Dobu Island is an island, part of D'Entrecasteaux Islands

D'Entrecasteaux Islands

D'Entrecasteaux Islands are situated near the eastern tip of New Guinea in the Solomon Sea in Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea. The group spans a distance of 160 km, has a total land area of approximately 3,100 km² and is separated from the Papua New Guinea mainland by the...

 in Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea , officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is a country in Oceania, occupying the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and numerous offshore islands...

. It is located south of Fergusson Island

Fergusson Island

Fergusson Island is the largest island of the D'Entrecasteaux Islands, in Papua New Guinea. It has an area of just over 500 square miles , and mostly consists of mountainous regions, covered by rain forests...

 and north of Normanby Island

Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea

Normanby Island is a volcanic, 400 square mile , L-shaped island, the southern most island in the D'Entrecasteaux Islands group...

.

The people of Dobu were the subject of a seminal anthropological study by Reo Fortune

Reo Fortune

Reo Franklin Fortune was a New Zealand social anthropologist. Originally trained as a psychologist, Fortune was a lecturer in social anthropology at the Cambridge University, and a specialist in Melanesian language and culture. He was married to Margaret Mead, with whom he undertook field studies...

. He described the Dobuan character as "paranoid", obsessed with black magic, and as having extremely unusual attitudes toward sex and violence.

Fortune's account was reiterated by Ruth Benedict

Ruth Benedict

Ruth Benedict was an American anthropologist, cultural relativist, and folklorist....

in her popular work Patterns of Culture. However, many later anthropologists expressed skepticism.

Fortune's analysis was significantly challenged by Susanne Kuehling in her 2005 title Dobu: Ethics of Exchange on a Massim Island, Papua New Guinea. In particular, Kuehling's interest lies at the intersection of ethics and personal conduct.

Sources

• Benedict, Ruth (1934). Patterns of Culture. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
• Fortune, Reo (1963). Sorcerers of Dobu: the social anthropology of the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Kuehling, Susan (2005). Dobu: Ethics of Exchange on a Massim Island, Papua New Guinea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

External links

• George Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians, their life-histories described and compared, Published 1910 by Macmillan and co. Ltd., London - Open Library