For many people, the term "Melanesia" might elicit thoughts of skin cancer or some other dreaded disease—not an oceanic region of islands and archipelagoes. Donald Tuzin, however, isn't one of those people. For Tuzin, a professor of anthropology at UCSD and director of the university's Melanesian Archive, the Southwest Pacific islands of Melanesia represent an "anthropological laboratory" with myriad distinct cultures and languages that make it one of the world's major venues for anthropological research.
Tuzin first became interested in Melanesia—which includes the islands of Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu among others—while a doctoral student at the University of London in the 1960s. Although studying African cultures at the time, he attended a seminar on Melanesia and the Sepik River region in Papua New Guinea and promptly "fell in love with it."
"It was very remote, very exotic and it appealed to my romantic side," the Minnesota native explains. "I liked the idea of finding and focusing on an 'untouched' group of people."
Add to that the fact that the island of Papua New Guinea at that time had only two million people yet 1,000 languages and Tuzin was sold.
"One sixth of the world's languages are spoken there," he says, "sometimes among as few as 200-300 people. That's unique, and different than Africa where the same language is typically spoken throughout major regions."
Tuzin transferred to Australian National University so he could focus on Melanesia and a Papuan New Guinea village called "Ilahita" in particular. Ilahita was the home of the Arapesh, a horticultural people that had also been the subject of study by famed anthropologist Margaret Mead. With a population of approximately 1,500 people, Ilahita was a virtual metropolis by New Guinea standards where most villages hovered between 200-300 inhabitants. The sheer size of the village fascinated Tuzin who wanted to discover how it managed to become, and stay, so big.
"This was a most unusual situation on the island," he says. "There was so much social activity going on in Ilahita due to the size of the population. I went to 35 funerals my first year alone."
After spending 21 months studying Ilahita and its inhabitants, Tuzin completed his doctorate and accepted a position with UCSD's anthropology department. "I joined the faculty in 1973 and at the time I thought I'd only be here a couple of years," he says. "But I found I liked teaching too much ever to return to a full-time research position."
And Tuzin's students are glad he does. Whether sharing his love of Melanesia or simply eager to learn more about anthropology, thousands of undergraduate and graduate students at UCSD have been impacted by Tuzin's gift for teaching.
Since joining UCSD, Tuzin has authored four books and numerous articles. He considers one of his most important achievements to be the founding of the Melanesian Archive with fellow UCSD anthropologist, the late Fitz John Poole. The two came up with the idea after realizing that such a depository was urgently needed.
"Much ethnographic material is lost when a researcher dies," explains Tuzin. "The work doesn't always get saved or turned over to a university and since much of it is unpublished, it doesn't exist in an article or a book anywhere. All that research is essentially wasted."
Tuzin and Poole founded the Melanesian Archive in 1982 with a handful of research documents. Since then, the archive has grown to become one of the world's finest collections for unpublished materials on the societies, cultures and languages of Melanesia.
"UCSD has become a magnet for Melanesian studies," says Tuzin. "We have scholars from around the world coming through to visit the archive."
In addition to creating a clearinghouse for anthropologists, the archive has also served as a means of repatriating information that had been taken out of Melanesia. Thanks to the miracle of microfiche, the materials stored in the archive could be shared, free of charge, with the countries where the research had been based. Never before had scholars of any ethnographic region systematically, and as an expression of collective responsibility, shared their findings with the countries that hosted them.
To build on UCSD's tradition of excellence in this area, the university is hoping to establish an endowed chair in Melanesian Studies. The chair—the first and only one of its kind in the world—would ensure that this field of inquiry, and UCSD's supremacy in it, is taken to a whole new level of scholarly recognition, importance and permanence. It would also ensure the continued health and success of the Melanesian Archive, which is something Tuzin and his international colleagues can't stress enough.
"It's critical that people support the archive and the research, or make provisions in their will to do so," he says. "Otherwise, it's a terrible loss of knowledge about this, most remarkable, portion of the human heritage. New Guinea—and Melanesia, in general—are extremely important to a comprehensive anthropological understanding of ourselves."
For more information on the Melanesian Archive, visit:
http://anthro.ucsd.edu/graduate.html#melanesian
http://sshl.ucsd.edu/melanesia/
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