Becoming Landowners

Across Melanesia, as across much of the world, the ways in which people connect to land are being transformed by modernizing processes of change. Melanesian peoples are becoming landowners, this book argues, both in the sense that these processes of change compel forms of property relations, and in the sense that "landowner” and "custom landowner” become identities to be wielded against the encroachment of both state and capital.