical ancestor—characteristically use brother-brother and father-son links to represent what were once in fact relatively unstable political alliances. Phratries were important when intergroup warfare was common because they provided a structure through which to conjoin otherwise distantly related groups during a period when the sheer size of local polities was a key to survival. While some groups have continued to emphasize the chains of descent connecting the living to their ancestors, most seem unconcerned with such connections. They use father-son links as the main mechanism of group recruitment but are open to the attachment of refugees and individuals connected through women.

Ties of intermarriage were important in creating and maintaining connections between descent- or kinship-based local groups. Marriages negotiated with enemies made at least temporary allies of them. Where marriage entailed a transfer of rights to a woman’s children and labour from her natal family to that of her husband, it was validated by bridewealth in the form of pigs or other valuables or services. This custom, in which a groom’s family compensates a bride’s family for the loss of her labour and as surety of fair treatment for the bride and any children of the marriage, has remained resilient in much of Melanesia despite Christianity and capitalist economic relationships.

Polygyny, a form of marriage in which two or more wives share a husband, was relatively widespread, at least for prominent leaders. It also tended to perpetuate the social hierarchies within a community, as polygynous families had more productive and reproductive labour with which to accumulate surplus pigs and root crops than did those of their monogamous counterparts. In some areas, as in the Trobriand Islands, polygynous marriages of high-ranking leaders were instruments of political alliance and of tributary relationships between descent-based local groups. For example, in the Trobriands, because a matrilineal subclan was obligated to cultivate yams and ceremonially present them to the husbands of its absent female members, a leader with many wives became a centre of yam distribution. Where polygyny was not practiced, leaders could draw labour from their followers by financing the bridewealth payments of subsidiary families.

Kinship ties created through marriage alliances crosscut and were complementary to divisions based on unilineal descent. In the patrilineally organized societies of lowland New Guinea and island Melanesia, a person’s connection to the mother’s group and ancestors was often recognized in acts of kinship support, in ritual, and in the parts played by the groups in marriages, mortuary ceremonies, and other exchanges. In the matrilineally organized societies of island Melanesia, ties to the father’s relatives were similarly expressed. The complementary parts played by maternal and paternal subclans in Trobriand mortuary rites were particularly complex. Throughout Melanesia, obligations toward kin constituted the ultimate moral imperative. Systems of exchange grew out of kinship obligation. Rights deriving from birth commonly had to be validated by gifts or the fulfillment of obligations.