This volume brings together a series of intensive investigations by Africanists and Melanesianists on the relations between persons and bodies. We did not give the contributors narrow instructions but wished to discover the range of strategies and approaches they would take to this topic. Specifically we were interested in how the broad interest in the body currently evident in a range of disciplines across the academy would be refracted in the ethnography of non-Western societies, and conversely what such investigations would have to contribute to the general debate as well as to the advancement of theory within anthropology itself. Our reasons for selecting Africanists and Melanesianists are advanced below, but in brief we wanted to see how models derived from work in each area might speak to each other. An underlying aim of the book is thus to advance ethnographic comparison, a theme we take up in more general terms at the end of the Introduction.

Africanist and Melanesianist traditions: a continuing dialogue

This project developed out of a sense that close work among regional specialists, while necessary and often exhilarating, is not enough. With the supremacy of the regionalist view (as manifested, for example, in course titles or job advertisements), it has become increasingly necessary to focus one's reading on a specific geographical region of study. As the number of monographs has grown, it has been harder to keep up, and one of the things that seems to have declined is reading between regions.