The town in the village and the village in the town: an examination of a discursive dichotomy in Melanesia

Melanesians had no experience of towns until Europeans developed them, and for several decades 'town' remained a distant place far-flung 'villagers' could only try to imagine. Conversely, early colonial officials applied the term 'village' indiscriminately to local habitats that often bore no resemblance to one. In this article I interrogate the development and resilience of the discursive town-village dichotomy from the colonial period to the present day, and the popular imagery especially of 'villages' with its implications of cultural integrity grounded in egalitarianism, communalism, and tradition. This imagery is found not only in development-aid literature and foreign media representations of villages, but also in the discourse of contemporary Melanesians. I contrast this representation with a variety of research findings that disclose the relationship between towns and so-called village society, and its changing nature over a number of decades.