Trobriand Religion

Trobriand religion, practiced by the Trobriand Islanders of the Massim region off eastern Papua New Guinea, centers on megwa, spoken spells used in gardening, canoe building, love magic, healing and the kula exchange, believed to work only when spoken correctly by their rightful owner. A megwa spell is owned property under Trobriand law, transmitted along a particular line of descent rather than shared as common knowledge, and this article describes what the magic is for and who owns it without reproducing spell text, even where an outside researcher once printed some.

That researcher was Bronislaw Malinowski, whose fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders in the early twentieth century, conducted through direct participation in island life rather than from a colonial administrator's distance, is widely credited with helping establish the modern practice of ethnographic fieldwork in anthropology as a discipline. His published accounts of Trobriand magic, gardening ritual and belief about conception and the spirit world remain foundational texts scholars still read and debate. Trobriand religion continues today alongside Christian practice introduced under colonial administration, still centered on baloma, ancestral spirits linked to conception, and on megwa held by those whose right it is to speak it, a living tradition rather than only a chapter in anthropology's own history.