Magicians of Manumanua: Living Myth in Kalauna

Record summary

Michael W. Young’s monograph examines ritual knowledge, myth, divination and magical practice in Kalauna, on the island of Goodenough. It is a particularly useful lead because it treats named practitioners and operations within a local social and cosmological system rather than translating them directly into Western occult categories. The book may support comparison with Melanesian ideas of efficacy, secrecy and ritual authority. Exact terminology, Indigenous-language spellings and the boundary between ethnographic description and later interpretation require checking against the publication and field materials.