In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories (review)

The Pacific region has long hosted research at the intersection of anthropology and history. In Oceania brings together nine of Nicholas Thomas's essays, most previously published and here revised, which showcase his work on colonialism, exchange, and identity. This volume is also about the modern meanings of colonial encounters and politics of tradition.

Thomas begins with the image of Tupaia's map: a chart of the central Pacific drawn by the Polynesian priest when he joined Captain James Cook's Endeavor at Tahiti in 1769. Repeating Samoan scholar Epeli Hau'ofa's vision of "a sea of islands," Thomas presents Oceania as a place where the very essence of identity, exchange, and tradition is the sense of movement, migration, and connection. In contrast to the European vision of fixed nations and ethnicities, soon to be frozen on the charts made by men who followed Cook, Tupaia's map reflects a world of links forged by sea voyages. The image lets Thomas bring together diverse essays elucidating "constructions of indigenous culture that have been fashioned both by a group of outsiders and by islanders themselves" (6). The position of these essays, taken as a whole, is that much postcolonial theory is so abstract and judgmental of indigenous practices and views of tradition that it misses the point: Pacific Islanders have never been "colonized" mentally or culturally but continue—as they always have—to generate novel, useful, internally contradictory ideas and practices that may or may not become reified as tradition. That Europeans have formed part of the context in which indigenous lives are lived does not mean that local history is controlled by the colonial encounter. Histories, Thomas writes in his introduction, "may be linked but not shared" (13), and the evidence comes through the essays that follow.

The book is divided into three parts. The first discusses problems of historians and anthropologists in treating (as outsiders) issues of authenticity and historical veracity in Pacific cases. Here are two essays, one based on Thomas's 1990 Journal of Pacific History article discussing the complex links between politics and the writing of history, the other from Biersack's edited volume Clio in Oceania exploring some alternative readings of "millennial" movements by reflecting on what is written about their founders.

In the second part, Thomas uses a variety of artifacts to describe the space that Oceania and its peoples have occupied in European culture—and a contested, ambiguous, and challenging space it often has been. These essays, some based on previous publications intended for various audiences, seem to have more to do with European cultural history than with Oceania, as they discuss artistic representations of New Zealanders from Cook's voyages, how European engravings presented Oceanic artifacts as "curiosities," how Peter Corris's novels represent Southwest Pacific politics and history, and how the nineteenth-century European categories of "Melanesia" and "Polynesia" are used today by Islanders, with very different content. In assembling these essays, Thomas means to say not only that Europeans and Islanders have "different views" of themselves and of each other, but also that their views are in a way intellectually incompatible; they inhabit different space. Our task is not just to show "both sides" of a past event, but to take on the challenge of recognizing two completely different, constantly shifting, and internally contradictory intellectual worlds and somehow bringing them into dialogue.

The final part focuses, in part, on western Fiji to consider the politics of tradition, seeking a new route across this well-traveled ground. How might historians and anthropologists think about tradition in a way that comes closer to a recognition of the diversity of ways that local people think about it? In "The Inversion of Tradition," Thomas "draws attention to ambivalent and negative attitudes to reified customary regimes" (186). He proposes reactive objectification as a common process whereby people reify certain aspects of culture in response to contact situations and then may take supportive, combative...