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International conference
'Race, Encounters, and the Constitution of Human Difference in Oceania'
ABSTRACTS
KEYNOTE 1
Warwick Anderson
University of Sydney
TBA
KEYNOTE 2
Michael Bravo
University of Cambridge
The worlds of the Arctic and the South Pacific emerged forcefully and almost simultaneously in
global networks of knowledge and exchange in the period 1760-1830. Normally historians approach
the study of these regions as quite separate and specialized entities, as though the one were isolated
from the other, a mere afterthought as, for example, when the Resolution and the Discovery sailed
north to the Bering Strait on Cook's third voyage. In this paper, my intention is to challenge this
phenomenon of isolationism by exploring how these regions each came to be appreciated as being
inhabited by a plurality of societies. This requires thinking about ethnographic and geographical
identities, including race and human difference, across a range of scales. My argument begins with the
observation that European ideas about the peoples of Oceania and the Arctic were rooted in global
circuits of capital and the encounters that took place in everyday trade and travel, as well as different
kinds of exploration. Taking my cue from our conference theme, I propose a novel way of framing the
Arctic – as an Oceania. This Arctic Oceania was populated by peoples who themselves placed great
store and value on mobility and navigation along traditional sea and ice routes and trails. I will bring
this world to life with illustrations from indigenous oral accounts, material culture, and travellers'
texts. Seen through this lens, navigation can be understood as a set of technologies of encounter and
negotiation. Their materiality is inherent in the landscapes they purport to represent. More broadly,
they constitute a considerable range of practices of orientation. The capacity for different modes of
orientation enabled the peoples of Arctic Oceania to modulate the timing and extent to which they
resisted or embraced other maritime societies. The accounts of some of these encounters were part of
define categories by which societies can know each other or share in a common sense of humanity.
Finally, I will reflect on the contribution of shared notions of humanity and race in bridging the
Oceanias of the Pacific and the Arctic during this crucial period of global integration.
KEYNOTE 3
Rainer Buschmann
Purdue University, Indiana
Alexander von Humboldt's journey to the Spanish possessions in the Americas (1799-1804) marked a
new area of scientific inquiry. His writings, collected in more than 30 volumes, have never been
seriously analyzed in connection with Oceania. This is indeed an odd oversight, since from the very
onset of his travels Humboldt was obsessed with the newly emerging world of islands. Georg Forster
proved to be a forming influence on the young Humboldt, whose main desire was to participate in a
French expedition to the Pacific. When this endeavour failed to materialize, Humboldt journeyed to
the Americas where his scientific gaze rediscovered the region. In his writings, Humboldt never
articulated a clear vision of human diversity or race. Rather, he envisioned human beings as part of a
larger biological whole defined as 'cosmos'. This paper examines Humboldt's view of Oceania as it
emerged from the shores of the Americas. His encounter with Oceania was mostly textual in nature
and yet his sources deserve attention. Besides the traditional British and French writings on the
Pacific, Humboldt employed many neglected Spanish authors in his synthesis. Humboldt, this paper
contends, was instrumental in a transnational transliteration of a Spanish intellectual view that saw
John Burton
The Australian National University
&
Ernie Grant
Echo Adventure and Cultural Group
Mission Beach, QLD
The people of the Cairns rainforest area have been viewed in a range of different ways since their first
encounters with outsiders at the end of the 19th century. Early ethnological writers were struck by the
impenetrable nature of the 'scrubs' (now 'rainforest') and the unique material culture of the inhabitants
– the 'Scrub Blacks' – in the form of wooden shields, thatched huts, woven baskets, and fish traps. In
the 1930s, the hey-day of race models, Joseph Birdsell suggested, by contrast, that the distinctiveness
of the area was due to the origin of its inhabitants among Negritos of South Asia. In recent years, the
view of the area has highlighted 'traditional ecological knowledge', heritage, and tourism. In 2005, a
Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Area agreement was signed by Federal and State
authorities and 18 Aboriginal groups of the Wet Tropics area, recasting the area as a tourist
destination worth more than $400 million a year to the economy of Queensland. A constant through
all periods is the assumed geographical and cultural coherence of a region extending roughly from
Cooktown in the north to Ingham in the south. Our presentation discusses the historical and cultural
processes that have contributed to the contemporary identity of people who today call themselves
Diana Carroll
Canberra
William Marsden (1754-1836) is best known as the author of The History of Sumatra (1783). Yet it is
rarely recognized that his findings in the 'Remarks on the Sumatran [and cognate] Languages',
published in 1782, underpinned all his subsequent scholarship. Although Adrian Reland in 1706 was
the first to recognize the linguistic similarities present from Madagascar to Easter Island, it was
Marsden's 'Remarks' paper that made the first truly scholarly analysis of the language family known
today as Austronesian and developed the idea in detail. Of the early philologists who identified the
'Malay' language family, such as Lorenzo Hervas in 1784, Marsden was the only one with first hand
experience in the region. The scope of his scholarship, the prominence of his publications, and the fact
that he published in English soon brought him to the notice of the wider European scholarly elite.
Marsden's linguistic scholarship inter alia set the course of scholarship on Malay studies. His
contemporaries were confident that Marsden's work would, as Cook's biographer Andrew Kippis put
it, 'throw much light on the origins of nations and the peopling of the globe' (1788:499). Marsden's
own ambitions were more modest. The History of Sumatra was intended as a scholarly work that,
together with the 'Remarks' paper, would explain and provide evidence for Marsden's linguistic
theories and contribute 'to the general knowledge of the age and more especially to furnish those
philosophers whose labours have been directed to the investigation of the history of Man, with facts to
serve as data in their reasonings'. His work was brought to the attention of the natural historian
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840). The focus of this paper is Marsden's perceptions of the
connections between the Austronesian-speaking nations of Sumatra, including the Malays, and the
'Polynesians' of the South Seas which attracted the attention of Blumenbach and others in his field.
Confronting 'Hybrids' in Oceania:
Bronwen Douglas
The Australian National University
Fierce debates about racial crossing recurred in 'medicalized' French anthropology during the mid-
nineteenth century. This paper addresses the nexus of theory and field experience in disputes about
human 'hybrids' as key signifiers of specific boundaries and as racially regenerative or transgressive.
The theorists include the early polygenists Virey, Bory, and Desmoulins; the naturalists Serres,
Quatrefages, Blanchard, and Hamy; and the anthropologists Broca and Topinard. Their diverse global
positions on interracial unions are calibrated with two distinct empirical registers: first, the reportage
and anthropological syntheses produced by naval naturalists following fleeting encounters with a
broad range of Indigenous people during scientific voyages in Oceania to 1840; and second, the much
more focussed ethnographies and anthropological comparisons produced by naval medical officers
following tours of duty in the new French Pacific colonies in eastern Polynesia and New Caledonia
from 1842. The paper concludes by posing an apparent paradox: that Aboriginal Australians and
Tasmanians loomed far larger in discourses on hybridity in France than either 'Melanesian' or
'Polynesian' French colonial subjects, though France had no colonial interests and few direct
Helen Gardner
Deakin University
In the 1870s, variations of Lewis Henry Morgan's kinship schedule were circulated around the
Australian colonies by Lorimer Fison and Alfred William Howitt. The successful completion of these
schedules of over 200 relationship terms in the language of the informant required a close and
engaged encounter between collectors and informants over hours and sometimes days. Responses – of
varying quality – came from mission stations, pastoralists, and government officials from Queensland,
New South Wales, South Australia, and Victoria. While accepting that the data from these schedules
was subsequently deployed in evolutionist arguments that largely denigrated Aboriginal people, this
paper focuses on the act of kinship collection and the debates, confusion, and discussions engendered
by the task. The paper also investigates Australian experiments in new forms of kinship representation
– using diagrams rather than relationship lists – as Aboriginal kinship proved too complex for the
Elisabetta Gnecchi-Ruscone
Università Milano Bicocca
Based on letters and reports written by a small group of Italian missionaries who in 1852-3 took over
the missions on Woodlark and Rook Islands (northeast of New Guinea) from the French Marists, this
paper focuses on early encounters: the assumptions on human difference which the first Italian
Catholic missionaries brought with them to Melanesia; what they learned from their predecessors; the
strategies they adopted; and their perception of indigenous attitudes to their evangelization project –
in particular, their representation of native agency as expressions of amorality. After almost three
harrowing years of disease, fear, and all-round failure, the missionaries resolved to leave both islands.
However, Mazzucconi's killing on Woodlark Island has represented a milestone in the history of
PIME. The bitter conclusion reached by the surviving fathers as they renounced the Melanesian
missions was that the inhabitants of these islands were too uncivilized and backward even to realize
that missionaries had something of value to teach them: it would be better to redirect their evangelical
efforts onto natives with greater experience of white traders and colonization: 'Una scuola di ferro, di
vessazioni e di sangue, ma pure è una scuola'. Only such experience would 'awaken their curiosity
Hilary Howes
The Australian National University
Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840-1911), a German-Jewish doctor and naturalist, travelled and collected in
north-west New Guinea between March and July 1873. He was one of the first Germans to set foot in
New Guinea and the first to publish extensively in German on his experiences there. Though his
subsequent career as a museum director was built on the scientific results and collections from this
expedition, after his death the expedition itself was largely forgotten and the publications resulting
from it – including a lengthy travelogue and works on New Guinean physical anthropology, language,
and religious beliefs – ignored or discredited. I re-examine this neglected corpus of scholarship and
discuss the ways in which Meyer's encounters with indigenous New Guineans influenced his
contributions to metropolitan discussions of racial difference. On the one hand, Meyer's perceptions of
'Papuan' racial identity were shaped by his pre-voyage readings (particularly of the naturalist Alfred
Russel Wallace and the anthropologist Theodor Waitz) and by the constraints of genre and discourse
on his post-voyage publications; on the other, these perceptions were constantly challenged in the
field by his actual encounters with individual 'Papuans' and by the diversity and unexpectedness of
Elise Juzda
University of Cambridge
As the indigenous population of Tasmania diminished throughout the nineteenth century, European
investigating the 'place in nature' of the island's natives. This emphasis not only encouraged an
international traffic in human remains, but also contributed to debates on the evolution of human
races, the notion of 'racial purity', and the supposed inevitability of racial extinction as a by-product of
settler-colonialism in Australia. Although the terms of these debates were established primarily in
Britain and France, the apotheosis of negative craniological sentiment towards the Tasmanian
Aborigines came from British-born researches based in Australia itself during the first decades of the
twentieth century. This paper thus argues that the establishment of physical anthropology in Australia
was premised upon traditional conclusions regarding the inferiority of the Aboriginal population and
was for many years a continuation of European racial theory and practice regarding indigenous
peoples.
The Galapagos of the Mind:
Robert Kenny
La Trobe University
At the moment psychologists wanted to leave the realm of philosophy and enter the realm of science,
evolutionary theories took hold in science. Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law – that ontology
recapitulates phylogeny – found a particularly receptive audience among the psychologists. This paper
looks at the work of Georges Romanes, James Mark Baldwin, John Hughlings Jackson, and James
Sully, among others, to show how the evolutionary recapitulative approach to psychology led to a
need for the psychological 'primitive'. This was an understanding that the psychological past was
recapitulated in the development of the 'civilized' child and reasserted itself in the mentally ill. But it
was a past seen to be still alive among the peoples of Oceania, particularly in Australia and Melanesia.
Study of these peoples would reveal much that lay hidden under the civilized mind. It is this which
explains why the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait of 1898 was dominated
by psychologists, (the chief among them, WHR Rivers, had studied under Jackson), and why
Sigmund Freud would turn to the anthropology of Australia to defend his concepts (heavily
Russell McGregor
James Cook University
This paper examines some ways in which the idea that the white race was congenitally unfitted to
tropical environments was deployed in debates over the destiny of northern Australia in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the earlier part of this period, that idea was commonly
used to buttress advocacy of a racially diverse, but racially stratified, northern society. In the two
decades after federation, pessimistic assessments of the viability of the white race in the tropics
underpinned the most cogent arguments advanced against the strictures of the white Australia policy.
By the 1920s and 1930s, assertions of white unfitness for tropical residence were coming to be used in
support of inter-racial political equality, notably in the advocacy of the geographer Thomas Griffith
Taylor and the Aboriginal activist William Cooper. The point I want to draw from this survey is that
racial (and even racist) ideas were remarkably plastic and able to be mobilized for widely divergent
political purposes.
Race as Reinterpretation:
This paper uses the specific history of race in Malaya to address wider issues surrounding the
development of ideas of race and their influences and determinants. I argue that ideas of race in
Malaya were the byproduct of a reinterpretation of local inequalities that were present and developing
in the process of Malaya being colonized and that the developments within the science of race in
Malaya were in large part an accommodation to these local conditions. Colonial situations are
important and indispensable aspects of the history of race. The interaction between colonial
governance and the science of race as developed within British Malaya yielded trajectories of its own.
The specific histories of races in the colonies furnish us with various sciences of race, splintering the
meaning of race even further when compared to the ideas of other groups of European intellectuals
(for instance, British, French, and German) and other colonies (for instance, India) which had their
Adrian Muckle
Victoria University of Wellington
From 1887 to 1946 the indigénat provided French administrators with measures to streamline the
government and summary repression of Kanak (the indigenous people of New Caledonia) and those
assimilated to them as indigènes ('natives') by the 'community of race'. In 1915, the indigénat defined
an indigène as 'any person of either Melanesian or Polynesian race or mixed race from New Caledonia
and its dependencies or the archipelago of Wallis and Futuna and who does not exercise the rights
pertaining to the quality of French citizen'. This paper will explore the place of the indigénat and the
role of French colonial administrators in defining a 'community of race' and the category of indigène
in New Caledonia in the period to 1946. Particular consideration will be given to: the influence (or
absence thereof) of the science of race on colonial administrators and their thinking about native
affairs/policy in New Caledonia; the impact of forms of Kanak agency on the administration's making
of racialized subjects and citizens; the situation of the métis ('half-castes'); and the extent to which
cultural and political divisions between the Grande terre (mainland) and the Loyalty Islands were
Anna Paini
Università di Verona
Influenced by his background in Natural History, the French Marist missionary Xavier Montrouzier
adopted different approaches to the unexpected in the course of his Melanesian experiences. In some
instances, he was able to allow his experience to speak by itself, for example, in acknowledging a
wider linguistic diversity than he had expected or in examining the variety of local landscapes, flora,
and fauna. Yet when he came to consider local cultural and social practices, a greater rigidity
emerged. His strong confidence in his own vision meant that in his writings he represented the
lifeways of 'the other' sometimes as unethical but mainly as irrational. Notwithstanding his
ethnographic curiosity, he was unable to face or to acknowledge reciprocity and was baffled that local
people even dared to suggest it. Drawn to open a mission in Woodlark by the presence in the newly
charted island of people who 'seem to belong to the Polynesian race' and regarding the new mission as
'a step made towards New Guinea', a few years later Montrouzier, disillusioned and disappointed by
the lack of concrete results and the seeming pointlessness of these challenges, was led to reconsider
his premises. This paper aims to plot Montrouzier's adjustments to the unexpected over a five-year
time span, highlighting the complexities in his representations of local contexts and thus avoiding the
Ricardo Roque
University of Lisbon
This paper will trace the attempts of colonial officers, missionaries, and anthropologists to classify the
races of East Timor in the wider context of the ethnological debates on the Indonesian Archipelago
and in relation to specific colonial encounters. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
ethnologists and anthropologists. By the late nineteenth century, the hypothesis that the mixed-race
East Timorese were, after all, originally affiliated with a 'black race' – the Papuans or perhaps the
Negritos – seemed to attract influential scholarly opinions. This paper investigates the changing
involvement of Portuguese metropolitan scholars and colonial agents with these views. The intention
is to explore the grounds upon which classifications of 'black races' could be claimed and accepted as
truthful. It will consider in particular the ways through which local ethnic stereotypes, concrete
colonial experiences, and the circulation of field materials (including human skulls) interfered with
Hirokuni Tateyama
Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Japan
One of the common observations that emerged with the onset of concerted European exploration of
what came to be called Melanesia in the late nineteenth century was that no actual chiefs existed but
secret societies served as a form of government and jurisdiction in the region. Unsurprisingly, this was
deployed to support the by-then orthodox view that people there were more primitive in evolutionary
terms than Polynesians, who had already been found to have hereditary chiefs. Considered as such,
secret societies attracted much hasty scientific attention, with the assumption that such an archaic
institution would vanish soon under the influence of European civilization. Among those which were
made most famous was one in New Britain that was then commonly known as Dukduk; indeed, its
ethnographic and material evidence was eagerly sought by Europeans. However, it is strange that the
number of Dukduk masks – the most obvious piece of material evidence – that are found in museums
worldwide is disproportionately small compared to the multitude of ethnographic accounts. This paper
explores why this is the case by examining interactions between Europeans and indigenous people
Serge Tcherkézoff
CREDO, Marseille
This paper will examine comparatively how actual early encounters between Pacific Islanders and
visiting Europeans impacted diversely on the visions of indigenous people elaborated by different
national categories of voyagers, expecially the French and the British. A careful scrutiny of particular
cases will juxtapose reports from the expeditions of Bougainville and Cook in Tahiti; and from the
expeditions of La Pérouse and Dumont d'Urville compared with those of Kotzebue and others in
Samoa. A particular focus of the paper will be on how European interpretations of encounters
influenced geographical map-making, again giving rise to different national traditions depending on
whether the geographical schools in question were French or British (and later Anglo-American).
Dixon, Skinner and Te Rangi Hiroa:
Issues of race in 1920s theories of the settlement of New Zealand
Moira White
Otago Museum, Dunedin
Today's discussions about the settlement of New Zealand centre primarily on the date and
consequences of Māori arrival in Aotearoa. In the early 1920s, however, while Māori were
acknowledged as the existing pre-European population, some participants in the academic debate
questioned whether Māori had supplanted an earlier population; others debated the racial origins of
the Māori population. Of the various theories put forward, some supposed a Melanesian population
living in New Zealand prior to the arrival of the Māori while others suggested that Melanesian
elements could be discerned in Māori art and physiology, implying that the settling population had
absorbed those artistic and/or genetic influences prior to arrival. Roland Burrage Dixon was Curator
of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum from 1912 and Professor of Anthropology at Harvard
University from 1915. His 'A New Theory of Polynesian Origins' (1920) and The Racial History of
Man (1923) stimulated a correspondence with HD Skinner of the Otago Museum and Te Rangi Hiroa
(Dr, later Sir, Peter Buck) regarding the racial origin of New Zealand's tangata whenua. Dixon and
Skinner's purely theoretical perspectives contrast with Te Rangi Hiroa's practical experience of
physical anthropology which he married with the idea of the scientific study of culture. For all three
men, however, the discussion is framed largely in terms of the definitions and characteristics of racial
groups.
Nature/Nurture and the Sociality of Science:
Sandra Widmer
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
By the early twentieth century, reproduction and nature/nurture had become significant aspects of the
study of human biological difference and the science of race. This paper will focus on how certain
researchers mobilized these scientific concepts in the context of an urgent practical problem. Namely,
how could one measure the declining population in the New Hebrides and how should the problem be
fixed? I will analyze two of the uncertainties the researchers had. First, I will discuss how, due to the
absence of reliable census data, the researchers utilized genealogies that documented the number of
children in each generation to measure the decline as best they could. Second, I examine the scientists'
unsatisfactorily answered questions about what New Hebridean women were doing to control birth
rates and care for babies. I will situate the representational practice of genealogy and gendered
questions of fertility and child nurturance within the focus on biological reproduction and
nature/nurture in the science of the day to reflect on how indigenous knowledge and agency might
Nazi racism, German citizenship, and Pacific Islander Germans during the inter-war years
Christine Winter
University of Queensland
One of the legacies of the German Empire in Oceania was German-Pacific Islander families living in
the Mandated Territories of New Guinea and Samoa and in other Pacific Islands. This paper
investigates how these families were categorized, described, embraced, or rejected when the Third
Reich revitalized its interest in the Pacific during the mid-1930s. When it came to the 'brown'
Germans of the Pacific, who won the day: the Foreign Office or the foreign organization of the
NSDAP? Legal frameworks of patrilineal descent, racial theories of purity and Germanness, or the