The concept of Melanesian socialism was first advocated by Father Walter Lini of the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), who became the country’s first prime minister upon its independence from France and the United Kingdom in 1980. Lini’s views on socialism were inspired by Julius Nyerere’s experiments in African socialism in Tanzania. Lini believed that socialism was inherently compatible with Melanesian societies and customs, including the emphasis on communal welfare over individualism, and the communal ownership and working of […]
By Bilal AhmedPosted on 18 November 2013Posted in Asia, Politics I was speaking to my mother about democracy, expressing wariness about European models, which many Pakistanis associate with the Soviet-inspired experiments of the Afghan Communist era. I mentioned the jirga, as a way of envisioning direct democracy, in South Asian vernacular. She found it appealing. “That’s like the old days, […]
Should we look to traditional societies to help us tweak our lives? Wade Davis takes issue with the whole idea Source: https://www.theguardian.com/ Anthropology was born of an evolutionary model by which 19th-century men such as Lewis Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”, envisioned societies as stages in a linear […]
