Helen Gardner

‘New Heaven and New Earth’: Translation and Conversion on Aneityum

The idea that 19th-century Europeans and Islanders faced each other across virtually impassable linguistic and cultural boundaries has been a model for Pacific ethnohistory and can, perhaps, be traced in part to the Sapir–Whorf theory of linguistic incommensurability. Based on a case study concerning the translation of the Aneityum [Anejom] bible in Southern Vanuatu in the mid-19th century, the article considers whether the engagement between Islanders and missionaries might be better investigated through the dynamic dialogic model of Bakhtin and Voloshinov: thus speakers and interlocutors on Aneityum actively sought to understand each other through debates and dialogues about the new deity and His place in the spiritual cosmos of the island. The article first discusses the Protestant missionary defence of linguistic parity and commensurability and the formal practices of 19th-century British bible translation; then analyses debates on the new Gods efficacy between missionary John Geddie and Nohoat, the foremost sorcerer of the area; and concludes by considering the translation of words particularly important to the Christian faith.

Southern Anthropology: A History of Fison and Howitt's Kamilaroi and Kurnai

1. Introduction. The Publication Of Kamilaroi And Kurnai 2. Morgan Imaging Kinship 3. The Unity Of World Kinship: A Southern Perspective 4. The Apocalypse In The South: Fison In Victoria And Fiji 5. Twice Converted: Fisons Epiphany 6. Cracks In The Theory: The Problems Of The Pacific 7. Fisons Fiji Discovery And The Interpretation Of Kinship History 8. Seeing Gamilaraay 9. Evidence And Anomalies From Australian And Pacific Sites 10. Howitt And Tulaba 11. The Turn From Kin To Skin 12. Time, Human Difference And Evolution In Oceania 13. Pen To Paper: Writing Kamilaroi And Kurnai 14. Kamilaroi And Kurnai: The Content And The Form 15. The Anthropology Of Kamilaroi And Kurnai 16. The British Response To Kamilaroi And Kurnai 17. The Legacy Of Kamilaroi And Kurnai In The Anthropology Of Kinship 18. Conclusion

Praying for independence

The establishment of the Presbyterian Church of the New Hebrides in 1948 as an independent church was viewed by some participants as a step towards the independence of the nation, which occurred some 32 years later. This paper argues that the church was slow to promote an anticolonial perspective through the 1950s, though, as Indigenous clergy took on more senior roles in the church, there was a corresponding increase in political consciousness. The trans-colonial experiences of many young clergy – for education around the region or for meetings in the newly formed Pacific Conference of Churches in the 1960s – exposed participants to anticolonial theologies and the decolonising Pacific. When Indigenous clergy gained full control over the Presbyterian Church in 1973, they simultaneously demanded the end to the Condominium.

Decolonisation in Melanesia

IN JULY 2010 VANUATU MARKED 30 YEARS OF INDEPENDENCE WITH A WEEK OF CELEBRATIONS. The Vanuatu flag adorned caps, shirts and aelan dres, while bunting in the colours of the nation was strung along the streets of Port Vila. Interspersed with the parades, dancing, concerts and church services was a series of seven public discussions run by the Pacific Institute of Public Policy, attended by over one thousand people. At these meetings, which included independence generation leaders such as Donald Kalpokas on a visit from his post at the United Nations, ni-Vanuatu citizens debated vigorously the past, present and future of their nation. Such celebrations are not confined to Vanuatu. Around Melanesia and diasporas in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, similar celebrations acknowledge the achievement of independence in the region. The decolonisation of parts of Melanesia has had a profound effect on all Melanesians: on those who achieved independence and those who did not, on those who welcomed the new nation set within colonial boundaries and those who sought other permutations of the nation through secessionist movements. Decolonisation remains a crucial historical episode of deep meaning for these peoples. Yet of course the decolonisation of Melanesia is incomplete. The patchwork of political changes experienced by the people of Melanesia through the decades of the 1960s and 1970s denies a single overarching narrative. As Stewart Firth has written, ‘From the perspective of the turn of the century, this particular march of history begins to look like an artefact of a period and set of circumstances, and decolonisation has lost its simple teleology’. If we take the contested term ‘Melanesia’ to

From Site to Text: Australian Aborigines and The Origin of the Family

Missions were not simply sites of modernity, they were also the source of key data for the modernist theories of human progress. The idea that so called “primitive peoples” provided a window to the origins of human institutions seemed axiomatic to nineteenth-century theorists of human society who sought evidence for these ideas from settlers, administrators and particularly missionaries. The 1870s and 1880s were the high point of missionary engagement with study-bound anthropologists, as questionnaires and letters were sent from the centres to the edges of empires. Missionary responses, augmented with settler and explorer observations, became the footnotes in early anthropological texts on “primitive” societies. These analyses were then mined for the foundation texts of the other social sciences in the late nineteenth century. Along with many other scholars, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels read the anthropology of the period and slotted the findings into their analyses of human society.

Photography and Christian Mission: George Brown's Images of the New Britain Mission 1875–80

In 1875, Methodist George Brown arrived in the Bismarck Archipelago to establish the New Britain Mission. Based in the Duke of York Islands, Browns territory covered New Ireland and the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain. The mission was one of the first to be photographed from its inception. The Australian Museum holds 96 plates from the first five years of the mission. Browns photographs are a visual record of conditions and peoples of the time. Analysed in relation to Browns writings they are indicative of the relationships and bonds established through photography both in the mission field and across wider scientific and church audiences. The methodology employed here also challenges the kinds of interpretations of photographs that can arise from visual analyses relying solely on the caption and the posing of the subject.

Melanesia: Art and Encounter

This is an important book that deserves a wide readership. It combines the excellent production values of an art book ‒ there are 306 exquisitely reproduced images ‒ with incisive analysis and very...

Decolonisation and the Pacific

Since the foundation of The Journal of Pacific History in 1966, the study of decolonisation in the Pacific has never been far from the historical limelight, but the critical approaches, perspective...

Evidence and Anomalies from Australian and Pacific Sites

While the social organisation of Aboriginal people drew Fison to a new area of research, kinship remained his principal focus. This chapter tracks Fison’s efforts to collect data from across the Australian continent and the Pacific Islands and his attempts to fit this evidence into Morgan’s schema. Fison’s new correspondents were largely missionaries whose experiences of indigenous congregations bolstered their religious expectations of the essential unity of humankind. They knew, however, that few in the secular world agreed with them. For this reason Fison’s kinship schedule was a welcome, if difficult, weapon in the battle for the recognition of human unity.

Pen to Paper: Writing Kamilaroi and Kurnai

Through the latter years of the 1870s, Fison and Howitt corresponded between Gippsland and Fiji on their developing manuscript, keeping track of the debate between Morgan and McLennan on the ‘origin of marriage’ through reviews in the London newspapers, in particular the Spectator. They knew their book would challenge much of the library-bound speculation of the British theorists, but they struggled to find an appropriate structure for data and findings that could not be wrestled into the contemporary paradigm of evolutionism. Fison, in particular, was constrained by the quality of his evidence, which he knew was incomplete, lacked crucial details, or was simply bewildering. Howitt, though tenacious in his efforts to gather details on kinship and social organisation from across the continent, was not sure how to present it. While both believed their evidence showed an earlier state of society ‘further upstream’ than others yet discovered, their Australian and Pacific material simply did not fit the evolutionist thesis of kinship and social structures changing through time. Even modest claims required more conjecture than was acceptable to Fison.