Page 335 - THE MELANESIA DIASPORA FILE CETAK ISI 10022017

There is a strong influence of Melanesian race in the element of culture as seen from the
anthropological perspective.

Searching for the Shards of the Melanesian Race
It is not a strange thing to have an initiative to reconstruct the elements that can be
categorized into Melanesian race. Howard (1993) said that it is very important to reconstruct
the understanding of the Pacific area to review the same term more realistically. He based
his opinion on the findings from all over Pacific, and he found that western influence
dominates the perspective and people’s mindset in the area. The search for the history of
men about the culture of Melanesian people is an important thing, or at least there is an
element of local culture (of Melanesia) in something that has been influenced strongly by
the western culture and other things (Howard, 1993).
Lubis (1980) in Bangsa Indonesia: masa lampau-masa kini-masadepan put Indonesian-
cultured people in the Melanesian context. Although the book didn’t mention the Melanesian
Race specifically the elaboration there referred to Melanesia. Some of them are:
“New men went from South Asia to Nusantara about 2000 years before Christ,
probably using rafts from woods, scattered around on the islands reaching out to the
east in Irian, Australia, or even further to the east. The researchers called them Paleo-
Melanesoid, Negrito, and Mongoloid. Maybe when they were still in Central Asia, called
by the researchers as the place where human civilization was born, these newcomers to
Nusantara had begun farming, planting the tubers, which grew well in tropical soil. They
lived on hunting and collecting food. On this level they didn’t have any social organizations
besides their family, and there was no king or someone who ruled the country. They
believed in taboos, magic, and that everything, animals, humans, trees, mountains, the
sea, rocks, rivers, lakes, the sky, and so on, had soul.”
Lubis then described the similarity of the people’s way of life who resided in Melanesia.
Boelaars (1984) complements Lubis by mentioning the strategy of basic culture of
Indonesian people, which is connected to the basic culture of Melanesian race. For
example, he mentioned the gatherers, farmers, and sailors. Boelaars refers to the pre-
history and history experts about the journey of the ethnic groups in the beginning of pre-
Indonesia to place the country in a non-exclusive or merely inclusive life line and with a
close relationship with the surrounding ethnic groups, in this case everybody who lived in
the area where Austronesian people lived.
Being sailors is a characteristic of the Melanesian race that has gone down from earlier
generations until now. It was said that at the end of the ice age, a group of sailors from

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