Talk:Melanesian mythology

Speedy deletion nomination

This article was nominated for speedy deletion. I have developed a couple of sentences and asked for expansion. I will also find an appropriate stub for it. Capitalistroadster 03:24, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Expansion

It seems to me that the most logical expansion would be to outline common beliefs and notable features of Melanesian mythology in areas such as New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. Capitalistroadster 03:42, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Origin

Good work so far Capitalistroadster! I think I started this page in error when I was making the Category for Melanesian mythology. It is a needed article tho, and I am also hoping to improve the kindred article on Polynesian mythology (more my area) which needs better content. Please also see the article on Encyclopedia Mythica to avoid a trap for the unwary that we are trying to get rid of from the Polynesian mythology pages: many of the Melanesian stubs will have been started from that source and it is unreliable to say the least. Kahuroa 05:06, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Merge proposal

Kastom is the more commonly used word to describe the range of myths and associated praxis. Merge? Paki.tv 08:23, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:

• Yaohnanen Tribesmen Show Pictures of 2007 Visit with Prince Philip.jpg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 02:30, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

needs to cite sources!

I was fascinated by this article. Then I realized it doesn't cite sources. This must be changed. Please, some editor who has specialized knowledge in this area, insert references. Pete unseth (talk) 15:21, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

Apparent copyvio

https://books.google.ca/books?id=24x0AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA378 Elinruby (talk) 15:07, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

Under “Origin of the sun and moon”: Compare to source above, from article: “the version given by one of the tribes of the Massim district of British New Guinea. One day a woman who was watching her garden close to the ocean, seeing a great fish sporting in the surf, walked out into the water and played with the fish, continuing to do this for several days. By and by the woman's leg, against which the fish had rubbed, began to swell and became painful until at last she got her father to make a cut in the swelling, when out popped an infant. The boy, who was named Dudugera, grew up among the other children of the village until one day, in playing a game, he threw his dart at the other children rather than at the mark, whereupon they became angry and abused him, taunting him with his parentage. Fearing lest the others might really harm him, Dudugera's mother determined to send him to his father; so she took the boy to the beach, whereupon the great fish came, seized him in his mouth, and carried him far away to the east. Before he left, Dudugera warned his mother and relatives to take refuge under a great rock, for soon, he said, he would climb into a pandanus-tree and thence into the sky, and, as the sun, would destroy all things with his heat. So indeed, it came to pass, for excepting his mother and her relatives, who heeded Dudugera's advice, nearly everything perished. To prevent their total annihilation his mother took a lime-calabash, and climbing upon a hill near which the sun rose, cast the lime into his face as he came up, which caused the sun to shut his eyes and thus to decrease the amount of heat.“ Elinruby (talk) 15:11, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

Since this was published in 1910, it falls in the public domain and can be copied like this. It should still be cited or acknowledged that text is coming from this work though. --Jacquesparker0 (talk) 20:39, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

Major problems with this entry

The whole entry is essentially a cut-and-paste of Dixon's book, since these edits of 23 May 2014 (which itself was a response to the speedy-deletion discussion the same week).

Dixon's 1916 book may be public domain now, and indeed freely accessible, but I do find it a problem that this whole entry is copied from a single author's book, which was never meant to be an encyclopedic entry to begin with; and I really don't think that this contents, written as it is now (interesting though it may be) is in line with what a WP entry should be like.

Add to this, numerous issues due to the old date of the book (1916): many place names that are now outdated (as I said here), e.g. “Banks Islands” and “New Hebrides” being two different archipelagos (even though they've been part of Vanuatu since 1980); “Lepers Island” for what is now Ambae; actual country names like Papua New Guinea being mentioned nowhere, and called instead using old-fashioned categories like German New Guinea and British New Guinea (i.e. pre-Treaty of Versailles!). I've tried to edit some placenames, but that's not enough. Also, major areas of Melanesia are missing entirely, like New Caledonia or Fiji.

And then there is a deeper problem, namely that what is outdated are not just placenames, but the entire approach to the very subject of “Melanesian mythology”. The author's 1916 approach consists in bringing together, sometimes under a single paragraph, cultural narratives from very different places, like the Banks islands and then the Admiralty islands and then moving on to so-called “New Hebrides” (meaning Ambae), then back to the Baining etc. as if those were all variants of a single culture, that one could lumpi under a single umbrella term of “Melanesian mythology”. That is such a 19th-century approach — similar to some books written at the time, that would claim to describe an “African mythology” from Senegal to Mozambique. This makes no sense at all, by today's academic standards.

Also, Dixon doesn't cite his own sources, which is yet another problem.

So I'm afraid this whole entry should be taken with caution, enriched with disclaimers, or even fully rewritten. The original 1916 texts could/should be posted on WikiSource for example (similar to Codrington's The Melanesians, 1891), and some refs made to it. Also, other sources should be taken into account in the entry, post 1916, including Maurice Leenhardt, Bronisław Malinowski, Jean Guiart, Maurice Godelier, Daniel de Coppet, Alban Bensa and so many others.

The current version of the page is unsatisfactory, but I don't know where to start to fix it. — Womtelo (talk) 16:04, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

@Womtelo I agree with everything you say here. I am fearful about the monosourcing this article exhibits in particular, since without extensive review of Dixon's entry and the volume as a whole I am unsure of how much of that information can be trusted to (1) be accurate since he doesn't cite sources and (2) not have racist undertones to it. Do we think it would be worth hiding this article from public access until it can be reworked? --Jacquesparker0 (talk) 20:36, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

I have no experience with dealing with public access to wikipedia articles, but it might be worth hiding it. The title is essentially misleading, as the article is more about Dixon's take on Melanesian mythology, and not about Melanesian mythology in general. If someone were to look at this article, they might think that this is the leading opinion on the subject, which it is probably not. The article definitely needs a massive overhaul, but I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing that. A. E. Katz (talk) 02:51, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

I have been working on editing the writing of the entry to make it less wordy and confusing, but I can see the underlying problems of this page. It is based completely on Dixon's 1916 work, which would be fine if it was an article on Dixon's work, but it is not. I think the whole of Dixon's work should be condensed into a single section, and more information added about the mythology that is not Dixon-based.

Would it be worth copyediting the whole article, or should I just get rid of a lot of unnecessarily detailed parts?

This article definitely needs more research and more relevant info added, but I have never done that for a Wiki article before and am unsure about undertaking it. A. E. Katz (talk) 02:46, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

I think that the best way to approach the article now would firstly be to delete all of Dixon's copied prose. What would remain would be sparse, but following which other editors could pick up the research work. It is simply inappropriate for this article to be a copy-paste of the book, and it's not better-off keeping it this way. I think it would be better off, indeed, covering just a few aspects of the notion of a Melanesian mythology. Dawkin Verbier (talk) 18:10, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

I disagree. There is a lot of information here that is doubtlessly correct; even if Dixon's classification and generalisations are not considered correct today (and it seems unlikely that they have all been completely disproved), the numerous specific narratives he cites are real. Wikipedia has a lot of fragmentary mythology articles that consist of little else but a few such narratives; this structured version is a lot better. It's better to revise what he says using newer sources, such as the Poignant book from the 1960s. But this might also turn out to be an under-researched area where there just aren't many treatments with a scope and detail comparable to Dixon's. As for the objection that he makes statements about Melanesian mythology in general - there is nothing wrong or outdated in trying to find common themes or trends in a region, or else in parts of it; Dixon's presentation certainly doesn't hide the huge diversity of the mythology of the area.--62.73.69.121 (talk) 12:50, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Contradictions

1. ‘The "Melanesian" mythology, on the other hand, has more myths relating to cosmogony,’ 2. ‘According to Dixon's classification, the mythology of his "Melanesian" area (i.e. the area peopled by Oceanic-speaking populations) is characterized by the almost total lack of myths relating to the origin of the world’ 3. ‘While Dixon did not focus on the beginning of the world in his "Melanesian" area’

These three statements are incompatible. Cosmogony is precisely about the origin of the world, so statement 1 and 2 contradict each other. And statement 3 is incompatible with either of the other two - the other statements presuppose that Dixon looked for cosmogonic myths and either found them (according to statement 1) or didn't (according to statement 2), whereas statement 3 implies that the only reason why Dixon didn't find any is that he didn't bother to look (presumably because he was especially racist against Melanesians as opposed to Polynesians - but that assessment of his research would itself need to be sourced). 62.73.69.121 (talk) 15:14, 21 February 2024 (UTC)