Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia

This study describes and interprets the ritual activity that follows upon death in the Tanga Islands Papua New Guinea. Robert J. Foster shows how the performance of large-scale feasts and ceremonial exchanges both commemorate the dead and regenerate the social relations of the living. He places the rites in an historical context by demonstrating how the effects of participation in an expanding cash economy has allowed Tangans to conceive of the rites as customary in opposition to the new and foreign practices of business.