ASAEO + NEWS = ASAO

Abstract

This paper examines the growth of ASAO from a society primarily focused on Eastern Oceania and Austronesian-speaking peoples to an umbrella organization that, today, encompasses the entire range of Pacific cultures. A primary decision towards this end was to include the very large number of researchers who work with speakers of non-Austronesian languages on the mainland of New Guinea. ASAO began as ASAEO, the Association for Social Anthropology in Eastern Oceania. Its members employed a controlled comparison approach to explore social variation in Austronesian (mostly Polynesian) societies. Meanwhile, Melanesianists, especially those working on the mainland of New Guinea with Papuan-speaking peoples, were without a comparable professional organization. Starting around 1980, a regional newsletter called <i>NEWS (The NorthEast Wantok System newsletter)</i> was begun with the goal of helping Melanesianists located in the Northeast area of the USA to keep in touch. It quickly grew and morphed into a regular newsletter with much wider (actually worldwide) distribution. But as the participation of Melanesianists in ASAO grew, <i>NEWS</i> became redundant with the <i>ASAO Newsletter</i> and the ASAONET listserv, and <i>NEWS</i> was terminated in May 1995. In this paper, I use <i>NEWS</i> as a focal point to trace the increasing involvement of Melanesianist anthropologists in ASAO and the concomitant broadening of ASAO’s comparative ethnographic base.