Peter R. Lovell's scientific contributions

... While it has been documented how Rivers was wrong in some of his most stubborn ideas about cultural history and diffusion (see Allen 1981a), his ethnographic observations from the early colonial era about social regulations still have validity. This is demonstrated in more recent studies of kinship in Vanuatu, quite simply by the fact that much has continued to revolve around the entanglements of 'mother right' and 'father right' and the various cultural implications these have in different parts of the archipelago (see Rodman 1973;Poewe and Lovell 1980;Allen 1981b;Patterson 1981;Facey 1989). We propose two different angles for relating mother right and father right to contemporary Vanuatu ethnography. ...