European Society for Oceanists 2022 Conference

Back to Conference session list

Session Detail (parallel)

Deep Histories of Oceania

Coordinator(s)

Laurent Dousset

Session presentation

There has been considerable enthusiasm recently for questions relating to the deep history of Oceania. Deep histories may invoke both deep and recent pasts but, as Andrew Shryock and Daniel Smail have argued (Deep History, 2011), they also refer to the deep integration of the perspectives and skills of all of the “historical” disciplines, including archaeology, genetics, linguistics, history and anthropology. Some degree of cross-disciplinary integration has long been a feature of research in the Pacific, with extensive collaboration involved in the process of documenting the history of settlement of the region by so-called Papuan and Austronesian groups. Triggered in part by the recent explosion of results and narratives being generated by genetics, a renewed intensity in exchange across disciplines has begun to generate different kinds of explanations, narratives and models for social processes in time and space: less uniform and discontinuous modes of discovery and settlement; more complex accounts of genetic, sociocultural and linguistic diversification; and understandings of these processes that span multiple scales, from ontogenesis through to human evolution.

In keeping with the general theme of the conference, this panel invites papers from all disciplines engaged in addressing deep-history questions in Oceania, which tackle issues of the circulation of humans along with material and immaterial things. The papers may present recent findings or hypotheses that are of interest to other disciplines, or that discuss the theoretical, conceptual and methodological bases on which interdisciplinary discussion and exchange might occur.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Oceania: world-crucible of myths

SERGE Dunis (University of the French Pacific)

Pacific Mythology in 2009 and L’île aux Femmes in 2016, its translation and continuation, highlighted the stunning mythological homogeneity the Pacific and the Americas had retained with Asia. Revolving around the theme of obstetrical peril, this homogeneity revealed a chronological blood-line we could then trace back 8,000 years to Inner Mongolia. By focusing on the Bering maritime passage, L’ours, la vague et la lionne, the last of our triptych, reaches back to the 15,000 year mark with variations on the same theme, variations which then further take us back to the 36,000 year old cave murals once our journey reaches the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Coming to terms with that major drawback imposed by bipedalism, namely death-in-childbirth, is blatantly the first concern expressed on the walls painted by our ancestors embodying themselves in the guise of opposing monsters. The study of mythology can thus vie with History and Genetics.

The Kula Ring in the Context of the Austronesian/East Asian Dynamic

Frederick H. Damon (University of Virginia)

In the context of rapid developments in the archaeology of Australo-Melanesian peoplealong the coastlines of East Asia 3-5000 BCE and Papua New Guinea, this paper explores the possibility of East-Asian cultural forms in one of the heartlands of Melanesia, the Kula Ring in Milne Bay Province, PNG. The focus will be upon similarities in astronomical systems across this region. And it will present a hypothesis about the ways by which such knowledge was used to organize regional totalities. The argument is that the region gradually came to look more like ‘China’ as its inhabitants came to understand its ecological properties. The underside of the paper suggests that ‘China’ may very well have taken its distinctive shape not only from the North, which is the received view, but in relationship to its southern, more watery part of the world.

Myth, ritual, and materiality: Logics of collapsibility in Anga rituals (PNG)”

Pierre Jean-Claude Lemonnier (Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, EHESS)

Based on minute ethnographies of myths, rituals, and material actions of the kind favoured by Jimmy/Jaimie – in this case, mostly those of anthropologists M. Godelier and G. Herdt, and linguist R. Lloyd – the paper explores the radical consequences on the Baruya’s and Simbari’s religious system and social organization of particular aspects of their respective origin myths and ritual cycle.
Although both local groups of Eastern Highlands Province of New Guinea were roughly contacted at the same time (1951-1956), the fate of their male initiations differed strikingly: by the end of the 1990s the entire Simbari ritual cycle had collapsed, whereas the Baruya still organized a Muka (1st stage ceremony) in December 2013, although in a highly modified form. In both cases, the persistence of boys’ insemination was a huge issue and the presence and mutual reinforcement of the agents of modernity (church, State, market, school, health services) led to an urgent modification of the ritual life. But, the Baruya had a possibility to dismiss ritualized homosexuality and nonetheless carried on the rituals, while the Simbari deliberately chose to abandon them abruptly.
The paper proposes a hypothetical explanation of that huge contrast in the place held by a key-institution in circumstances of deep and rapid change. As it happens, besides the presence of more combative missionaries in Simbari country and the continuation of warfare among the Baruya, what proved to be effective in allowing t

Constancies and contingencies in the deep (and shallow) history of the Mian: Causal mechanisms and causal outcomes.

Don Gardner (Australian National University)

The history of the Mian speakers (of Papua New Guinea), by their own account, presents a contingency-inflected trajectory, even over on the scale of decades, that is apt surprise a scholar in the Durkheimian tradition. Now that anthropologists are less inclined to conceive of social life as endogenously driven (by either a social substratum or a volksgeist) the history of a group like the Mian—a small-scale population, committed to a mode of production focused on hunting and extensive horticulture—nevertheless presents explanatory challenges, as history that must be narrated in relation to both long-and meso-term processes and the responses of folks comprehensible only as grounded in intentionality. In this presentation I offer a provisional sketch of such a narrative, one that invokes explanatory factors as diverse as the characteristics of Plasmodia species and mosquito-biting densities, through the productivity of Colocasia taro, ENSO events and human immune responses, to interpersonal friction and the charisma of leaders.

Prisoners of a Distant Past? Linguistic Diversity and the Time-Depth of Human Settlement in Papua New Guinea

Jon Fraenkel (Victoria University of Wellington)

Colin Filer (Australian National University)

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is the most linguistically diverse nation on the planet, but also one of the world’s least developed countries. What accounts for that heterogeneity? Can this explain weak development outcomes, or do other factors – such as geographical constraints or historical legacies – play the more significant role? For this paper, we assembled a unique database showing the extent of linguistic diversity in PNG’s 85 rural districts in order to investigate its impact on human development (measured using child mortality and school attendance). We find some evidence of a relationship between linguistic diversity and development, but a careful reading of PNG’s history suggests that it would be mistaken to interpret this as evidence of heterogeneity impeding development. Whereas some economists see linguistic diversity as having a linear relationship with the time-distance since human settlement, we argue that shifting crop cultivation technologies, warfare, disease and environmental convulsions – in tandem with time-depth – offer the better explanation. We also test and reject the fashionable hypothesis that ‘pre-colonial hierarchy’ has a strong and enduring influence over contemporary development outcomes.

Language families in the area of the mid-Holocene inundation of the Digul Platform

Edgar Suter (Universität zu Köln)

It is well known that New Guinea and Australia formed a single land mass called Sahul at the Last Glacial Maximum (21,000 years ago). Less well known is that the rising sea level did not stop at today’s coastline in southern New Guinea but that a large part of the platform of the Digul River was inundated during the mid-Holocene (6,000 years ago). Most of the present Digul lowland has come into being since then, largely through isostatic emergence (Chappell 2005).

Recently there has been intensive research into the classification of the Papuan languages of southern New Guinea (see References). Several new language families have been established and reconstruction has gotten underway on them as well as on some previously recognized families. In my presentation I look at the languages that are today spoken in the Digul lowland and report on their genealogical relationships. The geographical distribution of the different language families and ancient borrowing events give a clue as to how they might have spread. Drawing on this linguistic evidence, I discuss possible past migrations of language groups from the highlands into the Digul lowland.

The origins of graded societies in North-Central Vanuatu: From Bismarck to Tonga

Laurent Dousset (University of Lucerne)

It has been suggested that graded societies in North-Central Vanuatu have a historical relationship with the secret societies of the Bismarck Archipelago. Some material evidence, such as the existence of tusks in both regions, as well as genetic data, seem to confirm this hypothesis. In this paper I would like to suggest a more complex history of graded societies in developing a twofold distinction: that between secret societies, men’s or initiatory societies and graded societies, on the one hand, and that between centralized (encapsulating) and decentralized (non-encapsulating) graded societies on the other. I suggest that graded societies of North-Central Vanuatu seem to illustrate different degrees of influences from returning Polynesian navigators and that graded societies are a combination of some secular aspects of secret societies with the more sacred and hierarchical nature of Polynesian titles and ranks.

An interdisciplinary approach to Polynesian ancestry in Vanuatu

Lara Rubio Arauna (Institut Pasteur, Paris)

Wanda Zinger (University of Tübingen)

Lluis Quintana-Murci (Institut Pasteur, Paris)

Etienne Patin (Institut Pasteur, Paris)

Frederique Valentin (CNRS - Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique)

In the south of the Vanuatu archipelago some communities display Polynesian cultural features and speak Polynesian languages. Studies from different disciplines suggest that those populations are the descendants of migrations from Polynesia occurring during the last millennium. Here, we propose an interdisciplinary approach, joining the latest bio-anthropological findings in the region, to address the migratory and admixture processes of the Polynesian descendants in Vanuatu. Genetic data attests the presence of Polynesian ancestry among ni-Vanuatu, implying admixture between Polynesians and pre-existing Melanesians, and maps its distribution to both Polynesian and non-Polynesian-speaking communities. Interestingly, we provide evidence in modern ni-Vanuatu for a tendency of spouses to carry similar proportions of genetic ancestries. By comparison, phenotypic analysis of ancient individuals from the Roi Mata burial complex (400 BP) show that females with Polynesian phenotypes are buried in close relationship with individuals related to the Melanesian pre-existing society, suggesting their integration into the local society. Joining the past and the present, our findings, interpreted along with oral records, show that despite an extensive admixture of the Polynesian newcomers with the pre-existing populations, the social structure reflects the genetic ancestry. We also highlight the role of Polynesian women in the cultural and linguistical transmissions across generations.

Polynesian signatures in central Vanuatu: outliers or just normal distribution?

Chris Ballard (Australian National University)

Recent genomic research on the human settlement of Vanuatu proposes multiple phases of population movement, including a third migration originating from Polynesia between 600 and 1,000 years ago (Arauna et al. 2022). There are several distinct lines of evidence – from archaeology, genetics, linguistics and oral history – to support the claim for movement and exchange between western Polynesia and southern and central Vanuatu, but the different disciplinary signatures for this evidence vary considerably in their strength and emphasis. This paper sets out to ask when and why certain signatures of Polynesian contact or presence are retained or rendered visible to these different disciplinary approaches, and to propose a framework for their reconciliation in a general model of central Vanuatu history.