Marilyn Strathern argues that gender relations in Melanesia have been a particular casualty of unexamined assumptions held by Western anthropologists and feminist scholars alike. The book treats with equal seriousness, and with equal good humour, the insights of Western social science, feminist politics, and ethnographic reporting, in order to rethink the representation of Melanesian social and cultural life.

"Weaving together descriptive ethnography and conventional cultural analysis with narrative accounts, A'aisa's Gifts offers not only an illuminating picture of Mekeo cosmology and perceptions of self but a study with broad implications for anthropologists, psychologists, and scholars of comparative religion." -- Back cover.

"An original work... it presents to anthropology the model for a new and very important field of inquiry."--Paula Brown Glick, State University of New York, Stony Brook.