Towards a comparative ethnography of Austronesian 'paths' and 'journeys'

The expansion and dispersal of Austronesian languages from Taiwan to Timor and across the Indian Ocean and through the Pacific, stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island, demonstrate a remarkable social mobility. Exploration of this mobility has been the implicit theme in the majority of the various volumes of the Comparative Austronesian series. This exploration has included not just the delineation of the distribution of Austronesian languages and the examination of the archaeological evidence for the spread of plants, people and their products, but also the consideration of the social factors underlying this mobility: technologies of travel, systems of exchange, forms of subsistence and their implications, trade patterns, demographic pressures on small islands, the reception of distant strangers, the role of status systems that propel individuals outward, the prestige of founder status and the recognition and celebration of multiple ancestral origins.