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Melanesia is the subregion of Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, running from New Guinea in the west to the Fiji Islands in the east and bordering Southeast Asia, Micronesia, Polynesia and Australia. It comprises the independent nations of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, along with New Caledonia and the Indonesian provinces of Western New Guinea. The French navigator Jules Dumont d'Urville coined the name in 1832 alongside Micronesia, to sit beside the already established Polynesia, but geographers and anthropologists still disagree about exactly where its boundaries run, including whether Fiji belongs here or in Polynesia.
Facts
Area (sq km)2021 UN geoscheme totals row. Population2021 UN geoscheme totals row. Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Melanesia is one of Oceania's constituent subregions, alongside Micronesia and Polynesia.
On Continent
Australia, Continents Modelled on the atlas's own live convention for Oceania (on-continent Australia), the same convention this entity's continent-level parent region already uses.
Sources
1. Melanesia (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationDefinition and location sectionQuote, Definition and location section
Melanesia is a subregion of Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It extends from New Guinea in the west to the Fiji Islands in the east.
1. Melanesia (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationDemographics section, totals rowQuote, Demographics section, totals row
Melanesia (total) 1,000,231 [km2] 14,373,536 [population in 2021]
Open Questions (1 open question)
Which islands and peoples actually belong inside Melanesia, and does the category itself still hold together?
Melanesia was coined in 1832 by Jules Dumont d'Urville alongside Micronesia, to sit beside the already-established Polynesia, originally on now-rejected racial grounds. There is no general agreement even among anthropologists about where its geographical boundaries run: whether New Guinea belongs fully inside it, whether Fiji is better classified as Melanesian or Polynesian given its historical and genetic ties to both, and how to classify Torres Strait Islander communities. Modern scholarship has moved toward defining the region by shared cultural and linguistic features rather than the original racial classification, but that shift has not settled where the lines fall.
What would resolve this A cultural or linguistic classification standard for the region that current Pacific studies scholarship agrees on and applies consistently to the contested cases (New Guinea, Fiji, Torres Strait); no such consensus standard exists yet.
Anthropology and Pacific studiesMelanesia (Wikipedia)
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