Category Archives: Oceania

Australia is the largest country in the region of Oceania. Source: CIA World Factbook, 2007

By Amanda Briney

Oceania is a region of the South Pacific Ocean that consists of many different island groups. It covers an area of over 3.3 million square miles (8.5 million sq km). The island groups within Oceania are both countries and dependencies or territories of other foreign nations. There are 14 countries within Oceania and they range in size from the very large such as Australia (which is a both a continent and a country) to the very small like Nauru.

The following is a list of Oceania's 14 different countries arranged by land area from the largest to the smallest. For reference, the capital city and 2011 estimated population has been included for each. All information in the list was obtained from the CIA World Factbook.

1) Australia Area: 2,988,901 square miles (7,741,220 sq km) Population: 21,766,711 Capital: Canberra

2) Papua New Guinea Area: 178,703 square miles (462,840 sq km) Population: 6,187,591 Capital: Port Moresby

3) New Zealand Area: 103,363 square miles (267,710 sq km) Population: 4,290,347 Capital: Wellington

4) Solomon Islands Area: 11,157 square miles (28,896 sq km) Population: 571,890 Capital: Honiara

5) Fiji Area: 7,055 square miles (18,274 sq km) Population: 883,125 Capital: Suva

6) Vanuatu Area: 4,706 square miles (12,189 sq km) Population: 224,564 Capital: Port-Villa

7) Samoa Area: 1,093 square miles (2,831 sq km) Population: 193,161 Capital: Apia

8) Kiribati Area: 313 square miles (811 sq km) Population: 100,743 Capital: Tarawa

9) Tonga Area: 288 square miles (747 sq km) Population: 105,916 Capital: Nuku'alofa

10) Federated States of Micronesia Area: 271 square miles (702 sq km) Population: 106,836 Capital: Palikir

11) Palau Area: 177 square miles (459 sq km) Population: 20,956 Capital: Melekeok

12) Marshall Islands Area: 70 square miles (181 sq km) Population: 67,182 Capital: Majuro

13) Tuvalu Area: 10 square miles (26 sq km) Population: 10,544 Capital: Funafuti

14) Nauru Area: 8.1 square miles (21 sq km) Population: 9,322 Capital: No Capital

References

Briney, Amanda.

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What are the Seven Wonders of the World

(28 December 2009). "Geographic Profile of Oceania - Learn Important Facts about the World's Oceania Region." Geography at About.com. Retrieved from: http://geography.about.com/od/specificplacesofinterest/a/oceania.htm

Rosenberg, Matt. (n.d.). "Countries of Oceania." Geography at About.com. Retrieved from: http://geography.about.com/library/maps/blrocean.htm

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List of the 14 Countries of Oceania by Area

This is a list of sovereign states and dependent territories in Oceania. Although it is mostly ocean and spans many continental plates, Oceania is often listed with the continents.

This list follows the boundaries of geopolitical Oceania, which includes Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. The main continental landmass of Oceania is Australia.[1]

The boundary between Asia and Oceania is not clearly defined. For political reasons, the United Nations considers the boundary between the two regions to be the IndonesianPapua New Guineaian border.[2] Papua New Guinea is occasionally considered Asian as it neighbours Indonesia, but this is rare, and it is generally accepted to be part of Oceania. Geographically, Papua and West Papua provinces are part of Oceania.

This section includes all sovereign states located in Oceania that are members of the United Nations.[3] All are full members of the Pacific Islands Forum.[4]

Commonwealth of Australia

English: Canberra

English: Palikir

Republic of Fiji

Fijian: Viti Matanitu ko Viti

Fiji Hindi /Fiji - / Ripablik ph Phj

English: Suva

Fijian: Suva

Fiji Hindi: Suva

Republic of Kiribati

Gilbertese: Kiribati Ribaberiki Kiribati

English: Tarawa

English: Bairiki

Republic of the Marshall Islands

Marshallese: Aeln in Maje - Aolepn Aorkin Maje

English: Majuro

Republic of Nauru

Nauruan: Naoero - Repubrikin Naoero

Mori: Aotearoa

English: Wellington

Republic of Palau

Palauan: Belau Beluu er a Belau

English: Ngerulmud

Palauan: Ngerulmud

Independent State of Papua New Guinea

Tok Pisin: Papua Niugini Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini

English: Port Moresby

Independent State of Samoa

Samoan: Samoa Malo Saoloto Tuto'atasi o Samoa

English: Apia

Samoan: Apia

English: Honiara

Kingdom of Tonga

Tongan: Tonga Pule'anga Tonga

English: Nuku'alofa

Tongan: Nuku'alofa

Tuvaluan: Tuvalu

English: Funafuti

Republic of Vanuatu

English: Vanuatu Republic of Vanuatu

French: Vanuatu Rpublique de Vanuatu

Bislama: Port Vila

English: Port Vila

French: Port-Vila

The two entries in this section (Cook Islands and Niue) are states in free association with New Zealand. While maintaining a close constitutional and political relationship with New Zealand, both states are members of several United Nations specialized agencies with full treaty-making capacity, and have independently engaged in diplomatic relations with sovereign states under their own name. Both are also full members of the Pacific Islands Forum. Because of these features, they are sometimes considered to have de facto status as sovereign states.[12]

The following are entities considered to be within Oceania which are either:

1. Federal territories of sovereign states located outside these states' mainland.

2. Territories that constitute integral parts of sovereign states in some form other than a federal relationship, where a significant part of the sovereign state's landmass is located outside Oceania or the territory is located outside the sovereign state's mainland. Many of these territories are often described as dependencies or autonomous areas.

3. Dependent territories of sovereign states.

Two of these territories (French Polynesia and New Caledonia) are associate members of the Pacific Islands Forum, while five others (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Tokelau and Wallis and Futuna) hold observer status within the organization.

Territory of American Samoa[7]

Samoan: Amerika Smoa

Territory of Ashmore and Cartier Islands

Coral Sea Islands Territory

Rapa Nui: Rapa Nui

Overseas Lands of French Polynesia[7]

Territory of Guam

Chamorro: Guahan[5]

State of Hawaii

Hawaiian: Hawaii Mokuina o Hawaii

Territory of New Caledonia and Dependencies

Territory of Norfolk Island[7]

Norfuk: Teratri of Norf'k Ailen

Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands[7]

Chamorro: Islas Marinas Sankattan Siha Na Islas Marinas

Pitcairn Group of Islands

Pitkern: Pitkern Ailen

English: Tokelau

Territory of the Wallis and Futuna Islands

West Papua Province

See original here:

List of sovereign states and dependent territories in Oceania ...

Geography

Ethnology

Ethnography of Australia

Ethnography of island Oceania

History of European contact

Social science research in Oceania

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Oceania refers to Australia and to those Pacific islands situated between (and including) the Hawaiian archipelago and the Marianas Islands in the north, Easter Island in the east, New Zealand in the south, and New Guinea in the west. These boundaries are essentially ethnological and, in some respects, arbitrary. Although only a few scholars think that there have been significant human interchangesbiological or culturalbetween this region and the Americas, the western boundary is anything but sharp. Prior to the colonial era people of the Marianas and West Carolines seem to have had little or nothing in common with the Ryukyuans to the north, but their past relations with the Philippines are clearly demonstrable in language, culture, and physique. Links between New Guinea and islands west of it are even more evident; in fact, the Moluccas constitute something of a transition zone.

Our concern with the physical environment of Oceania is twofold. First of all, we are interested in those environmental features which have had some relevance to the social behavior of peoples with nonmetallic technologies, nonurban settlement patterns, and largely nonscientific ideologies. For such peoples the presence or absence of mineral deposits, deep harbors, or natural grazing pastures was largely irrelevant, but these very factors did become relevant to native behavior through the intermediacy of alien whites and Asians.

For the native Oceanians the region provided a wide range of natural assets as well as a formidable array of liabilities (Oliver 1951). In Australia, the climate nowhere reached such extremes as to render any large zone entirely uninhabitable. In fact, the populace tended to concentrate, regardless of climate, in places where natural foods were most abundant, i.e., in the humid and tropical north as well as in the temperate southeast. The natural foods relied upon by the hunting and gathering peoples included kangaroos, cassowaries, snakes, lizards, turtles, fish, grubs, fruits, roots, seedsin fact, almost everything the land and water produced that was even conceivably edible. The Australians direct and, one might say, indiscriminately total reliance upon the continents given resources for their subsistence may help to explain many of the similarities among aboriginal cultures noted by most students. But by the same token, local differences in the kinds and quantities of those resources also resulted in the development of some regional differences in other domains of cultural life.

Unlike the Australians, other islanders were primarily gardeners; hence the factors of rainfall, topography, and soil were of more immediate importance than direct availability of wild plants and animals. The islands of Oceania may be divided into several more or less distinctive types in regard to these features.

The continental islands are New Guinea, New Britain, New Ireland, Bougainville, and the mountainous archipelagoes which culminate in Fiji in the east and New Zealand in the south. These islands rise from a vast submarine platform which extends outward from Asia. The bold relief and wide,diversity of soil types, coupled with local differences in climate, have produced numerous sharply distinctive natural areas: bleak mountain summits, fern-forested uplands, grassy plateaus and high valleys, magnificent rain forests, scrubby jungles, riverine swamps, foothills, sandy coastal shelves, flat offshore reef islets, etc. This geographic diversity has contributed to the cultural diversity which is a hallmark of this portion of Oceania.

The remaining islands of Oceania are much smaller, more dispersed, and consist of just three basic landforms: high volcanic peaks, low coralline atolls, and raised-coral pancakesor combinations of these, each affected by differences in age, weathering, and climate. In addition, the proximity to supplies of marine food has served, in some places, to reduce the direct dependence upon soil.

Opportunities for formulating and testing hypotheses about human behavior are enhanced by the insular nature of the region, which provides the researcher with laboratorylike controls found in few other regions of the world. In island Oceania wide stretches of ocean or hazardous natural barriers helped to isolate human communities from one another for years or even centuries at a stretch; and the Australians, although in contact with each other, were themselves more or less isolated from the rest of humanity for many thousands of years. But before describing the uses that social scientists have made of data obtained in Oceania, we shall sketch the outline of mankinds history in the area, as reconstructed by archeologists, linguists, and ethnologists. This reconstruction is, of course, immensely interesting in itself as a chronicle of some fascinating chapters of human history; but its relevance in this article consists of the light it can shed about some of the events whose sequels provide social science with such varied and amenable resources for research.

Skeletal fragments and crude stone artifacts found on Java demonstrate that tool-making hominids inhabited at least the Greater Sunda Islands as early as the first interglacial period, but the oldest human remains yet found in Oceania (i.e., in Australia) go back no further than ten to fourteen millennia. Since archeology is just beginning in Australia and New Guinea, it is reasonable to anticipate some deepening of their chronologies in due course. But it is interesting and probably indicative that no excavations carried out elsewhere in Oceania have revealed traces of humanity dating back beyond 3,500 years ago. It is simply unlikely that much earlier than that there were any boats in the western Pacific capable of reaching such places as Hawaii, New Zealand, or even Fiji. And as for movements from the east, I stated at the outset my firm belief that Oceanias populations and cultures derived ultimately from the southern and eastern shores of Asia. There may well have been added a few genes and a few culture traits from the Americas, but if such were the case they were relatively late and comparatively insignificant.

There is no demonstrable basis for linking race with intellectual potential, but raceor at least its visible criteriahas some relevance to the student of social behavior in Oceania. It has figured, for example, in natives estimates of each other; and it has greatly influenced whites attitudes towards natives (e.g., the light-skinned, straight-haired peoples of Polynesia have by and large been treated with less contempt than their darker-skinned neighbors of Australia and the western islands). But knowledge of the genetic composition of Oceanias population could conceivably also provide helpful clues concerning culture history.

Few systematic studies of race have been carried out in Oceania, save in Australia and southeastern Polynesia, and the specialists differ in their interpretations of the findings. Although there is nearly universal agreement upon Asias having been the source of Oceanias populations, there is no consensus concerning the identity or the sequence of the several genetic strains that are evidently present in these populations.

There is a difference of opinion even with respect to the make-up of Australias quite distinctive aboriginal populationthe dark-skinned, curly-(not frizzly) haired individuals with massive browridges and low, broad noses. On the basis of some marked regional differences in physical features, some specialists posit three separate racial components: a short-statured negroid type; a larger-bodied, lighter-pigmented, more hirsute type reminiscent of the Ainu of northern Japan; and a more slender, dark-skinned, curly-haired type similar to the Veddas of Ceylon. According to this view, these three types arrived in separate waves or tricklesand have interbred somewhat, but not homogeneously, during the succeeding millennia. According to another view, the aborigines were of the same race to begin with and have developed their regional differences since arrival on the subcontinent. For the social scientist these contrary views are not without relevance: if the population can be shown to be tri-hybrid in origin, researches will logically focus on explaining the many cultural similarities found throughout the continent and vice versa.

For the rest of Oceania the racial composition is even more complex and variously interpreted. The archipelagoes containing the so-called continental islands, from New Guinea to New Caledonia and Fiji (but not New Zealand), are inhabited mainly by populations with frizzier hair and somewhat darker skin colors than possessed by their neighbors to the north, east, and south. This circumstance has led to the area being labeled Melanesia (black islands), a term which is rather inaccurate and has proved to be mischievously misleading. In the first place, although there are many dark brown and even coal black populations within Melanesia, there are also many others no more heavily pigmented than, say, natives of Tahiti or Tonga. Second, this regional division based on somatic criteria has been arbitrarily perpetuated by ethnologists in the cultural sphere.

Within Melanesia the range of racial types (or subtypes) is very wide. Stature ranges from pygmoid to tall, pigmentation from light copper to jet black, prognathism from absent to pronounced, etc., and there are no obvious correlations, direct or inverse, between these attributes. Some populations look remarkably Australian (except for hair forms), others like frizzly-haired Mongoloids, and still others (with light pigmentation and high, beaklike noses) resemble no other physical types anywhere.

Elsewhere in Oceaniain the far-flung archipelagoes of Micronesia and Polynesiaphysical types tend to be more uniform: the population becomes more Mongoloid and less Negroid; but the similarities (and differences) are not distributed in clear enough patterns to provide the specialists with unambiguous historical clues.

In fact, there is enough ambiguity in the racial data available for Oceania to permit any number of different historical reconstructions (including one that posits an American Indian component: Asia, after all, is the ultimate source of Oceanians and Amerindians). One reconstruction, derived from the tri-hybrid Australian scheme, proposes a succession of racial immigrations of the following order: Ainoid, Pygmy Negritoid, Veddoid, and Mongoloid. Another scheme includes Australoids (undifferentiated), both pygmy and full-statured Negroids, and Mongoloids. Still others (for somewhat gratuitous reasons) believe a so-called Caucasoid element to be present, especially in the populations of Polynesia.

Weighing all these alternatives, it seems least uncertain, and geographically most logical, that Australia and Melanesia were the first to be peopled, and by some combination of Negroids (short, or short and tall) and Australoids (or Ainoids-Veddoids); and that these separate strains interbred in varying degrees in different places. Nor is it unreasonable to believe that Mongoloid strains were the last to appear, leaving their genetic traces along the route, or routes.

It is unlikely that archeologists will ever turn up enough skeletal remains to permit a detailed reconstruction of Oceanias whole racial history, and social scientists searching for precise and longrange historical guidelines cannot expect much help from this direction. However, the small sizes and relatively great isolation of so many of Oceanias populations render them ideal laboratories for studying microevolutionary phenomena e.g., the relationship between physical variance, on the one hand, and social structure, ecology, or epidemiology, on the other. Here, indeed, are to be found ideal opportunities for anthropologists to practice what they preach about their concern with both cultural and biological aspects of mankind.

The languages spoken by the Oceanians comprise three great categories: Australian, Austronesian, and non-Austronesian (Capell 1962; Klieneberger 1957). Quite apart from the intrinsic interest of the subject matter, the study of these languages, both descriptively and historically, is relevant to social science inquiry. Not only is knowledge of the local vernacular indispensable for all but the most superficial field research in any Oceanic society, but ethnographersand especially those who have worked in Oceaniawould probably agree that a societys language is a very important part of its cultural inventory. And on the historical side, findings about language relationships, genetic and acculturational, provide the best evidence we have for culture-historical reconstruction in generaland hence for comparative studies of social behavior.

The native languages of Australia (including Tasmania) differ markedly among themselves in structure and vocabulary, but their outstanding student, Arthur Capell, considers them members of the same family (1956). Numerous attempts have been made to trace their relationships outside Australia; so far these efforts have proved unconvincing, but it would not be surprising if future research were to turn up some links with non-Austronesian languages of neighboring New Guinea.

Prior to the spread of English, Spanish, and French in recent centuries, Austronesian was the most far-flung family of languages in the world: its speakers were spread from Formosa and Malaya to Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand (one of its western languages even became established on Madagascar). Outside Australia and certain parts of the continental islands, all the languages of Oceania are to be classified within this great family.

For many decades it was the conventional practice of linguists to subdivide this family into four major (and implicitly more or less coordinate) branches:Indonesian (including Malay and all the Austronesian languages of the Philippines, the Sunda Islands, the Moluccas, etc., along with Malagasy (Madagascar), Cham (Cambodia), Li (Hainan),Jarai (Vietnam), Lati (southwest China), etc.;Micronesian (all the languages of Palau, the Marianas Islands, Caroline Islands, Marshall Islands, and Gilbert Islands); Polynesian (all the languages of Hawaii, Tonga, Samoa, New Zealand, Tahiti, Easter Island, etc.); and Melanesian (all Austronesian languages of New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Fijiexcept for certain Polynesian language outlierswithin the geographic zone of Melanesia). Thus the practice of subdividing Oceania according to so-called racial (Melanesia, black islands) or geographic criteria (Micronesia, small islandsPolynesia, many islands) was somewhat arbitrarily carried over into linguistic classification and, as will be seen, into general cultural classification as well.

Recent developments in linguistic science, including lexicostatistics and new methods of data processing, have stimulated a reappraisal of this conventional scheme (Capell 1962; Grace 1964).There is anything but consensus among the many linguists now studying Austronesiansome depend almost wholly on lexical data for their results;others insist that grammatical considerations must also be taken into accountbut the older fourclass scheme has been generally abandoned. It is now acknowledged that the languages of the Marianas Islands, Palau, and Yap are closer to those of the Philippines than to any in Oceania itself. There is also common agreement that the several Polynesian languages (or dialects) are far too alike to justify placing them in a genetic position coordinate with the many widely varying languages of Melanesia. It is in connection with the latter that the specialists are in least agreement. According to one view they remain something of a genetically separate unit more or less coordinate with a comparable unit of Indonesian while in another scheme they are classified into a dozen or more units of the subfamily order of branching. Alsoand this has a direct bearing on long-range perspectives of social changesome writers view the Austronesian languages of Melanesia as fusions of the areas numerous aboriginal(and non-Austronesian) languages with immigrant (and, implicitly, quite uniform) Austronesian tongues: this is the pidginization theory, so called by analogy with present-day Melanesian pidgin, the contact language between Oceanians and whites throughout most of Melanesia. This view has been sharply challenged, both on linguistic and culture-historical grounds.

In fact, among the Austronesian languages of Oceania it is only with respect to the closely interrelated Polynesian subgroup that historical relationships have been sufficiently established to provide the social scientist with bases for some controlled comparisons of social and cultural systems. One can better appreciate the attractive possibilities for this kind of research by taking note of the likelihood, suggested by lexicostatistics, that all the known Polynesian languages derive from a single language which began branching not much more than two thousand years ago, and that during their subsequent histories many of them had no contact with non-Polynesian speech.

The label non-Austronesian has been given to those languages of island Oceania not classifiable as Austronesian; they are to be found on New Guinea, New Britain, New Ireland, and the northwest Solomon Islands, as well as on Halmahera and other islands of eastern Indonesia. From their distributionmainly in the interiors of the large west Melanesian Islandsit has generally been assumed that they are survivors of the tongues spoken in this region before the spread of Austronesian. Unlike the Austronesian family and the languages of Australia, the non-Austronesian languages have so far resisted the efforts of linguists to link them into a single genetically interrelated unit, although they do not appear to be quite so fragmented as was once believed. In New Guinea, for example, linguists have discovered in the eastern highlands a very extensive stock comprising some 750,000 speakers (Capell 1962); other such unities are likely to emerge as more professional linguists turn their attention to parts of Oceania where the native languages have not even been recorded, much less studied.

Australian aborigines (Elkin 1938; Berndt 1965) got their food by hunting, fishing, and collecting;despite occasional contacts with Macassarese and Papuans they appear never to have adopted agriculture. And although they kept more or less tame dogs that helped them hunt larger game, they raised no animals for food. Men hunted (and fought) with spears, clubs, throwing sticks, or, in some areas, bows and arrows; women grubbed up roots and insects with digging sticks. Life was nomadic, in pursuit of widely scattered and seasonally variable food supplies; shelters were temporary, makeshift affairs. Some of the artifacts were fashioned out of stone, bone, and shell, but plants provided the materials for most objects of daily life.

It has been estimated that at the time of initial European colonization some two hundred years ago, there were no more than about 300,000 people inhabiting Australiaprobably a fairly stable figure in view of their seemingly unchanging technology and their millennia-long residence. It is not unlikely that the distribution of the population had also reached a point of stability in adjustment to the continents several geographic zones, with the heaviest concentrations in the temperate southeast and tropical north and the lightest in the arid interior. Some three hundred languages are said to have been spoken in Australia, but these were not necessarily contiguous with cultural or political distinctions.

The nuclear family, modally if not normatively monogamous, was the basic residential unit of society. In some areas, and during certain parts of the natural seasonal cycle, individual families traveled separately, and although males and females contributed differently, food was usually shared. When the availability of food permitted, but also for social and ritual purposes, several families congregated into bands (or hordes)of various sizes and degrees of integration.

In addition to families and bands, Australian societies were divided into various other kinds of social units based on locality, kinship, age, and sex or combinations of these factors. One relatively simple and fairly widespread kinship structure consisted of unilinear and exogamous moieties. Societies were sometimes divided into four or eight such parts. In the view of some analysts these arrangements functioned mainly to regulate marriages, while other writers consider them to be classificacation devices for the convenient ordering of ones numerous kinfolki.e., all other members of ones community.

The factor of age also received emphasis in almost all aboriginal societies. Particularly for males, the cycle of growing up and aging was associated with a series of ritual events. These were carried out within the context of localized all-male sodality that was stratified into more or less agegraded subgroups. Some of these rituals included extreme forms of body mutilation (e.g., subincision of the penis) along with ceremonial dances and recitations of great religious depth and drama. The form and content of these rituals, along with their theological connotations and their social functions, varied considerably from place to place; but they were widespread enough and similar enough to be considered a very characteristicbut of course, not distinctivefeature of aboriginal Australian culture.

Another characteristic feature of Australian life was the absence of anything approaching occupational specialization. Individual differences in skill and knowledge and stamina were recognized, but expert hunters, warriors, artists, magicians, flintknappers, etc., were not relieved of the ordinary chores of subsistence, and they received few material rewards for their specialties. Some individuals undoubtedly produced goods that were surplus to their own families subsistence needssuch things as stone spear points, cordage, mineral pigmentsor benefited from occasional windfalls of meat or fish. The limited local exchange and long-distance trade of these goods were usually carried out within the context of kinship and with some ceremonial elaboration. However, there were probably no bands capable of producing enough over-all surplus to sustain full-time specialists of any kind.

Perhaps the most prestigious of skills was the ability to chant from memory the interminable myths, prayers, and formulas which formed indispensable parts of various rituals. Individuals possessing this skill who had also moved up through the ranks of the age-graded mens sodalities achieved a status that commanded some measure of authority in community affairs. Compared, however, with most other societies in Oceania, the institution alization of authority in aboriginal societies was not very developed.

No aspect of Australian life has attracted more scientific attention than the so-called religious beliefs and practices. Living, as the aborigines do, in symbiosis with their physical environment, they have animated it so anthropomorphically and so comprehensively that their perceptions of the universe appear to contain no boundaries between mankind and the actual or imagined populace of nature. One of their most widespread beliefs, for example, consists of linking certain animals and plantsgenerically or individuallywith each of their enduring social units or categories. Such linkages are usually conceived of in terms of kinship and not infrequently involve restrictions against eating or rituals aimed at magical increase of the species involved. In some places even mountains, pools, stars, thunder, rain, and sneezing are either individually or generically assimilated into the social structure. The myths and rituals embodying these beliefs are as diverse and bizarre as they are long and dramatic. Fertilityof nature and of humanityis a theme which runs through many of them; and they are enacted through songlike recitation, dance, and instrumental music.

Finally, this brief inventory of institutions would be incomplete without mention of the graphic art of aboriginal Australia. Students have only recently begun to study the rich domain of painting, carving, and engravingnaturalistic and abstract, public and esoteric. Although these deserve serious enough attention on artistic grounds alone, their apparent associations with myth and ritual make them intriguing subjects for social science as well.

As noted earlier, agriculture was the basis of subsistence throughout all of island Oceania (Oliver 1951).Even on certain of those arid atoll islets where soil is lacking, natives laboriously imported soil for gardens (Barrau 1958). In places dependent mainly on self-propagating tree crops some effort was occasionally spent in protecting and tending the plants, and some supplementary gardening was usually practiced as well. The main tree crops of the islands were coconuts, sago, breadfruit, pandanus, and bananas. The first European visitors found coconut palms growing on nearly every inhabited island except Easter Island, New Zealand, and Chatham Island. These trees thrive best in lower altitudes near the coasts and provided islanders with food, drink, oil, containers, fibers, thatch, and construction wood. Sago palms grow semiwild in many swampy areas, particularly on the larger continental islands; the starch extracted from the palms pith was the staple food in many riverine and coastal communities. Breadfruit is most prolific in the volcanic soils of the central and eastern islands; although fruiting only seasonally, this tree produces bounteously and requires little care. Some varieties of the pandanus, or screw pine, produce a fruit which can be made partly edible and which serves only as a famine food on richer islands but is the main vegetable food on some of the arid atolls. Bananas (including plantains), which grow in most of the moist tropical areas, varied widely in culinary importance, from a staple food to an occasional supplementary one.

Of the root crops, both wet-land and dry-land varieties of taro were cultivated; yams were grown widely both for food and for purposes of display;and sweet potatoes were adapted to poorer soils and cooler climates.

The islanders supplemented these crops with wild roots, stems, shoots, fruit, and leaves. The only part of Oceania in which natives cultivated rice was in the Marianas, another trait linking these islands with the Philippines.

Each of the vegetable staples required different production techniques and resulted in a wide range of cultural variations. Sago, for example, could be collected at any time of the year and was preserved by a laborious process. In contrast, breadfruit required little processing but fruited only once or twice a year and remained edible only in a fermented state.

In comparison with the Australians, most Oceanian islanders spent little time hunting. A noteworthy exception occurred in New Zealand, where early inhabitants hunted to extinction the giant moa, a large, flightless, ostrichlike bird. On the other hand, fishing was a major activity wherever marine resources permitted. Streams, rivers, reefs, lagoons, and open seas were harvested by means of an extraordinary variety of tools, watercraft, and techniques. As in the case of agriculture, differences in emphasis on fishing together with differences in fishing techniques were reflected in other cultural domainsin religious beliefs and ritual as well as in the social structure of households and communities.

Canoes have played a central role in the lives of Oceanians, and they have been used for fishing, everyday transport, and, prehistoric ally, in the peopling of this world of islands. Some of the riverine and coastal peoples of New Guinea found shallow dugouts adequate for their purposes of moving about in calm waters, but most other islanders depended upon outrigger canoes or deep-hulled plankbuilt boats. Although some elements of this complex reflect the common southeast Asian origin of Oceanias seagoing heritage, there has developed a rich variety of local specialtiesin boat construction, ornamentation, and handling, as well as in navigational principles and skills.

In many places the building and handling of a big canoe was an event of social importance, being one of the few instances of large-scale coordinated activity. For the social scientist these occasions reveal otherwise unstated premises regarding division of labor, authority, and exchange. In fact, in seagoing societies such as Tahiti the nomenclature applied to the various parts of their larger canoes was a metaphoric summary of the nativesimage of their political relations.

Like Australians, the Oceanian islanders kept dogsfor pets, hunting aids, and sometimes for food. Most households also kept a few fowlifkept is appropriate for the rather aimless relationship in which the fowl were neither fed nor eaten with any regularity. It was only on remote Easter Island that fowl became important in native economy and in ritual. Wherever islanders managed to introduce and keep them alive, pigs became much more important than dogs or fowl. They were eaten at feasts and used in ceremonial exchanges. In fact, so highly were pigs valued that in some societies they became the prime means and measure of political ascendancy.

In societies like these, where food occupies such a dominant positionin productive energy, in social interaction, in hierarchies of value, in cult focus, in symbolic expression, and so forththe cooking and eating of a meal may provide social science with some of its most rewarding data. In this connection, then, it should be noted that techniques of food preparation vary within societies and among societies. Cooking was everywhere important, although some fish and plant foods were occasionally eaten raw. Cooking itself varied from simple roasting and pot boiling to large-scale baking in community-size earth ovens. Even the most elaborate Hawaiian or Samoan menus and recipes did not compare with those of Asia, but in many places men (festal cooking was nearly everywhere done by males) knew how to prepare puddings combining many ingredients in various proportions.

Next to water the only beverage universally imbibed was the liquid of unripe coconutsat least where coconut palms grew. On many islands in the central and eastern Pacific natives drank kava (or ava, etc.), a mildly narcotic liquid made from the root of a cultivated pepper plant. On some islands (e.g., Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa) kava drinking reached a point of high ceremonial elaboration.These ceremonials served to express and reinforce community integration and political status. West of the kava-drinking part of Oceania, and barely overlapping it, were areas of betel chewing extending on into the south Asian mainland. In these areas betel chewing did not become as ceremonialized as kava drinking did elsewhere, but its use throughout the populations was more widespread.

Plants were the source of nearly all the cordage and textiles made in island Oceania; loom weaving was restricted to the Marianas and West Carolines, but hand plaiting developed in some places to the level of a fine art.

Matwork and barkcloth were the chief materials out of which most clothing, floor covering, bedding, sails, and temporary shelters were made. In some places finely textured mats and barkcloths circulated as highly valued objects in networks of redistribution and intergroup exchange. Houses differed widely in shape and size; some were built to accommodate only a small family, while others were spacious enough for hundreds of people. Comparison of local differences can provide insights into human inventiveness and the processes of adaptation and also into historical relationships, but the nature of Oceanian housebuilding has even more direct relevance to the social scientist, inasmuch as most such enterprises involve the actions of large numbers of people contributing materials and services according to conventional social patterns. House architecture often provides valuable insights into the residents views about their social universeviews which might otherwise remain inexplicit. The residences, for example, very rarely contain inner partitions, but for the occupants internal space is divided into functionally and symbolically distinct rooms; in fact, in many places a house provides space for the living and for the dead, for spirits as well as mortals.

Public structures of many types and utilizing varied construction materials were built in island Oceania. They served a wide variety of uses: clan refuges, exclusive mens clubhouses, secular meeting places, temples, forts, theaters, athletic arenas, lovers trysts, craftsmens workshopsin fact, nearly everything but market places for buying and selling.

Within recent years the graphic and plastic arts of Oceania have aroused keen interest among art historians and collectors. The skillfully executed masks, ceremonial implements, idols, and so on are also of interest to the social scientist because of their relevance to social behavior. Designs, for example, often express magical intent or supernaturally protect ownership or clan unity. Or, the roughly shaped, grotesque figure may in faith be the terrestrial resting place of a powerful and handsome god. We cannot begin to describe the great variety in materials, techniques, and designs found in Oceanic art objects, but the situation is not as chaotic as a rapid walk through a museum might lead one to believe. In fact, some surveys by anthropologically oriented experts have begun to delineate for all Oceania a manageably small number of distinctive artistic traditions, thereby providing social scientists with some new and stimulating possibilities for investigation (Linton &Wingert 1946; Guiart 1963a).

In the foregoing discussion we have dwelt mainly on what islanders did and what they made in connection with daily living. However, it should at least be pointed out that islanders did not go about the business of making a living without reflection, in slavish response to custom On certain occasions islanders undoubtedly acted because of time-honored and sanctioned precedent, but their actions were more frequently pragmatic. Perhaps the many different and often difficult kinds of physical environments met with in the course of their histories in Oceania had something to do with this, by placing a premium on flexibility and adaptability. Many of their actions were based on premises that we would call magical, but this is not to deny the presence of a scientificattitude toward their environment.

As for the magical ingredient of their thinking, neither its logic (homeopathic, sympathetic) nor its content (animism, animatism) is distinctively Oceanian in any essential way.

Turning now to the islanders pre-European social behavior, we begin by acknowledging our inability to generalize about the region as a whole or about large segments of it. A great deal is known about the social life of certain island peoples, but there are many more societies about which nothing, or next to nothing, is knownwith no prospect of ever gaining such knowledge in many cases because the islanders native forms of society have completely disappeared under the impact of alien influences. And even with what is knownand among the studies of single island societies there are some of the worlds most complete ethnographiesscholars are just beginning to push beyond local description toward wider regional typologies of the kind formulated for Australia (e.g.,Hogbin & Wedgwood 1953; Sahlins 1958; Goldman 1960).

Settlement patterns. Although many excellent ethnographic descriptions treat patterns of residence, few attempts have been made at the comparative study of settlement patterns. Perhaps the most typical form of settlement pattern in the islandsthis is an impression, not an established factis the small four-to-five household hamlet or neighborhood; but there are also numerous instances of dispersed homesteads, at one extreme, and of densely settled villages, at the other. In this connection it is an interesting fact that some of the largest and most tightly integrated political units e.g., on Tongacomprised widely scattered homesteads. Villages rarely contained more than a thousand inhabitants; the average number was probably more like two to three hundred. Some of the larger villages were to be found alongside rivers or lagoons, but they have been noted in other kinds of settings as well. In some instances residences were clustered near the public placestemples, council houses, dance grounds, mens clubhouses, etc.; in others the public places and dwellings were kept far apart. Some settlements were surrounded by stockades; others lacked defensive constructions despite their involvement in periodic warfare.

Family. The nuclear family was certainly the most ubiquitous type of social group in island Oceania, although polygyny was permitted in most societies. Polygyny was practiced by only the most affluenti.e., those men who could afford the bride price or other expenditures associated with marriagebut in some of the wealthiest societies even the most influential leaders had only one official wife at a time.

There is evidence that polyandry was formerly practiced in some Polynesian-speaking societies, but little or nothing is known about its wider social contexts.

With regard to matrimonial rules of residence, couples tended to reside near or with the husbands male patrilineal kinsmen. The next most prevalent pattern among those societies surveyed (Murdock 1957) was residence near the wifes female matrilineal kinsmen; but in several other societies these alternatives were about equally favored. Still other alternatives have been recorded for other societies, e.g., residing close to the husbands matrilineal kinsmen.

Even in societies allegedly ignorant of the males biological role in reproduction (Malinowski 1922) social roles of maternity and paternity were institutionalized, although the nature of such roles, both in theory and practice, varied widely. At one extreme were those societies in which both mother and father shared the job of nurturing and socializing their children, with property being transmitted through both parents. In contrast, there were some other societies wherein the sociological father had little or nothing to do with his childrens specific upbringing or equipping beyond contributing generally to the domestic commissary. In between these extremes were numerous permutations, usually reflecting each societys general conceptualization of kinship.

Two other fairly characteristicbut of course not distinctivefeatures of island life had to do with membership in the family group. In some societies, even when a child was recognized as the biological offspring of a man, the latter was called upon to validate the relationship before it could become socially operative. The other feature of widespread occurrence was the facility and the popularity of adoption, especially practiced in the eastern parts of the region.

It is our impression that nuclear familiesplus one or two other dependent relativesconstituted the most typical residential units in the majority of island societies, but there were numerous variants. In some places households were much larger and consisted of composite familieseither polygynous, stem, joint fraternal, joint sororal, or some other type. In other places a man spent most of his sleeping and waking hours in his community mens house, visiting his wife and children in their household only on occasion. Variations in household composition were wide, as were variations in collective activity, in kinds and amounts of goods owned corporately, in symbols of unity, etc.; and all these facets of family and household life were surely related more or less directly to each societys more general institutionalization of kinship.

Although ties of kinship were not the only kind of social bond recognized and institutionalized in island societies, they were by all odds the most important. In most island societies, every member could claim (if not actually trace) some kinship tie with every other member. These kinship categories each implied some normative pattern of behavior no matter how attenuated by the remoteness of the tie or the influence of extraneous factors such as locality and social stratification. Indeed, relations across tribal and societal boundaries were more often than not dominated by considerations of kinship.

Within the context of all-inclusive kinship, which characterized most island societies, there were, however, some wide differences in the actual groupings of kinfolk. In size such groups varied from small, sharply defined units to large ones with vague or overlapping boundaries. Some groups were bilateral in descent, others patrilineal or matrilineal. Some were stringently exogamous, while in others membership appears to have played no direct role in choice of mate. In some societies, like certain ones of highland New Guinea, groups formed by the male members of patrilineages were all-importantmaritally, residentially, economically, politically, and ritually. In other places actual groups of kinsmenqua kinsmenwere scarcely discernible, either interactionally or symbolically.

What little collation has been done in this domain of social structure indicates that patrilineally structured groups predominated in New Guinea and matrilineal ones in central Micronesia and in parts of western Melanesia. Throughout most of Polynesia and in the rest of Micronesia the aggregates of kinfolk defined by common ownership of land and other valuables were ideally more nonunilinear in membership, although in actuality patrilateral ties preponderated. Elsewhere, in central and eastern Melanesia, there existed in close juxtaposition all these variants of kinship structure (Murdock 1957).

Other social groups. In most island societies there were other kinds of associational ties which crosscut those of kinshipties of coevality, of cult commitment, of occupation, and, most important, of coresidence.

Age itself was less influential in island Oceania than it was in Australia. Authority and privilege did derive from seniority in some societiesespecially in some of those with patrilineal kin groups but coevality as an organizing principle was only sporadically important (e.g., in parts of New Guinea and Melanesia, where painful male initiation rites served to usher boys into cult-focused mens clubs).

In many island societies, as throughout Australia, the mythical charters which rationalized and legitimatized kin groupings were embodied in congregational ritual. But, in addition, many island societies incorporated cult groups whose members were only incidentally kinfolk. Examples of such were the masoniclike mens clubs of New Hebrides and the intertribal Dionysiac Arioi sect of eastern Polynesia.

Occupational specialization was more marked in island Oceania than in Australia, but groupings of specialists were rare. In Samoa there were guildsof housebuilders, and in some other island societies one might discern the beginnings of other craft guilds or of schools of savant-priests, but that is about all.

Political organization. In most island societies neighbors were also kinfolkin fact or by nationalizationbut coresidence was often more influential than kinship as a basis for association. On the other hand, the size and degree of integration of such political units varied widely. At one extreme were numerous societies having no collective-action groups larger than localized extended families. At the other extreme were a few Polynesian societies containing highly organized, territorially based tribal units with many thousands of members. In between, and most typical, were societies whose political units were conterminous with small village or neighborhood communities, or with clusters of such communities, averaging perhaps a few hundred citizens and rarely exceeding fifteen hundred.

Island political units differed not only in size but also in domain. Units for waging war varied from tightly knit regiments to undependable confederacies of separate kin groups. Actions for the maintenance of internal order ranged from comprehensive, centralized policing to uneasy interkingroup feuding, wherein the over-all leaders did little more than protect their own kin groups interests. In some places a political units members were all linked in redistributive networks involving frequent and copious flows of objects and services;in other places little or nothing was exchanged among the strata of social hierarchies. And finally, whereas in some societies the identities of the political units were symbolized and validated in influential myths and impressive ceremonies, in other places only the most discerning observer would have discovered clues to collective notions of unity.

Succession to political leadership was hereditary in some island societies, nonhereditary in others;and there were differences within each category. In instances of hereditary succession, the principle of patriliny predominated; and even in societies whose kinship groups were matrilineal political offices usually passed from male to male. However, there were a few recorded instances, mainly in Polynesia, of high political office devolving upon females.

Nonhereditary succession to political office characterized large portions of Melanesia. In what was perhaps its most distinctive variant, wealth was an important steppingstone to power. In such cases, however, the prestige upon which power was based derived not so much from accumulating valuables but rather from disposing of themin potlatchlike feasting or in conspicuous waste.

But many island societies may not be so exclusively typed: in some, individuals born to high office had also to prove themselves capable of exercising it; in other cases they had to vie for office with low-born individuals of outstanding ability. And in some societies these contrasting principles of succession served to maintain situations of unresolved internal conflict.

Relations between political units were of many different kinds. Hostility colored most such relations over the long run, but it was usually tempered either by periods of general truce or by only individual kin-group feuding. Moreover, even between traditionally hostile tribes it was customary for women to be exchanged and goods to be bartered. Some of the intertribal circuits extended over hundreds of miles, and while some of the transactions were conducted without direct contact between the principals (i.e., silent trade), othersincluding the famous kula trade of southeast New Guineainvolved mass expeditions and elaborate ceremonies (Malinowski 1922). Another institution typical of many parts of island Oceania was that of the trade partnershipi.e., a pact between two friends or kinsmen from separate political units providing reciprocal visiting and bartering rights even in periods of intertribal conflict.

Many societies in island Oceania were to some degree stratified, but the phenomenon was most highly institutionalized in Polynesia, notably in Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa, and Tonga, where three or even four strata were distinguishable. In these societies class status derived almost wholly from birth and birth order, and for higher-ranking individuals class endogamy was so prescriptive that there developed castelike common-interest upper classes which cut across political boundaries. Political and ceremonial leadership were closely linked with class status, but ability sometimes outweighed birth, resulting occasionally in the relegation of highest-ranking persons to positions of little more than ceremonial pre-eminence (Sahlins 1958;Goldman 1960).

In view of the wide variety of cultural traditions and social structures found throughout island Oceania, it becomes next to impossible to generalize comprehensively about the behaviors of individuals in these societies. Individual life cycles, for example, were institutionalized in many different ways. In some societies the onset of puberty was marked by physical mutilation and community-wide ritual, in others it was virtually ignored. In some places the aged were revered and deferred to, in others they were socially devalued. Females were perhaps nowhere treated as chattel, but their social and ritual roles ranged from that of a magically polluted minor to that of a semidivine chieftainess. Even innovation received widely differing valuations, not only from society to society but within the same society as well. In some communities, for example, the invention of new graphic designs was discouraged while the composing of new songs was honored. Or, craft techniques remained rigidly traditional, while the discovery of new religious doctrines or magical formulas was socially rewarded. In fact, perhaps the only generalization one can make about islanders as individuals (and this in a manner both imprecise and impressionistic) is that in nearly all available descriptions of them they stood out as individualsas distinctive, at least partly autonomous persons, not as mere faceless units of this or that social aggregate.

Prior to the sixteenth century there may have been direct contacts between Oceania and Asian, or even American, high civilizations, although they were not enough to revolutionize native ways of life. But Magellans discovery of the Marianas Islands in 1521 ushered in a new era which is still going on and which is destined to transform most of the regions native societies.

During the four and a half centuries since Magellans voyage tens of thousands of Westerners (also Japanese, Chinese, and Indians) have visited or resided in Oceanianot to mention the millions now established in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii, and the additional hundreds of thousands who swept through the islands during World War II. Many Oceanians have also visited the outside world, but up to now their influences upon their own native communities have been minimal. With the exception of Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii, where the process of Westernization has proceeded at a faster tempo, the history of culture contact in Oceania can be described in terms of five distinctive but overlapping phases.

(1)The phase of exploration began with Magellan and is still going on in parts of New Guinea. By 1830 the consequences of these visitations from the West were well underway, in the shape of depopulation (mainly through introduced disease) and murderous warfare (with the help of firearms).

(2)Whalers, traders, and missionaries commenced their operations about 1780, continuing until about 1850. (Spanish Catholic missionaries were active long before 1780 but only in the Marianas.) Depopulation and political turmoil continued during this phase and were accompanied by widespread collapse of indigenous religious institutions and of religion-sanctioned political structures.

(3)Around 1860, planters, labor recruiters, and merchants initiated change consequent upon the removal or shifting about of large segments of the male population for long periods of virtually forced labor, the introduction of money and cashcrop economy, and the heightened desire for Western manufactured goods.

(4)Foreign governments began to assert administrative control over island populations over a hundred years ago, but interference with native political structuresincluding total replacementwas most direct during the half century before World War II. This phase also witnessed an increase in the native population, mainly because of improved medical services and an increased flow of Westerners into parts of the region where mineral deposits were located.

(5)The events of World War ii served not only to speed up kinds of change already in process, including urbanization and money-based economy, but to stimulate other changes as well. The postwar improvement in interisland communication and transport gave rise to several dramatic developments. Locally inspired movements to weaken political ties with the overseas ruling metropolitan powers and to advocate strengthened interregional cultural ties are among these new developments, although they are not necessarily fundamental to change.

Despite the homogenizing effects of these several but predominantly Western influences, the various Oceanian societies retain a large measure of local variation. None are at exactly the same stage of Westernization: for example, one can contrast industrialized Nauru with the New Guinea population, only now exchanging stone tools for those of steel. And no two native societies have experienced the same mixture of Western influence: even in New Guinea, for example, a community near a large coconut plantation has adjusted very differently from one near a mine;and the Polynesians in French Tahiti have become quite different from their ethnic cousins in British Samoa.

Although there are increasingly pressing political reasons why the rest of the world should begin to know something about Papuans or Fijians or Samoans, our present concern is with Oceanias significance for social science in generalwith the research opportunities it has provided for formulating and testing universally valid methods and theories, and with the uses that have been made of such opportunities. The reaction, for example, by the natives of Bikini to resettlement away from their radiation-polluted home island is of course poignantly interesting and of some relevance to international politics; but study of this situation would have had little value for social science if its procedures had not provided possibilities for testing social science methods and making innovations in these methods and if its findings were not widely applicable (Mason 1957).

Oceania has offered social scientists a very wide variety of social and cultural systems, many of them so strikingly exotic as to require major accommodations in some aspects of Western-based social scientific thinking. In addition, even as late as a few decades ago, when trained social scientists began their study of this region, they were observing the end products of centuries or millennia of isolation from the rest of the world and even largely from one another. And third, the relatively small sizes, sharp boundaries, and (perhaps consequently) internal cultural homogeneity of most of these societies made it possible and indeed inevitable for individual observers to investigate the functional relationships of many domains of behaviornot just technology or kinship or art, but all three in themselves and in relation to each other.

Research into Oceanian ways of life began nearly two centuries ago, when men like Banks, Bligh, and the Forsters went beyond the mere recording of personal experiences and of native bizarreness to carry out more or less pointed inquiries into native institutions. Moreover, the reports contributed by such men were empirically significant to the beginnings of comparative sociology in Europe. For the next century and a quarter, as more and better descriptions of Oceanians ways of life came to be produced by missionaries, administrators, and other island residents, the professors back home were able to use these data to support theories or to compile vast syntheses (for example, Morgan, Durkheim, Frazer, Freud). But it was not until 1898 that social scientists left their armchairs to confront their subjects in person.

In that year the Cambridge anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait islands (between northern Queensland and New Guinea) took place and included such men as Haddon, Rivers, and Seligman. It was during this expedition that Rivers developed his genealogical method for recording kinship data, which has subsequently been such an indispensable tool in social anthropological research everywhere. Between this expedition and the outbreak of World War I amateur and more or less competent observers residing in the region continued to produce ethnographic accounts which were used by scholars in their compilations, but field research by trained social scientists was carried out by only a handful, notably Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Thurnwald, Sarasin, Reche, Williamson, Poech, Haddon, and Rivers. It is probably fair to say that only the first three (and Rivers, to a lesser extent) produced publications from their Oceanian data that have been influential in the subsequent development of general social science theory and method.

Undoubtedly the outstanding landmark in social science research in Oceania was the work of Malinowski, whose monographs on the Trobriand Islanders have never been surpassed in ethnographic artistry. His studies ushered in a new world-wide approach to anthropological research that has come to be known as functionalism. Radcliffe-Brown drew upon his field experiences in Australia (and elsewhere) to produce essays that have led him to be identified as a cofounder of functional anthropology, although he himself disavowed the label. Through their teaching and writings these two men virtually dominated social anthropology throughout the interwar period; and their students, and students students, still hold most of the important teaching positions throughout the British Commonwealth.

In the interwar period more and more professionally trained social scientists went to Oceania to carry out sociologically and psychologically oriented research, and after World War II the influx reached flood proportions and is not now visibly diminishing. Moreover, these research activities have been aided by a number of journals, monograph series, museums, libraries, and university departments devoted exclusively or at least primarily to Oceania. The rich ethnographic data resulting from field research in Oceania have been drawn on heavily by many other social scientists for inspiration and for information respecting the range and variation of human social behavior.

The most influential innovation in social science research strategy and methodology to come out of Oceania was Malinowskis experience of long residence in a native community and active participation in its activities. He worked exclusively in the native vernacular, focused his attention upon the prosaic as well as the dramatic aspects of native life, and collected (and published) masses of documentary evidence to support and enrich his generalizations. It is somewhat ironic that Malinowskis style of field research has been more faithfully followed in Africa than in Oceania, with the outstanding exception of Raymond Firths work in Tikopia (Firth 1936; 1939; 1940).

Malinowski aimed at more or less total coverage of his native subjects way of life, and for some time after him this remained the objective of most social scientists working in the region. But this goal has increasingly given way to a narrower focus upon special aspects of native life, including economics, law, religion, ecology, acculturation, and education.

Malinowskis example of one-man field work has tended to prevail, although field research is coming to be conducted within the framework of larger-scale programs, such as the Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology, the Tri-Institutional Pacific Program, the long-range New Guinea research program of the Australian National University, the University of Oregons study of resettled populations, the University of Washingtons study of cultural and physical evolution in New Guinea, the Harvard study of social change in the Society Islands, etc. In this connection, attention should be called to the research activities of such organizations as the South Pacific Commission (an international body designed to improve the welfare of Pacific islanders) and the French governments Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre Mer, which though aimed primarily at the solution of practical problems have contributed useful data on some rapidly changing aspects of Oceanian ways of life.

Turning now to the substantive contributions to general social science theory that have come out of research in Oceaniacontributions in addition to the enrichment of the worlds ethnographic corpusone again begins with the writing of Malinowski, who audaciouslyalthough not always justifiablychallenged some of the basic assumptions of economics, comparative law, semantics, and psychoanalysis, and who in addition popularized the functional viewpoint already mentioned (Firth 1957). For Malinowski functionalism consisted mainly of a proposition to the effect that all of a societys customs are mutually interdependent and an analytical principle based on viewing institutions as instruments for satisfying basic human needs. The proposition has subsequently become an almost universally accepted canon among anthropologists, but not much use has been found for the analytical principle. Radcliffe-Browns contributions to general social science theory have been mainly in the field of comparative sociology(see Radcliffe-Brown 1922), and although his interests were somewhat narrower than Malinowskis he has left a comparably deep imprint. Perhaps the most successful implementations in Oceanian research of the general methods and theories of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown have been done, respectively, by Firth (1936) and Warner (1937).It now remains to list some other investigations in Oceania which, in my opinion, have served most to enrich social science either by proposing or testing theory or by describing novel or comparatively important institutions.

Major contributions to the sociology of kinship are to be found in the writings of Firth (1936),Warner (1937), Malinowski (1929), Radcliffebrown (1922), Elkin (1938), Mead (1934), R. M. Berndt and C. H. Berndt (1951), Meggitt (1962),and Goodenough (1951). Only from Africa have come works of comparable quality. Government and social control of relatively un-Westernized societies are usefully documented in the works of Malinowski (1926), Hogbin (1934), Guiart (1963),Oliver (1955), Pospisil (1958), and Berndt (1962).Useful studies of Oceanian economies are those by Malinowski (1922), Bell (1953), Salisbury(1962), and, especially, Firth (1939; 1959). The published works of Firth provide probably the fullest and most sophisticated treatment available on the economics of primitive societies.

Among the most useful studies of the social contexts of belief and ritual are those of Firth (1940), Fortune (1932; 1935), Malinowski (1935),Warner (1937), Guiart (1951), and Williams (1940). In this connection should be mentioned Batesons stimulating, and in some respects novel, multifaceted analysis of ritual behavior (1936), which deserves far wider attention than it has thus far received.

Many richly illustrated works have been published concerning the widely varied and extraordinarily elaborated graphic art tradition of Oceania, but only a few seek to relate these to social behavior, mainly those of Elkin et al. (1950),Mountford (1956), Firth (1936), and Guiart (1963b).

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"Oceania" is a song recorded by Icelandic singer Bjrk for her sixth studio album Medlla. It was written and produced by Bjrk, with additional writing by Sjn and production by Mark Bell. The song was written by the singer specially for the 2004 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, after a request by the International Olympic Committee. "Oceania" was released as a promotional single in 2004, by One Little Indian Records. The song was written at the ocean's point of view, from which the singer believes all life emerged, and details the human's evolution, whilst accompanied by a choir. "Oceania" was generally well received by music critics, who believed it was the best track from Medlla, although some thought it was not the best choice for a promotional release.

The accompanying music video for the song, directed by Lynn Fox, features Bjrk as "Mother Oceania", whilst being jewel-encrusted in dark watery depths, with a colourful sunset and swirling floral creatures above her. A remix of the song, featuring additional lyrics and vocals by Kelis on her point of view of the continents, was featured as a B-side to the "Who Is It" single. A piano version also appeared on the DVD single, and was assisted in its creation by Nico Muhly. The song was premiered during Bjrk's performance on the Summer Olympics ceremony, and was later included on the setlist of the Volta Tour (200708). At the 47th Grammy Awards in 2005, it was nominated in the category of Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Cover versions of "Oceania" were done six times, while it was sampled once.

The International Olympic Committee commissioned a song by Bjrk specially for the 2004 Summer Olympics opening ceremony. The singer revealed that the committee asked her to do a kind of "Ebony and Ivory" or "We Are the World" type of song, which are "smashing tunes" according to her, but she thought, "'Maybe there's another angle to this'. When I tried to write an Olympic lyric, though, it was full of sports socks and ribbons. I ended up pissing myself laughing". Then, she called Sjn, an Icelandic poet who had previously collaborated with her on songs such as "Bachelorette" from her fourth studio album Homogenic (1997). When she said to him that they would need something "suitably epic" for the Olympics, the poet even took a short course about Greek mythology at Reykjavk University. "Oceania" was the last song recorded for Medlla.[1] Bjrk said about the song: "I am incredibly honoured to have been asked to write a song and sing it at the Olympics. The song is written from the point of view of the ocean that surrounds all the land and watches over the humans to see how they are doing after millions of years of evolution. It sees no borders, different races or religion which has always been at the core of these [games]".[2]

During an interview with British radio station XFM, Bjrk explained its recording process, saying work on "Oceania" was kept being delayed because she wanted to do it especially for the Olympics. During the last day of mixing, she thought she needed "sirenes", like in Greek mythology. She called up an English choir to record these sounds. The singer had done an arrangement for piano on the computer that was impossible for a piano to play, and she got them to sing it. Then, she also called up beatboxer Shlomo, who was recommended to her as "the new bright hope of the hip hop scene". He went to record the next day and Bjrk asked him to do a techno tango beat, which he did. Recalling her work on the song until her last day of mixing, she commented, "That was the most fun part, in the end. Sometimes it's good for you to work with a gun against your head and just go for it, because you can sometimes sit too long with ideas. Sometimes adrenaline is a good thing."[3]

The song was written at the ocean's point of view, detailing the human's evolution.[4] According to Jason Killingsworth from Paste magazine, it calls listeners' attention to "Mother Oceania" from which the singer believes all life emerged, whilst she sings: "You have done well for yourselves / Since you left my wet embrace / And crawled ashore []". The song anchors the midsection of Medlla, "jubilantly punctuated with bubbling synth and propelled by the rolling, spitfire cadence of Rahzel's beatbox", according to the reviewer.[5] The last line from the song, "Your sweat is salty/ And I am why/ Your sweat is salty/ And I am why", is about how "we were all little jellyfish or whatever before we made it on to land", according to the singer.[1] Elthan Brown from New York magazine considered these lyrics as "frank sensuality".[6] "Oceania" also features The London Choir.[7]Entertainment Weekly's writer Chris Willman commented that "the computer-enhanced choir behind Bjrk [suggests] a cosmic harem of pleased dolphins. Here she imagines herself as the sea itself, proud of all the belegged creatures she's spit out onto land over the last hundred million years. It's the nearest evolutionists have come to having their own gospel tune".[8]

A remix version of "Oceania" featuring additional lyrics and vocals by American singer Kelis was recorded. She explained they were set to perform on Fashion Rocks concert in London the previous year, and their dressing rooms were right next to each other. Bjrk had an album by Canadian singer Peaches that was skipping, then Kelis gave her the copy of the album she had. They started talking and eventually hung out and exchanged numbers after the show, and later Bjrk contacted Kelis to work together, which she agreed. Then, Kelis recorded her vocals at Electric Lady Studios in New York City,[9] and wrote her own words in the song, from the point of view of the continents.[10] Originally not intended to be commercially released, the remix leaked after being played on BBC Radio 1's The Breezeblock, but was then included on the "Who Is It" single as a B-side. According to The Guardian, "it's a brilliant fusing together of two distinct voices, Kelis handling the breathy first verse, as layers of her chopped-up vocals form the rhythm track, while Bjrk at first comes across as restrained, allowing Kelis' ad-libs to soar before unleashing a song-stopping, wordless roar that heralds the song's dramatic final coda".[11]

A piano version also appeared on the DVD single, which was assisted in its creation by Nico Muhly. During an interview he stated, "When Bjrk asked me to play piano on Oceania, she sent me the music, and it was as complicated and layered as any piece of classical music I've played. I spent a few days figuring out how to make her vision of 'dueling lounge-lizard pianists' physically possible, and in the session, we ran through those quickly. Then, she experimented with different ways to space the progression of chords that runs through the piece - I suggested big, Brahmsy blocks - as well as the ending, for which we tried diaphanous, Debussy-like arpeggios".[12] Bjrk decided to stick with the album's vocal concept and use electronically tweaked choral voices. Before some last-minute polishing by Mark Bell, this version of "Oceania" was the last track to be worked for Medlla.[13]

"Oceania" received generally positive reviews from music critics. Jennifer Vineyard from MTV News called the song "one of those polarizing songs, with its Ethel Merman-like synchronized vocal sweeps that do suggest the aquatic, in a 1950s sort of way".[14]Entertainment Weekly's Chris Willman labeled the track as a "strikingly beautiful" song.[8] Alex Ross, reporter writing for The New Yorker stated that with "Oceania", Bjrk "confirmed her status as the ultimate musical cosmopolitan", acquainted with Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Wu-Tang Clan.[13] Matthew Gasteier from Prefix magazine called the track "the best song on the album", whilst complimenting "its swooping chorus [which] recalls the migration of birds or the time-elapsed drifting of icebergs, a swirl of beauty and power crashing down onto and then rising above the mix. It culminates in the near screech that leads into the sexy-spooky coda".[15] According to Andy Battaglia from The A.V. Club, in a positive review, "the electronic flourish strays from her organic vocal focus, but Bjrk summons the same kind of tingle with choral language" in the song, "which finds The London Choir reacting to what sounds like a thrilling slow-motion circus act".[7]

"Oceania" was "spoilt by some overenthusiastic vocal whoopings", according to David Hooper from BBC Music.[16]The Guardian's writer David Peschek said that when the singer sings in the song, "choral swoops [explodes] like fireworks behind her".[17]AllMusic's Heather Phares noted that the song, along with Medlla's lead single "Who Is It", "have an alien quality that is all the stranger considering that nearly all of their source material is human (except for the odd keyboard or two)".[18] Dominique Leone of Pitchfork thought "Oceania" was hardly the most obvious choice for a promotional single release, despite its "bizarre, swooping soprano lines and cyclical chord progression outlined by a chorus of Wyatt vocal samples".[19] Jeremy D. Larson from Time magazine provided a mixed review to the song, stating that it was the best Olympic theme song, but during the Olympics performance, "when she sang 'Every pearl is a lynx is a girl' we think you could hear the world collectively sigh, 'Where's Celine Dion?'".[4] In 2005, the song was nominated for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the 47th Grammy Awards but lost out to Norah Jones' "Sunrise".[20]

The accompanying music video for "Oceania" was directed by Lynn Fox, and was premiered on August 13, 2004 through Bjrk's official site.[21] According to Lynn Fox, Bjrk gave the team the initial sketch of the track in January 2004. Whilst they were doing scribbles for it, they had several phone conversations with the singer and emailed her images to keep her up to date with the progress of the work. For "Oceania", initial animations took six weeks, then had couple of days preparing for the shoot in Iceland and a few more days after to put all the shots together.[22] Like in the song, in the music video Bjrk is depicted as "Mother Oceania". The video opens with the surface of a body of water appearing yellowish and bright. Camera pans down to darker, deeper waters. Bjrk appears out of the dark background, singing and covered with sparkling jewels. As the second verse begins, images of sea anemones, representing the continents (her children) are thrown from Bjrk's hands.[23]

During the third verse they swim around and away from their mother, carried by the currents, which move in time with the song. In the bridge section, new sea flowers, with brilliant colors, emerge from the background, in contrast to the muted and darker colors of previous scenes. As the fifth verse continues, the camera pans back up to the much lighter surface, not seen since the beginning of the video. All sorts of marine life are swimming about the surface. Shortly after the sixth verse begins, Bjork is shown in deep, dark water. Several seconds later, the lighter surface of the water is shown without her. When she begins to sing "Your sweat is salty", a somewhat rapid alternation of images ensues: the light surface is shown for one second, followed by Bjrk singing in the deep water; these scenes alternate until she stops singing during the coda. Bjrk's vocal repetition ceases at the same time the visual alternation stops. The surface scene recedes, and Bjrk in the deep water comes to the fore, slowing. At the end of the video, she stands and smiles.[23]

At the 2004 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, where Bjrk premiered the song, she wore a very large dress which unfolded during her performance of "Oceania" to eventually occupy the entire stadium, and showed a map of the world in sign of union.[4] Additionally, Bjrk wore "bluish-purple glittery eye shadow across her lids. Her dark hair dangled in tiny twists that framed her pixieish, freckled face".[24] Immediately after the performance at the Olympics opening ceremony, the song was downloaded more than 11,000 times on the iTunes Store.[25] Jake Coyle from Today commented that her dress was "reminiscent in its uniqueness to the infamous swan dress she wore to the Oscars in 2001".[26] According to Jeremy D. Larson from Time, if it weren't for the fireworks at the end of the song, he was legitimately unsure if people in the audience would have cheered.[4] Dominique Leone of Pitchfork was surprised by the committee's choice of bringing Bjrk to perform at the ceremony, and stated: "They could have had anyone-- say, a reassuring Celine Dion or a physically ideal Beyonc-- but they chose a prickly, decidedly uncomfortable Icelandic woman. On aesthetic grounds, I can't argue with their choice, but I continue to wonder about Bjrk's significance".[19] "Oceania" was also performed during the Volta Tour (200708).[27]

The song was sampled by E-40 in the track "Spend the Night" featuring Laroo, The DB'z, Droop-E and B-Slimm on his 2010 Revenue Retrievin': Night Shift album.[28] SPIRITWO and singer Yael Claire covered "Oceania" with a Middle Eastern theme for the 2012 London Olympic games.[29] Aspirant singer Srbuhi Hovhannisyan also covered the song on The Voice of Armenia in 2014.[30] "Oceania" covers also appear on the albums by Beliss, Harmen Fraanje Quintet, Murphy's Law and Serena Fortebraccio.[31]

Credits adapted from Medlla liner notes.[33]

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Oceania (song) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia are the three fictional superstates in George Orwell's futuristic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The history of how the world evolved into these three states is vague. They appear to have emerged from nuclear warfare and civil dissolution over 20 years between 1945 (the end of the Second World War) and 1965. Eurasia was likely formed first, followed closely afterwards by Oceania, with Eastasia emerging a decade later, possibly in the 1960s.

Oceania is the superstate where protagonist Winston Smith dwells. It is believed to be composed of the Americas, the British Isles (called "Airstrip One" in the novel), Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa below the River Congo. It also controlsto different degrees and at various times during the course of its perpetual war with either Eurasia or Eastasiathe polar regions, India, Indonesia and the islands of the Pacific. Oceania lacks a single capital city, although London and apparently New York City may be regional capitals. In the novel, Emmanuel Goldstein, Oceania's declared public enemy number one, describes it in the fictional book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism as a result of the United States having absorbed the British Empire. Goldstein's book also states that Oceania's primary natural defense is the sea surrounding it.

The ruling doctrine of Oceania is Ingsoc, the Newspeak euphemism for English Socialism. Its nominal leader is Big Brother, believed by the masses to have been the leader of the revolution and still used as an icon by the party. The personality cult is maintained through Big Brother's function as a focal point for love, fear, and reverence, more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization.

The unofficial language of Oceania is English (officially called Oldspeak), and the official language is Newspeak. The restructuring of the language is intended to eliminate unorthodox political and social thought, by eliminating the words needed to express it.

The society of Oceania is sharply stratified into three groups: the small ruling Inner Party, the more numerous and highly indoctrinated Outer Party, and the large body of politically meaningless Proles. Except for certain rare exceptions like Hate Week, the proles remain essentially outside Oceania's political control and are placated by trivial sports and other entertainment; the Thought Police easily manage any Prole socially aware enough to be a problem.

Oceania's national anthem is Oceania, Tis For Thee which, in one of the three film versions of the book, takes the form of a crescendo of organ music along with operatic lyrics. The lyrics are sung in English, and the song is reminiscent of God Save the Queen and My Country 'Tis of Thee.

Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England, or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.[1]

Like Europe as a whole, Britain was hit by atomic weapons in the conflicts before the revolutions in Oceania and then elsewhere. One British town, Colchester, is referenced specifically as having been destroyed; flashbacks to Smith's childhood also include scenes of Londoners taking refuge in the city's underground transit tunnels in the midst of the bombing.

It is stated that Eurasia was formed when the Soviet Union annexed the rest of continental Europe, creating a single polity stretching from Portugal to the Bering Strait. Orwell frequently describes the face of the standard Eurasian as "mongolic" in the novel. The only soldiers other than Oceanians that appear in the novel are the Eurasians. When a large number of captured soldiers are executed in Victory Square, some Slavs are mentioned, but the stereotype of the Eurasian maintained by the Party is Mongoloid, like O'Brien's servant, Martin. This implies that the Party uses racism to avert sympathy toward an enemy.

According to Goldstein's book, Eurasia's main natural defense is its vast territorial extent, while the ruling ideology of Eurasia is identified as "Neo-Bolshevism", a variation of the Oceanian "Ingsoc".

Eastasia's borders are not as clearly defined as those of the other two superstates, but it is known that they encompass most of modern-day China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea. Eastasia repeatedly captures and loses Indonesia, New Guinea, and the various Pacific archipelagos. Its political ideology is, according to the novel, "called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-worship, but perhaps better rendered as 'Obliteration of the Self'". Orwell does not appear to have based this on any existing Chinese word or phrase.[2]

Not much information about Eastasia is given in the book. It is known that it is the newest and smallest of the three superstates. According to Goldstein's book, it emerged a decade after the establishment of the other two superstates, placing it somewhere in the 1960s, after years of "confused fighting" among its predecessor nations. (At the time of writing, the victory of Mao Zedong's Communists in the Chinese Civil War was not yet taken as a foregone conclusion. The Korean War had also not yet occurred, but Korea was already being administered by two competing governments. Japan was still under military occupation and, at least until shortly before Orwell completed the book, by several different powers. Power in the real life nations that make up the fictional Eastasia was, therefore, very much in flux.) It is also said in the book that the industriousness and fecundity of the people of Eastasia allows them to overcome their territorial inadequacy in comparison to the other two powers. At the time Orwell wrote the book, East Asians, including the Japanese, all had birth rates higher than those of Europeans.[citation needed]

The "disputed area", which lies "between the frontiers of the super-states", is "a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong".[3] This area is fought over during the perpetual war among the three great powers, with one power sometimes exerting control over vast swathes of the disputed territory, only to lose it again. The reason three super-countries seek to control this area is to harness the large population and vast resources within the region. Control of the islands in the Pacific and the polar regions is also constantly shifting, though none of the three superpowers ever gains a lasting hold on these regions. The inhabitants of the area, having no allegiance to any nation, live in constant slavery under whichever power controls them at that time.

Eastasia and Eurasia fight over "a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet".

At one point during the novel, Julia procures tea to share with Winston, and remarks that she thinks Oceania recently captured India (or perhaps parts of India) but such "control" is usually transient.

The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four exists in a state of perpetual war among the three major powers. At any given time, two of the three states are aligned against the third; for example Oceania and Eurasia against Eastasia or Eurasia and Eastasia against Oceania. However, as Goldstein's book points out, each Superstate is so powerful that even an alliance of the other two cannot destroy it, resulting in a continuing stalemate. From time to time, one of the states betrays its ally and sides with its former enemy. In Oceania, when this occurs, the Ministry of Truth rewrites history to make it appear that the current state of affairs is the way it has always been, and documents with contradictory information are destroyed in the memory hole.

Goldstein's book states that the war is not a war in the traditional sense, but simply exists to use up resources and keep the population in line. Victory for any side is not attainable or even desirable, but the Inner Party, through an act of doublethink, believes that such victory is in fact possible. Although the war began with the limited use of atomic weapons in a limited atomic war in the 1950s, none of the combatants use them any longer for fear of upsetting the balance of power. Relatively few technological advances have been made (the only two mentioned are the replacement of bombers with "rocket bombs" and of traditional capital ships with the immense "floating fortresses").

Almost all of the information about the world beyond London is given to the reader through government or Party sources, which by the very premise of the novel are unreliable. Specifically, in one page Julia brings up the idea that the war is fictional and that the rocket bombs falling from time to time on London are fired by the government of Oceania itself, in order to maintain the war atmosphere among the population (better known as a false flag operation). The protagonists have no means of proving or disproving this theory. However, during preparations for Hate Week, rocket bombs fell at an increasing rate, hitting places such as playgrounds and crowded theatres, causing mass casualties and increased hysteria and hatred for the party's enemies. War is also a convenient pretext for maintaining a huge militaryindustrial complex in which the state is committed to developing and acquiring large and expensive weapons systems which almost immediately become obsolete and require replacement. Finally, according to Goldstein's book, war makes handing over power to a small caste easier, and gives pretext to do so.

Because of this ambiguity, it is entirely possible that the geopolitical situation described in Goldstein's book is entirely fictitious; perhaps The Party controls the whole world, or possibly its power is limited to just Great Britain as a lone and desperate rogue nation using fanaticism and hatred of the outside world to compensate for political impotence. It's also possible that a genuine and large-scale resistance movement exists, or that Oceania is indeed under a large-scale attack by outside forces.

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The Oceania ecozone is one of the World Wildlife Fund-WWF ecozones, and is unique in not including any continental land mass. It is the smallest in land area of the WWF ecozones.

This ecozone includes the islands of the Pacific Ocean in: Micronesia, the Fijian Islands, the Hawaiian islands, and Polynesia (with the exception of New Zealand).

New Zealand, Australia, and most of Melanesia including New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and New Caledonia are included within the Australasia ecozone.

Oceania is geologically the youngest ecozone. While other ecozones include old continental land masses or fragments of continents, Oceania is composed mostly of volcanic high islands and coral atolls that arose from the sea in geologically recent times, many of them in the Pleistocene. They were created either by hotspot volcanism, or as island arcs pushed upward by the collision and subduction of tectonic plates. The islands range from tiny islets, sea stacks and coral atolls to large mountainous islands, like Hawaii and Fiji.

The climate of Oceania's islands is tropical or subtropical, and range from humid to seasonally dry. Wetter parts of the islands are covered by Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, while the drier parts of the islands, including the leeward sides of the islands and many of the low coral islands, are covered by Tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests and Tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas, and shrublands. Hawaii's high volcanoes, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, are home to some rare tropical Montane grasslands and shrublands.

Since the islands of Oceania were never connected by land to a continent, the flora and fauna of the islands originally reached them from across the ocean (though at the height of the last ice age sea levels were much lower than today and many current seamounts were islands, so some now isolated islands were once less isolated). Once they reached the islands, the ancestors of Oceania's present flora and fauna adapted to life on the islands.

Larger islands with diverse ecological niches encouraged floral and faunal adaptive radiation, whereby multiple species evolved from a common ancestor, each species adapted to a different ecological niche; the various species of Hawaiian honeycreepers (Family Drepanididae) are a classic example. Other adaptations to island ecologies include gigantism, dwarfism, and among birds, loss of flight. Oceania has a number of endemic species; Hawaii in particular is considered a global 'center of endemism', with its forest ecoregions having one of the highest percentages of endemic plants in the world.

Land plants disperse by several different means. Many plants, mostly ferns and mosses but also some flowering plants, disperse on the wind, relying on tiny spores or feathery seeds that can remain airborne over long distances notably Metrosideros trees from New Zealand spread on the wind across Oceania. Other plants, notably coconut palms and mangroves, produce seeds that can float in salt water over long distances, eventually washing up on distant beaches, and thus Cocos trees are ubiquitous across Oceania. Birds are also an important means of dispersal; some plants produce sticky seeds that are carried on the feet or feathers of birds, and many plants produce fruits with seeds that can pass through the digestive tracts of birds. Pandanus trees are fairly ubiquitous across Oceania.

Botanists generally agree that much of the flora of Oceania is derived from the Malesian Flora of the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia, the Philippines, and New Guinea, with some plants from Australasia and a few from the Americas, particularly in Hawaii. Easter Island has some plants from South America such as the totora reed.

Dispersal across the ocean is difficult for most land animals, and Oceania has relatively few indigenous land animals compared to other ecozones. Certain types of animals that are ecologically important on the continental ecozones, like large land predators and grazing mammals, were entirely absent from the islands of Oceania until humans brought them. Birds are relatively common, including many seabirds and some species of land birds whose ancestors may have been blown out to sea by storms. Some birds evolved into flightless species after their ancestors arrived, including several species of rails. A number of islands have indigenous lizards, including geckoes and skinks, whose ancestors probably arrived on floating rafts of vegetation washed out to sea by storms. With the exception of bats, which live on most of the island groups, there are few if any indigenous mammal species in Oceania.

Many animal and plant species have been introduced by humans in two main waves.

Malayo-Polynesian settlers brought pigs, dogs, chickens and polynesian rats to many islands; and had spread across the whole of Oceania by 1200 CE. From the seventeenth century onwards European settlers brought other animals, including cats, cattle, horses, small Asian mongoose (Herpestes javanicus), sheep, goats, and the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus). These and other introduced species, in addition to overhunting and deforestation, have dramatically altered the ecology of many of Oceania's islands, pushing many species to extinction or near-extinction, or confining them to small islets uninhabited by humans.

The absence of predator species caused many bird species to become 'naive', losing the instinct to flee from predators, and to lay their eggs on the ground, which makes them vulnerable to introduced predators like cats, dogs, mongooses, and rats. The arrival of humans on these island groups often resulted in disruption of the indigenous ecosystems and waves of species extinctions (see Holocene extinction event). Easter Island, the easternmost island in Polynesia, shows evidence of a human-caused ecosystem collapse several hundred years ago, which contributed (along with slave raiding and European diseases) to a 99% decline in the human population of the island. The island, once lushly forested, is now mostly windswept grasslands. More recently, Guam's native bird and lizard species were decimated by the introduction of the brown tree snake (Boiga irregularis) in the 1940s.

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Santorini, Greece Santos (Sao Paulo), Brazil Sapporo, Japan Savona, Italy Seattle, Washington Seville, Spain Seward, Alaska Seychelles, Male Shanghai, China Shannon, Ireland Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt Siem Reap, Cambodia Singapore, Singapore Skagway, Alaska Sokhna, Egypt Southampton, England St. Denis, Reunion St. Georges, Bermuda St. John, Canada St. Johns, Antigua St. Maarten St. Martin, French Antilles St. Nazaire, France St. Petersburg, Russia Fed. St. Thomas, Virgin Islands St. Tropez, France Stockholm, Sweden Sydney, Australia Sydney, Canada Syros, Greece Talcahuano, Chile Tampa, Florida Tarragona, Spain Tel Aviv Tema, Ghana Tenerife, Canary Islands Tenerife, Spain Tianjin, China Tokyo, Japan Toronto, Canada Toulon, France Trapani, Italy Travemunde, Germany Trieste, Italy Tromso, Norway Tromso, Norway Ushuaia, Argentina Valencia, Spain Valletta, Malta Valparaiso, Chile Vancouver, Canada Venice, Italy Victoria, British Columbia Vigo, Spain Villefranche, France Walvis Bay, Namibia Warnemunde, Germany Washington DC Waterford, Ireland Wellington, New Zealand Whittier, Alaska Willemstad, Curacao Xiamen, China Xingang, China Yangon Rangoon, Myanmar Yokohoma, Japan Zurich, Switzerland

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Oceania Cruises : Huge Discounts on Oceania Vacations ...

Oceania este numele dat ansamblului insulelor din Oceanul Pacific mpreun cu apele lor teritoriale. n general, aceast denumire se refer la Polinezia (inclusiv Noua Zeeland) iniial populat de mori, Melanezia (inclusiv Papua Noua Guinee) i Micronezia), iar uneori, i ri ca Australia sau Malaezia.

Dei insulele Oceaniei nu formeaz un continent n adevratul sens al cuvntului, Oceania este uneori asociat cu insula-continent Australia, din tendina de a mpri tot Pmntul n grupri continentale. Astfel, este cel mai mic "continent" n suprafa i al doilea cel mai mic (dup Antarctida) n populaie.

n ecologie, Oceania este una dintre cele opt ecozone terestre, zone care constituie cele mai mari regiuni ecologice de pe planet. Ecozona Oceaniei este format din toat Micronezia, Fiji i toat Polinezia (cu excepia Noii Zeelande). Noua Zeeland, mpreun cu Papua Noua Guinee, Australia, Insulele Solomon i Noua Caledonie, constituie o ecozon separat, i anume Ecozona Australasia. n geonomie, Oceania este un laborator al viitorului devreme ce lumea insular, mai fragil dar mai uor de observat, de studiat i de ngrijit prin soluii inovante pe planul agricol, halieutic i energetic, este deja afectat foarte vizibil de suprapopulaie, de nclzirea climei, de nteirea taifunurilor, de ridicarea nivelului mrii, de eroziunea solului, de vulcanism, de dispariia speciilor endemice i de proliferarea celor invazive. Ca atare, Oceania apare ca o prefigurare a problemelor i soluiilor pentru ntreaga planet.

n Oceania, nicio ar nu are granie terestre (cu excepia frontierei trasate n insula Noua Guinee ntre partea independent i partea Indonezian).

mprirea tradiional a Oceaniei n Micronezia, Melanezia i Polinezia (dup francezul Dumont d'Urville, n 1831) nu mai este considerat ca fiind corespunztoare cu realitatea geografic-lingvistic de majoritatea geografilor i oamenilor de tiin, dar este nc cea mai folosit din motive practice:

1 Regiuni dup UN categorisations/map. 2 Noua Zeeland este consta des ca parte de Polinezia. 3 Fr insulele indoneziene i Timorul de Est, care sunt considerat ca parte de Micronezia. 4 Papua Noua Guinee este uneori considerat ca parte din Australasia sau Melanezia.

n romanul O mie nou sute optzeci i patru, de George Orwell, Oceania este unul dintre cele trei superstate, care i disput supremaia n lume, alturi de Eurasia i de Estasia.

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Oceania - Wikipedia

Welcome to Oceania Cruises

Your World. Your Way.

Filled with a spectacular array of diverse and exotic destinations, your world awaits your discovery. There is simply no better way to explore it than aboard the elegant ships of Oceania Cruises. Our unique itineraries are handcrafted, featuring the most fascinating destinations throughout the world. As Regatta, Insignia, Nautica, Sirena, Marina and Riviera are all comfortably mid-size, each ship calls on the worlds most desirable ports, from historic cities and modern meccas to charming seaside villages and faraway islands. On a voyage with Oceania Cruises, each day offers the rewarding opportunity to experience the history, culture and cuisine of a wondrous new destination.

Relax on board our luxurious ships and savor exquisite cuisine that not only is renowned as the finest at sea, but also rivals the best restaurants ashore. Inspired by Master Chef Jacques Ppin, these culinary delights have always been a hallmark that distinguishes the Oceania Cruises experience from any other. Considering the uncompromising quality, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of an Oceania Cruises voyage is its incredible value. Lavish complimentary amenities abound, and there are never supplemental charges in any of the onboard restaurants. Value packages ensure that sipping a glass of vintage wine, surfing the Internet or enjoying a shore excursion is both convenient and affordable.

As the leader in destination cruising, Oceania Cruises sails to more than 330 ports around the globe. Itineraries are unique in that they call on the perfect mix of must-see marquee and boutique, off-the-beaten-path ports. Multiple overnight calls afford an in-depth, enriching destination experience and allow travelers to immerse themselves in the cuisine, culture and history of the ports we visit.

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