<p>This book deals with war in three Oceanian societies. More specifi cally, it analyzes the following: the process of war in relation to population pressure among New Guinea's Maring people; exten sion and contraction in the headhunting activities of the Iban people of Sarawak during the nineteenth century; and the disrup tion resulting from the introduction of muskets in the warfare of the Maoris of New Zealand. In all of the analyses, I have viewed war as a process rather than simply as something that either does or does not occur and I have tried to see how the process relates to environmental problems or perturbations actually faced by people. The use of such an approach can, I believe, lead to important understandings about war and, more generally, about how people respond to environmental problems. A goal in this book is to show that this is so. Although it is only relatively recently that the significance of viewing war as a process became clear to me, my interest in war in relation to environmental and demographic phenomena is of long vii viii Preface standing. The beginning of the studies resulting in the present book can, in fact, be said to date back to the mid-1950s when I was in New Zealand to do library research for my Ph. D. dissertation on Maori warfare.</p>

War in Ecological Perspective: Persistence, Change, and Adaptive Processes in Three Oceanian Societies

Politics & Social Sciences

Vayda, Andrew

Social Sciences

Springer

The islands of the Pacific Ocean provide the anthropologist with a unique laboratory for studying man and his culture. Not only does their isolation remove the problem of defining communities or social systems, but, in addition, culture traits and institutions rarely found another areas of the world have developed and survived in the islands where external contacts have been limited. The kinds of studies undertaken in the Pacific have been numerous. For this volume, Dr. Vayda has collected articles that not only exemplify the main research interests of anthropologists working in the area, but which also serve as introductions to more specialized areas such as physical anthropology and linguistic classification. Dr. Vayda received his doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University in 1956. He has done field work in the Cook Islands, and New Guinea and has traveled widely in the rest of the South Pacific. Dr. Vayda is currently Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.

Peoples and Cultures of the Pacific: An Anthropological Reader.

Anthropology

Published for the American Museum of Natural

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