ANTHY308 – Week 2
The Beginnings of Melanesian Ethnography
Melanesia has always held a pivotal position in the history of modern anthropology, from its
inception at the start of the 20th century and into the present.
History of Melanesian Anthropology > tightly connected to European projects of imperialist
political domination and cannot be understood independently of this historical process.
From the 1500s until the 1800s a variety of European nations, including the Portuguese,
Spanish, French, English, and Dutch, mount numerous scientific expeditions into the Pacific,
looking mainly for economic opportunities and opening possibilities for settlement.
Similar pattern of interaction by locals and foreign explorers: friendly welcome,
misunderstandings, sullen retreats, occasional reconciliations, robberies and violent
retaliation. Loss of life was substantial on both sides.
Before any formal colonial control was established, Melanesia was also being incorporated
within these imperialist voyages, with many well known places bearing the names of foreign
explorers, e.g. Bougainville, Cartaret Islands, Torres Strait, D’ Entrecasteaux Islands, Banks
Islands, and their own naming projects, e.g. Papua/New Guinea, Solomon Islands.
Historical evidence suggests that the vast majority of these early European voyagers and
their crews saw Melanesian people as living in a morally, socially, and physically depraved
state, and thus were prime targets for utilisation in a variety of European projects of control.
As early as 1568, Mendana’s first expedition to the Solomon Islands abducts a family group
from San Cristobal and takes them to Peru, intending they return to their homeland as
messengers of the Gospel.
Following from the sporadic and usually brief passages through Melanesia by these
expeditions, European influence becomes more systematic from the middle of the 19 th
century through two main influences: one religious, the other economic.
A variety of missions begin moving into Melanesia starting in the middle of the 19th century.
Methodists and London Missionary Society (LMS) in Fiji from 1830; LMS and Presbyterians in
Vanuatu from 1830; LMS and Marists in New Caledonia from 1840; Anglicans and Marists in
Solomon Islands from the 1850; LMS, Methodists, Catholics, and Lutherans, from 1872.
Two economic activities in Melanesia during this time were:
-
Blackbirding
Sandalwood Trade
Sandalwood Trade
- Mainly between 1841 & 1865; New Hebrides and New Caledonia
- Traders (practically Sydney); Average rate of 20 ships a year
- Access to sandalwood – acquired through exchanges with locals
- Locals wanted pigs tobacco, metal tools in exchange > technological revolution
Blackbirding
- Established in 1860s after sandalwood trade diminished
- - Known as Melanesian version of slave trade
- Mainly Australian ships, tricking and kidnapping local people
- These locals were wanted for the sugarcane plantation in Queensland mainly
- The Solomon Islands were strongly targeted
- Fatalities, low wages and unfair treatment to the locals working at the plantations
Most NZ seasonal workers are from Melanesia, mainly Vanuatu
- Some labourers returned to their homelands and others stay in Australia
- These people were known as South. Sea Islanders; which is Australia’s largest nonindigenous black ethnic group
Colonisation began at the end of the 19th century – towards the era of New Imperialism
Place
Year
French New Caledonia
1853
British Fiji
1874
German New Guinea
1884
German North Solomon Islands
1886
British New Guinea
1888
British South Solomon Islands
1893
French New Hebrides
1906
The reports of travellers to Melanesia piqued the curiosity of natural and social scientists,
who were drawn to the area’s ‘untouched’ reputation. Some of these early scientific visits
were, however, ignominious.
Luigi D’Albertis, Italian naturalist ; Three voyages to Fly River (1875,1876,1877)
Like many early ‘expeditions’, D’Albertis’s behaviour and methods were deeply damaging
and highly controversial, including killing many local people; using dynamite to acquire
specimens; stealing ancestral human remains; killed a Chinese servant, all of which was
recorded in his book New Guinea: What I Did, What I Saw (1880).
Nikolai Nikolayevich Miklouho-Maclay; First Anthropologist in Melanesia
Sponsored by the Russian Geographical Society, Miklouho-Maclay travelled on the Vitiaz to
Astrolabe Bay on the northern coast of New Guinea in 1871, where he stayed for an initial
period of 15 months, another 17 months from June 1876-November 1877, and a final brief
visit in 1883.
His ethnographic efforts remained mainly superficial, and engaged mainly in sketching –
physical types, costumes, material culture, and local settings. This owed both to the
evolutionary perspective he brought from Europe and also to the fact that there was not a
single bilingual intermediary from which he could advance his communication skills.
His experiences were recorded in diaries that were edited by his good friend Leo Tolstoy and
which sold millions of copies throughout Europe.
German New Guinea; Established 1884
British New Guinea; Created in 1888
The economies of both territories initially based upon extensive copra plantations that
satisfied the European desire for coconut oil.
In 1905, the British handed control over British New Guinea to Australia, which then became
known as the Territory of Papua. At the outbreak of the First World War in July 1914,
Australians seized German New Guinea, which was formally passed into Australian control
with the League of Nations and Treaty of Versailles of 1920, when it was renamed the
Territory of New Guinea.
The Melanesians (1891)
- Important precursor
- written by Anglican missionary R. H. Codrington
- Based mainly at Norfolk Island, Codrington worked with informants from a range of
Melanesian islands to document their ways of life.
The first dedicated anthropological expedition into Melanesia was the Cambridge
Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits (CAETS) of 1898. An exercise in ‘salvage
anthropology’, CAETS had a deeply significant impact upon the trajectory of anthropology.
- Organised by A.C. Haddon with a team of six Cambridge scholars
- None of these scholars were trained anthropologists
Prior to this, Anthropology had been known as ‘armchair’ anthropology. This is a state of
affairs that Haddon deemed insufficient for gaining an accurate understanding of indigenous
culture.
Psychological experiments
- Conducted by Rivers
- Sensory perception such as hearing, sight, etc.
The results showed that Torres Strait islanders were not biologically inferior to any other
human being and that their senses and habits were attuned to their environment.
The expedition marked a watershed moment in the history of modern anthropology
whereby the formerly separate roles of theorist and data collector were united in the figure
of the ethnographic fieldworker. The importance of fieldwork within modern anthropology
begins to emerge.
‘The intellectual pedigree of modern British social anthropologists conventionally – and with
considerable justification – begins with the members of the 1898 Cambridge
Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits’ (Kuklick 1991: 134).
While the CAETS was taking place, Germany was still stuck in the ‘armchair’ phase of
anthropology but a decade later launched their own ethnographic expeditions in New
Guinea.
German Naval Expedition (1907-1909)
The Hamburg South Sea Expedition (1908-1910)
Geographical Commission Expedition (1908)
Sepik Expedition (1913-1914)
- Expeditions collected thousands of artefacts for sale in Europe without giving much
thought to their cultural meaning and function.
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski
- Polish/British Anthropologist
- Arrived in New Guinea in November 1914
- Known as an enemy alien to Australians
- The colonial government allowed him to conduct research
- His impact to Melanesian ethnography and anthropology is unrivalled
- Malinowski’s most important influence upon the discipline of anthropology has been
methodologically, namely, for developing ‘participant-observation’ fieldwork during
his time in Kiriwina.
- He was instrumental in forming a key doctrine of modern anthropology; this is that
all human worlds are meaningful in their own right
- Argonauts of the Western Pacific; most famous book (written on inter-island
exchange of red shell necklaces and armbands)
Red Shell Necklaces and Armbands; Kula Ring
-
Each object has its own name, history and imbued with spiritual power
Certain objects thus come to take on special significance owing to the important
groups that have previously exchanged them.
Malinowski’s reputation has not survived the passage of time unscathed however. By
keeping a diary of his innermost thoughts while undertaking his fieldwork, Malinowski never
knew that it would later be used to posthumously attack his reputation.
Clifford Geertz felt that the ‘gross, tiresome’ diary revealed Malinowski as ‘a crabbed, selfpreoccupied, hypochondriacal narcissist, whose fellow-feeling for the people he lived with
was limited in the extreme.’ Also roundly criticized for overstating the extent to which he
really participated in everyday Trobriand life.
Malinowski ‘As for ethnology: I see the life of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or
importance, something as remote from me as the life of a dog’ (1967:167).
- Total Opposition from his books
There is thus a vivid and highly problematic disconnect between Malinowski’s stated avowal
of the ethnographic virtues of respect and understanding and his occasional internal
revulsion at the supposed object of those virtues.
Was he simply a flawed human being or was he just another racist colonial masquerading as
a scientist?