During his end-of-century tour through what he called the “sea of little lands,” the British anthropologist F. W. Christian (1899a) visited Nan Madol on the island of Pohnpei in the Eastern Caroline group of the larger Micronesian geographical area. In three separate visits to the ruins in March of 1895, Christian surveyed the entire site, made maps, and took photographs of the larger, more prominent islets of Nan Dauwas and Pahn Kadira; he also conducted excavations of several tombs on Nan Dauwas, from which he took a substantial collection of beads and shell burial goods. Christian supplemented his description of...

Moruya Heads, New South Wales January 1999. I am reading Greg Dening’sReadings/Writingstucked up against the sand dunes, pondering the relation between his writing and the materiality of the beach: its scorching sands, its vast white expanse, the turbulent palette of the ocean as the weather changes and the tide rises and ebbs, and how in the heat of an Australian summer mirages are created, confounding quotidian vision and creating a dreamy haze in which pasts, presents, and futures seem to fold into and embrace each other. Suddenly a southerly breeze picks up and scatters fine grains of sand...

This chapter combines an ethnohistory of encounters between Pacific Islanders and European voyagers with the history of the unstable idea of “race” by correlating voyagers’ racial terminology with their experience of particular indigenous people. I take seriously local initiatives, actions, and demeanors—condensed as agency—as refracted through varied genres, modes, or media of travelers’ representations. I interpret encounters situationally, not as a general clash of reified cultures but as ambiguous intersections of multiple indigenous and foreign agencies that were usually at cross-purposes but not necessarily opposed. Theoretically, this approach postulates an oblique liaison between indigenous actions and their representation...

In June 1767, the British shipDolphindiscovered Tahiti for Europe. Captain Wallis was on a voyage of exploration, searching for the Unknown Southern Continent. Although canoe travel linked this small Polynesian island to the archipelagoes around it, until that moment its people knew nothing of the wider world. Now this isolation was shattered as a succession of ships from France, Britain, and Spanish America began to anchor off the coast, and as the first vessel from each nation arrived, its officers landed and put up a flag or a cross, claiming Tahiti for their monarch. To these first Europeans...

During James Cook’s second circumnavigation of the globe from 1772 through 1775, a certain young man’s observations shed light on European encounters with foreign cultures from a perspective unlike that of any other European of his day. The young man was Georg Forster (1754–1794), a youth of only seventeen at the journey’s start. Although in contrast to Cook—whom the public knows much more about today—his descriptions of their travel in the South Seas form in their distinctiveness a valuable contribution for today’s cultural anthropology that is impressive in literary terms as well as being scientifically rich.

Together...

It is usually assumed that the naming of the Pacific regions, at least for Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, was invented by the French navigator Dumont d’Urville in the early nineteenth century, as the expanded knowledge of the Pacific, or Oceania as it began to be called at the same time in France, required more detailed maps and hence new names for subdividing a vast expanse that appeared to be composed of so many different islands.

Such a view, which one finds in most textbooks and school manuals, is oblivious to two historical dimensions. First, Dumont d’Urville’s proposal was not so much...

On August 5, 1774, James Cook’s shipResolutiondropped anchor in what Cook was soon to name Port Resolution, a small bay on the eastern tip of Tanna Island (Cook 1777, vol. 2: 83–84). Cook had been sailing down the middle of an archipelago he had just renamed the New Hebrides, mapping and making observations. Attracted by the fire of Tanna’s active volcano, and by a snug harbor located close by, Cook decided to land on the island to take on wood, water, ballast and, so he hoped, food.

While anchored at Port Resolution, Cook loaded up with water,...

Societies remember the past in many different ways. There are historical narratives of various kinds, which keep track of past events that are relevant for the keepers of the histories (for example, descent groups, church groups, religious movements, political units). The past is also remembered in the passing on of ritual practices, social customs, practical knowledge, and material products. Traditions are forms of historical knowledge that elaborate on social practices and that are consciously orchestrated (e.g., as ceremonies or learning situations). A special kind of traditions put weight on an assumed continuity with the past. In Melanesia these traditions are...

In this chapter I will show that mimetic practice in a society is a key element in creating and handing down binding representations of a collective past. “Social mimesis,” in the sense used here, derives primarily from the philosophical works of Gebauer and Wulf (1995, 1998, 2003). These authors have taken a concept normally associated with aesthetics and usefully extended it to the social and cultural sciences. Following Gebauer and Wulf, I conceive mimesis as embracing in like measure acquisition and articulation, imitation and change. Corporeality and practice function as fundamental elements of the social process. Thus it is chiefly...

While living in France in February of 2002, I visited the annual Salon Mondial du Tourisme (tradeshow of global tourism) in Paris. It was packed with thousands of people browsing among some two hundred booths advertising every tourist destination imaginable. While looking at a display about farm stays in Tuscany, I suddenly heard the unmistakable sounds of Tahitian drumming reverberating throughout the hall, announcing that the next cultural performance—one of several that occurred at regular intervals throughout the tradeshow—was about to begin. As if on cue, crowds of people began to push their way toward the thunderous sounds...

The Solien Besena are a unique cultural group originating from the Motu-Koita and Tatana people of the Papua New Guinea south coast region, between Tatana Island and the Brown River. Numerous clan members migrated to eastern Australia in the 1970s up until the late 1990s. The Solien Besena now hold a distinctive ethnic marginality in both Papua New Guinea and Australia and consequently they aggressively promote their culture despite societal pressures from the dominant Australian population and other Papua New Guinean groups. They are recognized for their exemplary cultural development work in Brisbane and Sydney, having been invited to two...

In changing contexts through time and across the globe, certain Fijian water has shifted in meaning. It has emerged unnamed from springs, free-flowing and uncommoditized in the foothills of the Kauvadra mountain. It has been put in a coconut shell cup and named“wai ni tuka”(water of immortality) by prophet-leader Navosavakadua, drunk to induce warrior invulnerability by the Vatukaloko people, and sent to potential allies for consumption. And some recently has become another kind of transacted object, pumped into square plastic bottles with hibiscuses on them and sold in U.S. upscale places like Adams Fairacre Farms, on Route 44,...

InThe Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism,Ashis Nandy (1983) argued that the British, in India, hypermasculinized themselves while denying adult manhood in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to the colonized men in India. Kipling is his prime example. Nandy argued that the Gandhians responded most effectively: they abandoned efforts to outmasculine the British and instead valorized an androgynous ethic of nonviolent and spiritual superiority. Nandy’s thematic of loss and recovery is certainly relevant to the anxieties and ideologies one finds in Fiji in recent decades, most obviously among ethnic Fijians justifying military coups, but more subtly,...

On the Polynesian island of Wallis-‘Uvea, which is part of the French overseas territory referred to as Wallis-and-Futuna, several “affairs” occurred between 2001 and the present, whose legal and political dimensions provoked much turmoil in the territory. These affairs illustrate particularly well the difficulties that arise from the interaction between two different legal systems, one of which is the local system, considered “customary” by Wallisians, and the other is the French system, referred to as “Les lois de la République.”¹

In 2001, four notions were widely used by the people when speaking about social life in Wallis:la coutume(custom/kastom),...

During the late 1980s and early 1990s a whole generation of scholars examined and discussed the reconstruction of traditions and their politicization in the Pacific. This debate about the revival of traditions came gradually to an end during the mid-1990s. Some ten years later, however, it may be concluded that the implications of this discussion for anthropological theory have barely been made explicit. The aim of this chapter is therefore to revisit the debate about the politics of traditions and consider the consequences for anthropological thinking about traditions and particularly their role in processes of cultural change. I will suggest...

According to Epeli Hau‘ofa, “in cultural creativity we can carve out our own spaces, in which we set the rules, the standards that are ours, fashioned to suit our circumstances, and to give us the necessary freedom to act in order to bring out the best in us. The realization of this potential can unleash an enormous creative energy that could help to transform and reshape the face of contemporary Oceania in our own image” (2005: 11–12). Here, the crucial message is the claim of freedom to explore and represent one’s own identity in an artistic way. Epeli Hau‘ofa...

This chapter traces the stories of three late eighteenth-century Palauan treasures that are now held in the British Museum¹—a large shell-inlaid bird-shaped wooden bowl, a shell-inlaid canoe, and an oil painting of three Palauans. These pieces were given, transferred, or commissioned during Honourable East India Company ship visits—Captain Henry Wilson’s first extended visit to Palau in 1783 and Captain John McCluer’s return visits in 1791–1795. Occurring within decades of the Cook Pacific voyages and collections, the stories of these pieces both parallel and diverge from those of objects held in the Cook/Forster Collection at the Georg August...