Across the Great Divide: Journeys in History and Anthropology

by Douglas,Bronwen

• ISBN13: 9789057023064
• ISBN10: 9057023067
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-08-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Across the Great Divide tracks a Pacific historian's fruitful, ambivalent engagements with History and Anthropology, anticipating experiments in each discipline with the other's theories, and praxis. The revised and new essays comprising this collection provide systematic critiques of aspects of received scholarly wisdom about Oceania and are linked by reflexive commentaries addressing recent postcolonial concerns. A varied but coherent set of ethnographic and historical narratives about colonial encounters in Island Melanesia is informed by particular critical focus on the paradoxes and politics of knowing indigenous pasts through colonial texts.

Author Biography

Bronwen Douglas is a fellow in the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia project at the Australian National University.

Table of Contents

List of Maps and Plates
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Prelude: Now Into Then: Disciplined Encounters	p. 1
Rank, Power, Authority: A Reassessment of Traditional Leadership in South Pacific Societies	p. 29
Ritual and Politics: The Inaugural Meeting of High Chiefs in New Caledonia	p. 69
Foreword: Apologia on Gender	p. 113
'Almost Constantly at War'? Ethnographic Perspectives on Indigenous Fighting in New Caledonia	p. 123
Reading Indigenous Pasts: The 'Wagap Affair' of 1862	p. 159
Winning and Losing? Reflections on the War of 1878-79 in New Caledonia	p. 193
Autonomous and Controlled Spirits: Indigenous Rituals and Encounters with Christianity in Melanesia	p. 225
Dealing (With) Death in a Melanesian World: Indigenous Aetiologies and the 'Sickness of the Christians'	p. 263
Power, Ritual and the Appropriation of God: Christianity and Subversion in Melanesia	p. 285
Finale: Whig in the Closet: Past Continuous, Future Perfect?	p. 319
Abbreviations	p. 323
Bibliography	p. 325
Index	p. 351
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