Classic studies in Melanesian and Amazonian ethnography attempted to link oppositions between men and women to the structural features of collective male bonding and to a psychology of male insecurity and resentment against women. This article juxtaposes such arguments with the contemporary relationship between gendered identity and appropriations of modernity in these world areas. Gendered identities nowadays engage with the importance of acquiring trade goods and money, with the altered significance of female sexual propriety and of restrictions on women's activities, and with the intrusion of national economic and political agendas. The intertwining of commodity aspirations and idioms of modernity is central to the contemporary construction of masculine prestige and feminine propriety in these regions. The major differences between Amazonian and Melanesian gender relations are connected to contrasts in customary marriage and residence patterns, and to differing histories of colonial domination, geographic intrusion and cultural influence. Over the last four decades, the ethnography of gender in Melanesia and in Amazonia has exhibited a number of common themes. As many scholars have noted, both of these world areas share significant features pertaining to rainforest ecology and adaptation, to acephalous sociopolitical organization and exchange and to elaborate spiritual beliefs, ritual cults, or initiations relating to cosmological life-force and fertility. Cultures in both regions have foregrounded gendered opposition - sometimes associated with male domination or antagonism against women - as a central dimension of social life and symbolic organization.1 In both Melanesia and the Amazon, a number of studies carried out between the 1950s and the 1980s attempted to link opposition between men and women with the structural stresses and effects of collective male bonding, on the one hand, and to a psychology of male insecurity and resentment against women, on the other. Several now-classic studies from both regions considered the relationship between sexual antagonism, social structure and psychology. This article critically juxtaposes the legacy of these arguments with changing patterns of gender and sexuality in Melanesia and Amazonia. Local notions of manhood and womanhood increasingly engage the tensions created by the growing dependence on trade goods, aspirations to economic development and the intrusion of nationalist economic and political agendas. The intertwining of commodity aspirations with ethnic, racial and national dimensions of