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Lindstrom

Oceania: Islands, Land, People

Due to colonial neglect and historical isolation, the Pacific Islands, home to the world's most diverse range of indigenous cultures, continue to sustain many ancestral life-ways. Fewer than 6.5 million in all, the peoples of Oceania possess a vast repository of cultural traditions and ecological adaptations. Papua New Guinea alone is home to one-third of the world's languages - about 780 distinct vernaculars. Oceania thus has the most to lose, culturally speaking, from the pressures of global political and economic change.

Kava, Cash, and Custom in Vanuatu

Night comes early to Port Vila, Vanuatu's small capital town where some 20,000 of the country's 145,000 people now live. By 6:00 P.M. a goodly number of these townspeople are already settled in a variety of bamboo-walled, tin-roofed shelters, and are busy buying and drinking cups of kava (Piper methysticum), the Pacific's indigenous drug (see Lindstrom 1987). The number of Port Vila's urban kava bars (or nakamals, as these are called in Bislama, Vanuatu's Pidgin English) has increased dramatically since the country's independence in 1980.

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