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The Pacific Islands: Environment and Society, edited by Moshe Rapaport. Honolulu: Bess Press, 1999. ISBN I-573o6-083-6, cloth; 1-573o6-042-9, paper; vi + 442 pages, maps, photographs, tables, notes, bibliography, index, and Island Gazetteer. Cloth, us$49.95; paper, us$39.95. Humboldt tried to write, in several volumes, about the entire cosmos, but since the late nineteenth century geographers have learned to be more circumspect and have confined their efforts to single regions. However, there comes a time when even the classic regions of nineteenth-century geography can no longer be covered properly by a single author, and the Pacific Islands may now have entered this stage. Half a century ago even a vast and populous region like India could be tackled with panache by a polymath scholar like Oskar Spate, but in the Pacific we have rather few examples of equivalent ambition. Harold Brookfield achieved something close to a classic regional text in his book Melanesia: A Geographical Interpretation of an Island World (1971), but it is hard to think of more recent examples that encompass even part of the Pacific Islands in all their modern diversity. Even books that seem to promise a holistic overview turn out to be relatively specialized. For example, Matthew Spriggs' fine book The Island Melanesians (1997) covers a large area but lingers for so long on its prehistory that the last five hundred years are covered in a gallop, while Paul Sillitoe's An Introduction to the Anthropology of Melanesia (1998) does an excellent job in reviewing the ethnography of rural New Guinea but seldom strays far from that island or from the anthropological literature.
As a result we lack overviews. The scholarly focus has shifted to the microscale where the challenge of making broader generalizations and regional comparisons can be avoided, and where no attempt at a holistic analysis is expected. For this reason alone-for its regional scope and holistic ambitions-Moshe Rapaport's edited volume Pacific Islands: Environment and Society is to be welcomed.
An increasingly...