Page 304 - THE MELANESIA DIASPORA FILE CETAK ISI 10022017

dynamics of Melanesia, that is a mixture of elements of the Negroid Race and Australasia
Race (Fox, 2014).
Around 1825, Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent made further attempts to elaborate
by referring to the 15 general race models of the human races in the world. His findings
are almost the same as the Melanesian population, also called Melanian, and can be
distinguished from the Australia race and Neptunian, now called Polynesia. This describes
Melanesia as a race that exists with their own cultural patterns, but still together with
other races such as the Negroid, Asian (Mongoloid), and Australasian.
In 1832, Dumont D’Urville followed up the above descriptions and began to classify
the inhabitants of Oceania into four major racial groups namely: Malaya(sia), Polynesia,
Micronesia and Melanesia. Meanwhile, there were some who classified Australia into the
race of Melanesia by including the Aboriginal people of Australia. Researchers mostly
agreed that the starting point of the division of Melanesia was not based on geography,
but only on physical distinction or specific cultural interests, or phenotype characteristics
which later became known as races without actual genotype analysis. Melanesia came to
be known as the ‘home race of Oceania’, and I think it is this latter idea that should be
explored more carefully to understand the lives of the Melanesian People.
Generally, all tribes who inhabit Oceania - or in the context of our speech Melanesia are
– black-skinned, a ripe sapodilla color and a bit dark, with curly and wavy hair, small noses,
who actively hunt, have fine hair, wide mouths, and are somewhat different from the white
population with typical social behavior. European researchers identify Melanesia not only
from the perspective of cultural and racial or geographic group understanding but also as
groups of people that can be identified from a variety of perspectives.
Although there are some researchers who hold on to the erroneous claim that emerged
in the 19th century, the difference boiled down to a very significant opinion regarding the
map of Melanesia. Some experts claim that Papua New Guinea and Indonesian Papua
do not belong to the Melanesian groups. In the 20 century, the claims from the previous
th
century were challenged and eastern Indonesia, including islands of Nusa Tenggara (NTT
and NTB) but not Bali were included in Melanesia. The findings made in the 20th century
are based more on the analysis of the findings/discoveries from around the 16th century to
19th century, about the origin of Melanesia. There are two things: (1) Melanesian cultural
transmission and the neighboring races, and (2) language transmission, in particular of the
languages of Proto-Austronesian.

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