Bronwen Douglas

From Invisible Christians to Gothic Theatre: the Romance of the Millennial in Melanesian Anthropology

This paper is a history and textual critique of the anthropology of millennial, pentecostal, and charismatic Christianity in Melanesia located in relation to interpretations of indigenous religiosities worldwide, particularly mainstream Christianity but including cargo cults and millenarianism generally. An important subtext is the correlation between anthropological scholarship and the empirical settings of fieldwork, historicizing ethnographic texts in terms of indigenous actions and desires which subtly helped mould particular representations. Anthropologys major national traditions have been pervasively secular, romantic, and ahistoric. In Melanesia anthropologists essentialized exotic, traditional ritual complexes and mostly elided the less dramatic, mobile religious practices and experiences of the ever-growing majority of Melanesians who appropriated varieties of Christianity to their own ends. Only recently has mainstream Melanesian Christianity become a proper topic for ethnography, often in conjunction with a prolific literature on the politics of tradition. Emblematic of the extent to which anthropologists are shifting Christianity from outside to within Melanesian religiosity is an emergent ethnographic focus on burgeoning pente-costal, charismatic, and millennial Christianity. Such movements may better cater to the disciplines expertise in exotic ritualizing than the seeming mundanity of mainstream Christian practices, but there is also powerful indigenous impetus in anthropologys romance with the millennial.

Encounters with the Enemy? Academic Readings of Missionary Narratives on Melanesians

“Western” societies today are by and large post-Christian, in the sense that many people do not seriously identify with a religious denomination or sect, major public discourses—particularly academic ones—are secular, and Christian institutions and values are no longer naturalized in public politics. My secular sense that Australia is among the most secular societies in a largely secular “Western” world is evidently shared by committed Christians. A leading Anglican minister refers to Sydney as “a godless city” and differentiates “our Christian counter-culture” from “the worlds culture” ( Age Good Weekend [Melbourne], 22 Aug. 1998:12). In the United States, confrontation and competition from a host of born-again contenders can force post-Christian religious indifference into quasi-fundamentalist rivalry for the moral and political high ground, but mainstream academic discourses remain as resolutely secular as they have been at least since World War I. Given that this period has seen the heyday of anthropologys disciplinary professionalization, George Stocking locates anthropologys “classical” period from about 1920 to about 1965 (1992:93–4). it is not surprising that its dominant orientations have often been unreflectively sociopolitical, even though its usual proclaimed objects of study were, until relatively recently, putatively “traditional” “societies” with “cultures” aptly categorized as “religious.”

Slippery Word, Ambiguous Praxis: ‘Race’ and Late-18th-Century Voyagers in Oceania

This paper traces the presence, absence, and shifting connotations of the term ‘race’ and the idea of human classification in representations of indigenous Oceanian people by navigators, naturalists and artists on 18th-century British and French voyages. These ambiguous usages signified hardening European attitudes to human difference, as the holistic, ‘environmentalist’ explanations of the natural history of man lost ground to the differentiating physicalism of the new sciences of biology and physical anthropology. However, by correlating the generation of ideas with particular embodied encounters, I question the presumption that voyagers’ representations of indigenous people were entirely determined by preconceptions derived from received knowledge and prevailing discourses. I suggest instead that indigenous behaviour and demeanour left latent countersigns in the language, tone and content of such travel literature and art — on which the emergent metropolitan science of man drew heavily to justify its deductions.

Race, Place and Civilisation

THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS AT ONCE COMPLETES A FOUR-YEAR TEAM PROJECT ON THE history of race and encounters in Oceania and signals several key directions for such research in the future. In 2005, we received an Australian Research Council Discovery grant for a project on ‘European Naturalists and the Constitution of Human Difference in Oceania: Crosscultural Encounters and the Science of Race, 1768–1888’. Our primary goal was to investigate the reciprocal entanglement of emergent metropolitan theories of racial difference with the more empirical register of texts of encounter and racial classifications produced by naturalists travelling or resident beyond the slowly expanding zone of European colonisation in Oceania. The first major outcome of this project, the edited volume Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the science of race, 1750–1940, attracted some critical comment in this journal for its perceived emphasis on the science of race at the expense of a more nuanced approach to the layering of varied discourses on human difference, particularly in their colonial settings. Although four of the contributions to the volume spanned colonial settings, the theme of race and governance was broached only in the final chapter by Vicki Luker. While acknowledging that the volume, taken as a whole, was necessarily stronger on the naturalisation of racial concepts than on their normalisation across different social registers or genres, we suggested in response that the unfolding direction of the project, as indicated in our original proposal,

Notes on Race and the Biologisation of Human Difference

It has come belatedly to my attention that the Journal of Pacific History has printed a rejoinder by Tom Ryan to a footnote in my paper ‘Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History of Man’. While it is gratifying that one’s footnotes are read, this one hardly does what it is accused of — namely, question Ryan’s ‘professional competence in the history of anthropology’. Indeed, in a forthcoming publication I praise his ‘important recent study of Brosses [which] convincingly demonstrates his seminal contribution to the mid-eighteenth-century emergence in France of the anthropology of Oceania’. Contrary to a footnote of his own (which misrepresents my argument in the work cited) and some rather heavy-handed insinuations in his rejoinder, I do not believe and have never suggested that ‘ ‘‘scientific’’ thinking with respect to Oceania did not emerge until the late 1760s and early 1770s’; or that ‘French anthropological thinking about the peoples of the South Pacific began to coalesce only after 1800’; or that anthropology and ‘the intellectual field it belongs to came into being only during the last decades of the 18th century and, especially, the early decades of the 19th century’. What I have repeatedly argued is the now ‘commonplace’ position that, towards the end of the 18th century, ‘biological ideas of ‘‘race’’ as innate, hereditary, and fundamentally differentiating steadily displaced the environmental and cultural criteria with their connotation of essential human similitude on which earlier descriptions and classifications mainly drew’. I am pleased to read that Ryan shares this viewpoint. Unfortunately, this is not always evident in his 2002 paper. Inverted commas do not adequately signal that his ‘use of the word ‘‘race’’ reflected its use by French Enlightenment writers’ since modern users conventionally put ‘race’ in inverted commas in order to acknowledge and distance themselves from its infamous history. My reading of the ten-page section of his paper

Terra Australis to Oceania: racial geography in the "fifth part of the world".

This paper is a synoptic history of racial geography in the ‘fifth part of the world’ or Oceania — an extended region embracing what are now Australia, Island Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. The period in question stretches from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment, to focus on the consolidation of European racial thinking with the marriage of geography and raciology in the early 19th century. The paper investigates the naming of places by Europeans and its ultimate entanglement with their racial classifications of people. The formulation of geographical and anthropological knowledge is located at the interface of metropolitan discourses and local experience. This necessitates unpacking the relationships between, on the one hand, the deductive reasoning of metropolitan savants, and, on the other hand, the empirical logic of voyagers and settlers who had visited or lived in particular places, encountered their inhabitants, and been exposed, often unwittingly, to indigenous agency and knowledge.

Pasts, Presents and Possibilities of Pacific History and Pacific Studies: As Seen by a Historian from Canberra

I am a historian, not a prophet. So rather than prognosticate much about futures, I shall discuss ‘pasts, presents and possibilities’, with specific reference to Pacific history and, more generally, to Pacific studies that are not always historically framed. My geographical orientation is from broadly defined Oceania, spanning Island Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Australia as well as the Pacific Islands. Having studied Pacific history as an honours student at the University of Adelaide, I began a PhD at the Australian National University (ANU) in the late 1960s in Jim Davidson’s Department of Pacific History, within the Research School of Pacific Studies (RSPacS), then two decades old. From the outset, the department included Southeast Asia within its remit, but neither Australia nor, at least in principle, New Zealand. The Pacific Islands, including New Guinea, were the almost exclusive focus. The emancipatory, decolonising 1960s and 1970s were the heyday of the ‘island-centred’ school of Pacific historians to which I was an enthusiastic recruit. In retrospect, it was a common-sense, rationalist historiography, inspired by universalising secular humanism or radicalism and largely unconcerned with theory or ontological differences. The key themes were ‘culture contact’, colonialism and decolonisation, addressed from the Islanders’ points of view and with some cross-disciplinary liaisons, especially with structural-functionalist anthropologists, who mostly were not much interested in history. From about 1980, a conceptually more sophisticated ethnohistory or ethnographic history emerged, especially in Melbourne, in partnership with more historically oriented anthropologies, notably those of Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner. By this stage, Pacific history was widely taught in Australian universities, especially newer ones such as Flinders, Macquarie and La Trobe, where I worked

Introduction: Indigenous Presence to the Science of Race

This book is a study of the linkages and hiatuses between metropolitan discourse and regional praxis.1 Specifically, it investigates the intersections of fluctuating European ideas about human similarity and differences over four centuries with the grounded experience of European voyagers during actual encounters with Indigenous people in the ‘fifth part of the world’, or ‘Oceania’, from 1511 to 1840. It is a systematic history of neither anthropology nor European seaborne exploration but a set of interconnected episodes that bring ethnohistory into play with the history of science through focus on the interactions of travellers and local inhabitants. Intellectual history and ethnohistory are bridged by lexico-semantic history — systematic attention to the contemporary meanings of the words used by savants or voyagers to describe, name, label, and eventually classify people or groups. I trace the long trajectory of one such term, ‘race’, from inconsequential genealogical origins to reconfiguration as a biological taxon.

Meeting Agency: Islanders, Voyagers, & Races in the mer du Sud

The global circumnavigation by Vancouver in 1791–5 and Flinders’s Australian voyage of 1801–3 were the last significant expeditions of exploration or survey sent to the South Seas by the Royal Navy before the long hiatus of the Napoleonic Wars. French scientific voyaging to Oceania was similarly interrupted by war and eventual defeat after the return of Baudin’s expedition in 1804. The geopolitical void was partly filled by the Russian voyages of Adam Johann von Krusenstern and Iury Fyodorovich Lisiansky (1803–6), Vasily Mikhailovich Golovnin (1807–9, 1817–19), and Kotzebue (1815–18).1 Yet the United Kingdom, unlike France, was by no means strategically absent from Oceania during this period. From the late 18th century, growing British colonial or non- official presence was assured by the acquisition of commercial footholds in India, the Straits of Malacca, and Canton; the establishment of colonies in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land; the settlement of Protestant missionaries in several Pacific Islands and in New Zealand; and burgeoning intra-regional trade centred on Port Jackson. The need to despatch expensive naval expeditions from the metropole was thus considerably diminished. Britain finally resumed long-range voyaging from the mid-1820s with the expeditions of Frederick William Beechey (1825–8), Robert FitzRoy (1831–6), Edward Belcher (1837–42), and James Clark Ross (1839–43).

Races in the Field: Encounters & Taxonomy in the grand Océan

The German philosopher and Protestant divine Herder often provoked extreme responses. Kant (1785b:22, 154), his teacher, disparaged his lack of intellectual rigour, excessively ‘poetic language’, undisciplined empiricism, and reliance on ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herder’s own student and co-leader of the Sturm und Drang literary movement, recoiled from aspects of his thinking and from the sting of his ‘generally ugly disposition’ (Laan 1986:562).1 Ever since, competing political, philosophical, or biological teleologies have drawn selectively on internal tensions in Herder’s texts to produce anachronistic present judgements on his meanings and influence. He has been serially feted or damned — as opponent of slavery, anti-imperialist, and champion of cultural plurality; as founder of the modern notions of history, cultural relativism, and cultural anthropology; as precursor of biological racism, ‘aggressive’ nationalism, and ultimately Nazism.2 Eschewing teleology, I focus on Herder’s expressions of the theme of human difference in the second volume of Ideen zur Philosophie des Geschichte der Menschheit (1785).3