European Society for Oceanists 2015 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Making peace with the past

Coordinator(s)

Chris Ballard, Dario Di Rosa

Session presentation

This panel addresses the many ways in which the past is recalled, invoked and employed in the contemporary Pacific. The panel title deliberately evokes the twin processes of uncovering or coming to terms with the past, and of using the past in pursuit of present concerns, which range from atonement to reconciliation, struggles over land and political power, and the search for justice. Blackbirding, punitive expeditions, land transactions, the arrival of missionaries and, occasionally, their murder, are amongst the historical acts now being resurrected, reworked and reinterpreted. As part of this process, digital recourse to archival resources is rendering the past ever more present in Pacific lives, provoking questions about the encounter of different modes of historical consciousness or historicity, and the politics of differential access. How are Europe and the Pacific mutually implicated in these negotiations over history, and what role do researchers play in what is frequently a contested engagement with the past?

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Introduction

Chris Ballard (Australian National University)

Dario Di Rosa (Australian National University)

History as relation. On the “use and abuse” of the past in Australia and Vanuatu

Laurent Dousset (University of Lucerne)

Even - and in particular - when working on such controversial topics as kinship or land tenure, ethnography inevitably deals with the multiple and diverse embodiments, expressions, treatments and deployments of what Ricœur called the “traces of the past”: an exertion of memory as much as of oblivion. Comparing two bodies of discourse and description from two different ethnographic locations, this paper will attempt to elaborate on the modalities through which such traces are deployed to (re)define contemporary being and belonging. The first body reflects current Australian Aboriginal recollections of “first” and “early contact” situations in the Western Desert in the 1950s and 1960s. In a language of explicit disruption, the traces recalled from these situations are deployed to signify the emergence of an authenticity and of distinctions of ways of doing and of thinking that continue to define contemporary being and belonging. The second body stems from rural communities in the southern part of Malekula in Vanuatu. Here, again, the reference to and deployment of traces from the past are substantial means for situating contemporary practice within ideologies of belonging. However, in this second case, multiple regimes of historicity coexist and compete, reflecting divergent visions for the collective future. Despite this important difference, on which the paper will reflect, a common observation emerges from both situations – an observation that is relevant in many domains and subjects of sociological enquiry. In Aboriginal Australia, as in South Malekula, traces are not only about the connection of people with their past; they are also, and above all, a means for shaping and reviewing relations between people through their past.

Time Machines: The Agency of Ancestors in Nonstate Spaces

Ryan Schram (University of Sydney)

Classical anthropology and modern states have each committed the same error in thinking about the nature of human societies. They each treat communities as if they fit neatly within clearly bounded totalities. It is a view of society as a whole which can only come from the bird's eye view. If a prerequisite of domination is to establish a schedule and census of a population, then it was anthropology of a kind which taught rulers to see their subjects like a state. Anthropology today rejects this classical holism as too simple. In this paper I would like to suggest that this move away from wholes and toward conjunctures commits the same errors all over again by reducing present patterns to a linear historical narrative which can encompass everything in a global history. In cases from Malaita (Solomon Islands), Lakalai (West New Britain, Papua New Guinea) and Duau (Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea), I show how ancestor spirits and their memorials are used as resources for mediating the colonial encounter and its aftermath. Specifically, ancestors are not merely a generation past, but continue to intervene in the present. Rather than as a culturally-specific temporality, I see the continuing agency of ancestors as a way people deal with the limits of narrative itself. By attributing historical shifts to supernatural rather than political acts, I conclude, people are engaged with the uncertainty of historical meaning, and the need to continuously constitute one's own historical consciousness.

Contested pasts and presents: Dealing with inconsistencies in relation to time on the Epoon Atoll, Marshall Islands

Ola Gunhildrud Berta (University of Oslo)

“The people who used to live on this atoll were vicious killers without moral,” I often heard during my fieldwork on the Epoon Atoll in the southern Marshall Islands, “But when the missionaries came, we learned how to be moral and loving people.” This presentation of a dark past and an ideal present is common among people on Epoon when discussing Christianity. However, it runs parallel with a contested version of the past and present. In this version, “people of the old days” were giants that would often live to be 150 years. They were also exceptionally strong, and could easily dive for giant clams to bring ashore. People often contribute these skills to the effect of local foods (breadfruit, taro, pandanus etc.). Additionally, they knew how to live properly within ṃanit (custom), e.g. by sharing everything with everyone. When the “Westerners” came, however, they gradually lost their old ways. Rice eventually replaced local food, resulting in health issues and lower life expectancy. In addition, people have become greedy, and they often prefer the “American way of life,” which means neglecting one’s family after adolescence. Here, I wish to explore these contested pasts and presents in order to see how people on Epoon deal with the tensions of an interconnected world.

Arbiru mate are lolo, Arbiru was gunned down: the deaths of colonial officer Duarte, 1899-2012

Ricardo Roque (University of Lisbon)

This paper explores the connections and disjunctions that arise when European accounts meet Indigenous stories about places and events set in the colonial past.
In 1899, during the dramatic siege by colonial forces of a “rebel” mountain village in Atabai, East Timor, the Portuguese commanding officer, Second-Lieutenant Francisco Duarte, was shot dead by his Timorese enemies. Throughout the twentieth century the death of officer Duarte – nicknamed after the indigenous Tetum term arbiru – became the stuff of colonial legend. He was posthumously celebrated as an imperial hero. The colonial government held an annual ceremony at the site of his death, where a memorial stone still marks the spot of his fall in battle. In Portugal, archival documentation and oral memories are preserved in connection with this heroic narrative of Duarte’s death. In Atabai too, Timorese accounts of the event have survived. Yet, they evoke a different historical reality. In 2012, an alternative past was revealed to me by local residents at Atabai. This paper is about the historical and anthropological complexities brought out by this disclosure.

The death and resurrection of Nokwai on the island of Tanna, Vanuatu

Ron Adams (Victoria University)

On September 25, 1877 the Tannese youth Nokwai was hanged for murder at the masthead of HMS Beagle, anchored in Port Resolution Tanna. I wrote about the execution in 1984, with a fuller account in 1993. There was no shortage of archival material: the event was widely reported in the London and colonial press; Hansard closely recorded the heated debates in Parliament; missionaries turned on each other in letters and church journals; and Admiralty bureaucrats methodically documented the decision-making process that led to Standing Orders being revised. Hundreds of thousands of words.
But not a word from Tanna, where for years I asked about Nokwai. It perplexed me that he had disappeared from local historical consciousness—until I read in Lindstrom’s Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society (1990) how, in neither producing nor consuming certain bodies of knowledge, the Tannese stand outside their power. I stopped asking about Nokwai. Then, in 2008, an east coast chief volunteered that he knew the ‘tru stori blong Nokwai’—he even had a custom song about him! In my presentation I’ll relate the story and play a video-recording of the song, and reflect on the profound difference between western historians’ treatment of the past and how the past is recalled, invoked and used by the Tannese.

Crimes and Retributions in the Western Solomon Islands: an examination of punitive raids in the shaping of the Arthur Mahaffy collection

Aoife O'Brien (National Museums of World Culture)

Indigenous warfare and headhunting within the Western Solomon Islands was particularly targeted for eradication following the establishment of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate in 1896. As experienced by indigenous peoples across the Pacific, punitive raids were here utilized as a means of deterring and inflicting ‘punishments’ on communities believed to have perpetrated such acts, all with the aim of safeguarding economic development. While colonial agents frequently used Indian police, occasionally local men were also trained as police, often employing recruits from areas that had previously suffered attacks from headhunters.
Punitive raids were utilized as opportunities for colonial agents to target and acquire objects for their collections that were usually withheld from sale. They also became occasions for indigenous police to seek government-sanctioned clearance to visit retribution upon historic enemies.
Focusing upon the collection of Arthur Mahaffy, the first District Officer in the Western Solomons, held by the National Museum of Ireland, along with Western Pacific High Commission documents, housed by the National Archives, Kew, and The University of Auckland, this paper explores the effects punitive raids had on indigenous populations. The loss of important objects, such as war canoes, personal valuables, and the destruction of crops and canoe houses created social and cultural losses for communities while further feeding into imbalances of power with the Western Solomons. Drawing upon particular, dated punitive raids and the objects taken as loot during them, this paper is concerned with understanding the implications of how colonial agents fed into indigenous social and political struggles through disrupting the balance of power in the region.

Acts of Atonement: making peace with history in the Pacific

Chris Ballard (Australian National University)

‘Sorry ceremonies’, in which the historical events of killing missionaries and other visitants are re-enacted as the prelude to a memorial service or act of reconciliation, have emerged as a formal mode of engagement with the past in the contemporary Pacific. Through their acknowledgement of responsibility, these acts of atonement appear to constitute Islander claims to agency, points of entry to a documentary history that has been produced and controlled largely by non-Islander authors. But they are also powerful statements about the future, in which the long-delayed reciprocity anticipated from outsiders is realised, and the impediments – cultural, historical and moral – to local progress are identified and overcome. This paper considers a series of sorry ceremonies from across the region in an attempt to understand what they might have in common, and why.

Ameha via Tivona: the Politics of Peace and Reconciliation

Dario Di Rosa (Australian National University)

The killing by Kerewo people of the LMS missionary James Chalmers at Dopima in 1901 was a major event in the colonial history of the southern part of what is now Papua New Guinea. Public outrage at this death lead to two punitive expeditions at the cost of a significant number of Kerewo lives.
This series of events has acquired an important place in Kerewo oral traditions. Indigenous theology understands the spilling of Chalmers’ blood as the seed from which the Gospel grew and spread in Kikori area, and as proof that God has chosen Kerewo people to preach his word. But an alternative, parallel exegesis asserts that the blood of the missionary has cast a curse on Kerewo people, preventing them from realising the promises of ‘modernity’.
The paper explores the micropolitics surrounding preparations for a Peace (ameha) and Reconciliation (tivona) ceremony in 2015, which is intended to lift this curse. I focus on a number of points that are core to understanding contemporary Kerewo historical consciousness: the strategic shifts of identity politics articulated at several levels (ethnic, regional, national, denominational), the different weight of authority given to different historical narratives (written and oral), and the underlying conceptions of ‘modernity’ which have shaped the preparations of the Peace and Reconciliation ceremony.

Exploring the potential of restorative justice in French Polynesia: going beyond foreign penal institutions

Emmanuelle Crane (Sorbonne Paris 4)

Colonisation has touched everything, including dispute resolution. This paper addresses the unconventional way of moving from a punitive approach and re-rooting French Polynesia in restorative approaches as well as reinvigorating traditional peacemaking processes as a response to prevent and sanction criminal offences. My paper will focus on establishing the correlation between local cultural practices, enforcement of « imported » penal institutions and the gap of resolving intrafamily violence in small Polynesian communities. Based on alarming statistics of Polynesians overrepresented in the prison of Papeete as well as recurrence of criminal activities such a sexual abuse, I will discuss the potential of aboriginal justice in helping perpetrators to take and develop responsibility for their own lives as it has been experienced in First nations communities in Canada.

Makarrata: Making Peace for the Future

Louise Hamby (Australian National University)

The past for Yolngu (people from northeast Arnhem Land in Australia) is held by their strong memories of people, places and things. Many of the objects and photographs of people and events are dispersed around the world. The encounters between the collectors and Yolngu surrounding the acquisition of these objects are not always well documented. Methodology of collection, the objects current ownership, use and access have caused some tension between institutions and people in communities where the objects were collected. Can this cultural legacy be used for reconciliation between parties?

Yolngu comprehend a makarrata to be a formal process through which disputing parties reach an understanding and put things right in order to make peace and settle conflict. Traditionally this would involve the ritualized throwing of spears between the two parties, the accused person facing a spear in the leg. The makarrata concept has been adopted by Yolngu for an event to be held in 2016 at Milingimbi, an island in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Museum leaders, Yolngu and the researchers working with them will meet on Yolngu country to attempt to bring about an understanding between these parties regarding cultural material. This paper will explore the background of makarrata and how the 2016 event is attempting to make peace with the past and provide an improved environment for going forward into the future.

Kinship in the land court: Why the Motu-Koita can’t make peace with the past

Michael Goddard (Macquarie University)

Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, began in the 1880s as a few hectares of land on the territory of the Motu-Koita people. It now covers an area of about 90 sq miles (or 240 sq kms). Colonial officials attempted to be fair in their early land purchases. They sought to understand native landholding systems and kinship, to be confident no land was alienated without native knowledge and to ensure that all individuals with rights in a bought land portion were recompensed. As the town spread, the Motu-Koita became increasingly alarmed about land loss, and from the mid twentieth century they have continuously pursued court actions to reclaim land. Recent land losses have involved opaque and anonymous purchases and leases which the Motu-Koita seek to uncover, but they also continually challenge the early colonial land purchases. Their efforts overall are complicated by conflicts among themselves over who the original owners of plots of land were. This paper reviews issues of kinship and landholding, particularly as represented in courts of law, which impede Motu-Koita attempts to settle contemporary land claims.

Usurpation of Sovereignty, Illegitimate Governments of New Zealand. Ngāpuhi’s Tribunal Claim

Hone Sadler (University of Auckland)

The processes to address Ngāpuhi’s deficit position to participate fully in a society of crown intervention in all aspects of life: political, economic and social, is a challenge that will test the mettle, constitution and resoluteness of a people with a proud heritage forged in its resolve that they have never ceded sovereignty or authority to anyone. The settlement process of addressing Ngāpuhi’s land claims and grievances against the crown has begun in earnest.

The following addresses the Waitangi Tribunal ‘Early Hearings’ of the WAI 1040 Te Paparahi o Te Raki, the Ngāpuhi initial claims hearings held in Waitangi in May and June 2010. This hearing was premised on Ngāpuhi’s claim that their tūpuna (ancestors) did not cede their sovereignty to anyone let alone the Crown on the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. On 6th February 1840.

This claim is unique in that it does not call for an inquiry into specific acts by the Crown that led to losses by Ngāpuhi. Rather, the enquiry examines the basis on which the Crown in New Zealand assumed its authority to govern. For over 170 years, the Crown has relied heavily on the presumption that Ngāpuhi ceded their sovereignty to the crown when they signed the treaty at Waitangi. It is this presumption and its detrimental effects that lie at the heart of the Ngāpuhi initial claim.

'Ivola': ancestral knowledge and the Native Lands Commission hearings in Nabobuco, Fiji

Edwin Jones (University of St. Andrews)

In Fiji, the polysemic category of ‘ivola’ entails different forms of knowledge about the relationship between the past, present and future. These include an extensive repertoire of oral traditions (ivola tamata) and various types of environmental knowledge (ivola gauna), as well as written documents, books and religious scripture. The Fijian translation of the Bible, for example, is the iVola Tabu (‘Holy Book’), and indigenous people’s names and descent group affiliations have been listed in the iVola ni Kawa Bula (‘Native Registry’) since the colonial era, when the Native Lands Commission (NLC) collected sworn testimonies of local histories and models of social organisation. Such information dates from 1926 for the highland district of Nabobuco, where alleged errors made during the final NLC hearings became particularly contentious issues following the development of the Monasavu hydro-electric scheme in the late 1970s. This paper explores the Nabobuco people’s recent struggles to amend official records through their use of ancestral knowledge as a competing mode of historicity.

Cultures of Participation in 19th Century Fijian Politics: Insights from Subaltern Activities

Robert Nicole (University of the South Pacific)

This paper traces “cultures of political participation” in 19th Century Fiji from a “people-centred” point of view. It argues that people’s political participation was well rooted in Taukei society. It tracks this history of participation to reveal the multifarious means by which ordinary people interacted with those who held positions of power, how they chose and installed their leaders, held them accountable, resisted them, removed them, and how they (the people) created for themselves spaces for political action within the confines of the power structures that sought to control them. The paper explores the significance of this history in addressing current debates about democracy in Fiji. It argues that while the idea of democracy in its western liberal sense may have been a “foreign (European) flower”, participatory politics was not. The paper also addresses the current view that Fijians are politically paralysed by a culture of silence. It ends with an exploration of the role of historians, as intellectuals, in intervening in political debates, and of disturbing the over-simplified generalisations that currently dominate public conversations about politics in Fiji.

A Pentecostal Conquistador: Michael Maeliau’s relocation of Pedro Fernández de Quirós’s 1605 voyage to Terra Australis in the historiography of the All People’s Prayer Assembly in North Malaita, Solomon Islands

Jaap Timmer (Macquarie University)

In this paper I will explore the ways in which Michael Maeliau, the leading prophet of the Pentecostal All People’s Prayer Assembly (APPA) from North Malaita, Solomon Islands, employs 16th century Spanish satanic epics of exploration of the Pacific in his theology. While national and European versions of the modern history of Solomon Islands tend to commence with the attempt by Alvaro Mendaña to locate King Solomon’s Ophir (1 Kings 9:26-28) in 1568, Maeliau holds Pedro Fernández de Quirós’s 1605 voyage to “La Australia del Espíritu Santo” as evidence that Solomon Islanders have always been in a covenant with God. Maeliau occupies this historical space by suggesting that Solomon Islanders are Israelites, that their fate is prophesized in the Old Testament, and that De Quirós’s crusading expedition was part of God’s plan to redeem the Pacific. Inverting the 16th century Catholic notion that the devil plotted to make it difficult for explorers to colonise new territories, Maeliau relocates the Spanish satanic epics to the contemporary need to battle against evil in Solomon Islanders’s attempt to conquer their path back to Jerusalem. I will situate Maeliau’s evolving theology in the politics of differential access in North Malaitan contestations over engagements with the past.

When evil spirits become ancestors again: personhood, Christianity and cultural heritage in Tahiti.

Guillaume Aleveque (EHESS - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)

Making peace with the past can be a slow process, particularly if the past is regarded as a threat to the present. In contemporary Tahiti, political discourses and artistic performances often glorify the pre-Christian past as a Golden Age and the very source of the Polynesian identity and of its cultural heritage. Yet, the day-to-day relationship of the people with this past is more ambiguous because everything that may appear as a relic of a pagan past in a Christian present can be tied to an evil spirit and a cause of supernatural illness.
In fact, since the Christianisation brought by the London Missionary Society in the early 19th century, until the late 1960’s and the revalorisation of the Polynesian heritage through anticolonial claims, the past was a matter of oblivion. However, as this paper argues, this past had literally haunted the society and the people themselves, as these evil spirits were still regarded as remote ancestors from whom they had inherited (in their very hearts, or more precisely in their guts) a part of their unchristian nature.
Today, these evil spirits have become respected ancestors again, even so the relationship between them and the living remains a major issue: how the society as well as the individuals can be Polynesian and Christian at the same time?
Analysing the transformations of the representations of personhood and heritage during the past five decades, this paper examines how people and institutions have tried to resolve the double bind represented by Christianity and ancestrality through the creation and the modification of collective and ritualised actions.

The Present-ness of World War II in south-eastern Papua New Guinea

Deborah van Heekeren (Macquarie University)

In recent times the Vula’a people of south-eastern Papua New Guinea have developed an interest in historical documentation. As they adopt the conventions of Western chronology, the nuances of oral narratives are obscured. In this paper I present three vignettes drawn from my ethnographic research among the Vula’a that resonate with the period commonly described in the literature as World War II. A photograph taken in 2005 shows how local historians construct a chronology emphasising concerns with landholding that were coming to a head in the 1940s. In a narrative recorded in 2001, fear of Japanese bombs is enmeshed with the 1951 eruption of Mount Lamington and a subsequent period of famine. Finally, reminiscences of unusual intrusions, salvage operations, and creative improvisation suggest that the greatest impact of World War II in the region resulted from detritus unwittingly strewn across the Papuan landscape. In sum, rather than expanding the historical record, I show how the past--construed by researchers as ‘historical events’--is refracted through local experiences that persist in the present.

How to understand the sadness of our grandmothers? The Japanese in New Caledonia

Francoise Cayrol (University of New Caledonia)

Near the end of the 19th century, with the discovery of nickel, the realization of its economic value and the abolition of penal transportation, New Caledonia decided to institute immigration under contract of Asian workers. Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and in spite of difficult negotiations with the Japanese government and the denunciation of unsafe working conditions, around 6000 Japanese immigrant workers (free or under contract) had arrived in New Caledonia. Social and ethnic boundaries were not easily broken through in this country, but the Japanese proved successful across a very large range of sectors and positions, developing relationships with all of the social circles of the colony, and marrying or living with women belonging to every ethnic group of New Caledonia. However, the early 1940s saw New Caledonia side with De Gaulle and the Free French and, following the attack on Pearl Harbour, nearly all of the Japanese residents of New Caledonia were rounded up confined and sent to Australian concentration camps; their property was seized. The situation of their women and children, who were not Japanese citizens, was awful ; terrified, some of them went into hiding and a wall of silence was erected around this chapter of New Caledonian history. I will describe the particular process carefully chosen by the third generation to understand the immeasurable sadness of their grandmothers and to break the silence. I analyse the form in which these particular stories have emerged, and their deeply resilient writing. At the same time, I present the position of this work as a challenge to the official histories of the country and their self-imposed limits. Finally, in the context of a recent increase in attempts to reconnect people and their particular histories in this country of the « Destin Commun », I draw attention to the elaboration of a multi-ethnic historical consciousness in New Caledonia.

Making peace with the mining past? The politics of value and citizenship in Thio, New Caledonia

Pierre-Yves Le Meur (IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement)

Mining is an old and contentious issue in New Caledonia, one so deeply entrenched in the history of Thio (situated on the south east coast of the island) that it has become part and parcel of local society. More precisely, the SLN (Société Le Nickel), which is the historical and hegemonic mining company in Thio, is perceived and challenged by the local population against this background, meaning as a peculiar local citizen embedded in a web of rights and duties. This emic view of corporate social responsibility has recently been activated by exceptional rain events and recurring environmental damages. A strong social movement was born out of these events, blocking the mining sites, and composing a list of grievances and claiming for environmental restoration (rather than ecological or monetary compensation). This collective action associated with the role of a few leaders or brokers has turned into an association whose name means “taking caring of the home/community” and explicitly claims an inter-ethnic constituency at the municipal level. This work thus explores how this chain of events interacts with other contemporary sequences (legal procedures of mining sites regularization, new prospecting campaigns) and older event and memory chains, including the historical trajectory of SLN in Thio as both a firm and a para-state institution, as well as various conflicts between Kanak peoples and mining companies around local sovereignty (including the sequence of violent civil/anti-colonial clashes of 1984-87 euphemized as “the events”). The resulting dialectic is a politics of compressed place (communal localization and infra-communal segmentary tendencies) and extended time (mining memory, policy and prospect) influencing the local politics of value, belonging and citizenship in Thio.

Unruly Pasts, Shadow Histories and Erasure in French Polynesia’s “Outer” Islands

Alexander Mawyer (University of Hawai'i-Manoa)

This paper examines the lived experience of the past across dimensions of daily life in one part of the French Pacific. How the past emerges and sometimes erupts violently into the present across time scales and domains of social and cultural engagement with nature, language, architecture, pearl culturing, the politics of civil society, and the legacies of the nuclear test establishment is at the heart of this work. Drawing ethnographic attention to six material contexts in which Mangarevans, the people of French Polynesia’s Gambier Islands, encounter, confront, and negotiate their relationships with the past, this paper queries the variable character of the past in contemporary Pacific lives with ethnographic attention to various techniques and technologies Mangarevans deploy for engaging with if not always controlling many aspects of the “unruly” past. Examination of six culturally salient moments sheds light on how the past is not always easily accommodated and how Mangarevans respond to moments of historically inflected disruption. The various ways in which the past appears salient offers more careful purchase on the place of the nuclear past in these so-called "outer" islands. After decades notable for various forms of silence and erasure, the French state’s dramaturgical management of the facts of the nuclear experience in its Oceanic colonial possessions has become extraordinarily visible since a 2005-2006 territorial fact-finding commission of inquiry into the consequences of nuclear testing. With the curtain thrown back, what should be made of instructions to nuclear test personnel forbidding a preventive evacuation of islands about to be subjected to nuclear fallout “for political and psychological reasons”, of first-hand accounts of the experience of fallout, of labor at test-sites, or of sermons encouraging support for testing, offers a particularly challenge to attempts to understand the place of the past in the Pacific present. The relationship between local discursive practices and the state’s management of populations in times of radiological crisis made visible in recollections of Ma‘ohi experiences of nuclear tests, in French scientists reflections’ on their role in “the big secret”, and in various administrations’ erasures, silences and obfuscations, speaks directly to the murky, often spectral character of forms of history in the post-colonial French Pacific and, perhaps, further afield. This work seeks to compliment yet extend existing literature exploring the intersection of nature, culture, and political history in the Pacific with potential resonance cross-culturally and outside the region.

The re-emerging relevance of Europe for Hawai‘i’s de-occupation struggle

Lorenz Rudolf Gonschor ('Atenisi University)

For most Pacific Islands ties to Europe were established during the era of colonialism, which for some of them is still ongoing. In Hawai‘i, however, the situation is fundamentally different. After threats of colonization by Russia, France and Great Britain were successfully averted during the first half of the nineteenth century, in 1843, Hawaiian diplomacy succeeded in having France and Great Britain formally recognize the Hawaiian Kingdom as an independent state, and in 1858, the last of the Kingdom’s unequal treaty with a European power was revised. Hawai‘i thus became the first non-Western state to be a full member of the then mainly European family of nations. During the following decades, the kingdom not only maintained balanced relations with the great powers but also with smaller European countries only marginally involved in the Pacific, such as Switzerland and Belgium. While European powers divided up the rest of Oceania in colonial spheres, they respected Hawai‘i’s unique political standing as a sovereign state. The threat to its independence, however, came from the United States, which in the 1890s first militarily invaded and then permanently occupied the archipelago, an illegal occupation that is still going on. In recent years, the movement to end this occupation and restore Hawai‘i’s independent government has gained significant ground. In order to move forward in their quest of national liberation, leading Hawaiian academics and political agents have reconnected with their country’s diplomats of the 1800s and are currently re-activating ties to European countries. Research in the archives of each European nation’s foreign ministries is a key component in support of these efforts.

Three Stories - Three Cameras; the Keveri people of south-east Papua New Guinea in the 1930s

S R Jan Hasselberg

The Keveri people were the last group of South-east Papua New Guinea to keep up with raiding and killing, but in just a few years they broke with their past in an extraordinarily thorough manner, turning their backs to most of their traditions. After missionaries visited in 1935, their conversion to Christianity was so rapid and all-embracing, that when government anthropologist FE Williams visited five years later he wrote in disappointment about vanished traditions and an almost total loss of Keveri material culture.

This paper discusses in what way three sets of texts and photos - with the advantage of being able to combine their different agendas and approaches, but also considering their limitations - can reconstruct parts of the past in a way that will enrich the present Keveri communities.

I have studied the writings and photographs from three sources dating from 1933 to 1940: Austrian photographer and ethnographer Hugo Bernatzik; missionary brothers Cecil and Russell Abel, who wrote about the ‘converting expedition’ and its follow-up in “Kwato Mission Tidings”; and F E Williams. I am also relating this to my short visit to the area last year, where I found a unanimous and sincere interest in learning more about a past that is largely forgotten. How can this material, none of which is known among today’s Keveri, contribute to identity restoration?

I will also comment on the different approaches, in writing and photography, of Bernatzik, the Abel’s and Williams, and about the availability of the material.

First contact

Andrey Tutorski (Moscow State University)

The topic of first contact remains popular in anthropology. In their book First Contact, Connolly and Anderson assume that the stories about the first contact haven't changed during the intervening 40 years. I will argue that stories about first contacts have in fact transformed considerably. My data draws on stories about Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, who worked on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea during the 1870s. The stories about him were recorded in 1890s, 1930s, 1940s, 1970s and 2010, so the data encompasses a period of 120 years and we can track changes in local perceptions of this 'first contact': firstly, that the stories are not descriptions of the historical event but rather a presentation of an ideal meeting; when looking at the stories of subsequent contact between Germans and Bongu people we see that they don't differ greatly from those about Maclay. Secondly, that the idea that the 'European' is just a human appears only after the 1970s. In the stories from the beginning of the century, Maclay's status (or maybe his 'nature') isn't described at all and he is perceived as a deity. In conclusion I would like to highlight that the changes I've showcased here may take a different form and be more or less slow, but that changes in stories regarding first contact nevertheless occur. The image of a first contact that has just taken place, that of 20 years later and that of 40 years later are three very different pictures.