Publisher's Synopsis
"A major contribution to the ethnography and history of Malaita and Melanesia, and to the growing literature on cultural resistance. But above all, his humane and painful analysis of the meeting of peoples living in different worlds and constructing their agendas and moralities on incommensurate-and apparently equally arbitrary-principles, represents a major contribution and challenge to anthropological thought, addressing the basic issue of what it is to be human."-Fredrik Barth