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International conference
'Race, Encounters, and the Constitution of Human Difference in Oceania'

20-22 January 2010

Coombs Lecture Theatre
The Australian National University
Canberra, ACT, Australia

ABSTRACTS

KEYNOTE 1

Hybridity, Race and Science: The voyage of the Zaca, 1934-35

Warwick Anderson
University of Sydney

TBA
 KEYNOTE 2

Cartography, Resistance, and Pluralism in the Making of Arctic Oceania

Michael Bravo
University of Cambridge

The worlds of the Arctic and the South Pacific emerged forcefully and almost simultaneously in

global networks of knowledge and exchange in the period 1760-1830. Normally historians approach

the study of these regions as quite separate and specialized entities, as though the one were isolated

from the other, a mere afterthought as, for example, when the Resolution and the Discovery sailed

north to the Bering Strait on Cook's third voyage. In this paper, my intention is to challenge this

phenomenon of isolationism by exploring how these regions each came to be appreciated as being

inhabited by a plurality of societies. This requires thinking about ethnographic and geographical

identities, including race and human difference, across a range of scales. My argument begins with the

observation that European ideas about the peoples of Oceania and the Arctic were rooted in global

circuits of capital and the encounters that took place in everyday trade and travel, as well as different

kinds of exploration. Taking my cue from our conference theme, I propose a novel way of framing the

Arctic – as an Oceania. This Arctic Oceania was populated by peoples who themselves placed great

store and value on mobility and navigation along traditional sea and ice routes and trails. I will bring

this world to life with illustrations from indigenous oral accounts, material culture, and travellers'

texts. Seen through this lens, navigation can be understood as a set of technologies of encounter and

negotiation. Their materiality is inherent in the landscapes they purport to represent. More broadly,

they constitute a considerable range of practices of orientation. The capacity for different modes of

orientation enabled the peoples of Arctic Oceania to modulate the timing and extent to which they

resisted or embraced other maritime societies. The accounts of some of these encounters were part of

traditions of story-telling and knowledge-gathering, resources used to demarcate boundaries and

define categories by which societies can know each other or share in a common sense of humanity.

Finally, I will reflect on the contribution of shared notions of humanity and race in bridging the

Oceanias of the Pacific and the Arctic during this crucial period of global integration.
 KEYNOTE 3

A Fifth Part of the World? Humboldt, race, and Oceania

Rainer Buschmann
Purdue University, Indiana

Alexander von Humboldt's journey to the Spanish possessions in the Americas (1799-1804) marked a

new area of scientific inquiry. His writings, collected in more than 30 volumes, have never been

seriously analyzed in connection with Oceania. This is indeed an odd oversight, since from the very

onset of his travels Humboldt was obsessed with the newly emerging world of islands. Georg Forster

proved to be a forming influence on the young Humboldt, whose main desire was to participate in a

French expedition to the Pacific. When this endeavour failed to materialize, Humboldt journeyed to

the Americas where his scientific gaze rediscovered the region. In his writings, Humboldt never

articulated a clear vision of human diversity or race. Rather, he envisioned human beings as part of a

larger biological whole defined as 'cosmos'. This paper examines Humboldt's view of Oceania as it

emerged from the shores of the Americas. His encounter with Oceania was mostly textual in nature

and yet his sources deserve attention. Besides the traditional British and French writings on the

Pacific, Humboldt employed many neglected Spanish authors in his synthesis. Humboldt, this paper

contends, was instrumental in a transnational transliteration of a Spanish intellectual view that saw

Oceania as a cultural and racial extension of the Americas.

 From Scrub Blacks, to Barrineans, to Rainforest Aboriginal People:

Changing Aboriginal identities in Northeastern Australia

John Burton
The Australian National University
&
Ernie Grant
Echo Adventure and Cultural Group
Mission Beach, QLD

The people of the Cairns rainforest area have been viewed in a range of different ways since their first

encounters with outsiders at the end of the 19th century. Early ethnological writers were struck by the

impenetrable nature of the 'scrubs' (now 'rainforest') and the unique material culture of the inhabitants

– the 'Scrub Blacks' – in the form of wooden shields, thatched huts, woven baskets, and fish traps. In

the 1930s, the hey-day of race models, Joseph Birdsell suggested, by contrast, that the distinctiveness

of the area was due to the origin of its inhabitants among Negritos of South Asia. In recent years, the

view of the area has highlighted 'traditional ecological knowledge', heritage, and tourism. In 2005, a

Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Area agreement was signed by Federal and State

authorities and 18 Aboriginal groups of the Wet Tropics area, recasting the area as a tourist

destination worth more than $400 million a year to the economy of Queensland. A constant through

all periods is the assumed geographical and cultural coherence of a region extending roughly from

Cooktown in the north to Ingham in the south. Our presentation discusses the historical and cultural

processes that have contributed to the contemporary identity of people who today call themselves

Rainforest Aboriginal People.

 William Marsden and his Contribution to the History of Man

Diana Carroll
Canberra

William Marsden (1754-1836) is best known as the author of The History of Sumatra (1783). Yet it is

rarely recognized that his findings in the 'Remarks on the Sumatran [and cognate] Languages',

published in 1782, underpinned all his subsequent scholarship. Although Adrian Reland in 1706 was

the first to recognize the linguistic similarities present from Madagascar to Easter Island, it was

Marsden's 'Remarks' paper that made the first truly scholarly analysis of the language family known

today as Austronesian and developed the idea in detail. Of the early philologists who identified the

'Malay' language family, such as Lorenzo Hervas in 1784, Marsden was the only one with first hand

experience in the region. The scope of his scholarship, the prominence of his publications, and the fact

that he published in English soon brought him to the notice of the wider European scholarly elite.

Marsden's linguistic scholarship inter alia set the course of scholarship on Malay studies. His

contemporaries were confident that Marsden's work would, as Cook's biographer Andrew Kippis put

it, 'throw much light on the origins of nations and the peopling of the globe' (1788:499). Marsden's

own ambitions were more modest. The History of Sumatra was intended as a scholarly work that,

together with the 'Remarks' paper, would explain and provide evidence for Marsden's linguistic

theories and contribute 'to the general knowledge of the age and more especially to furnish those

philosophers whose labours have been directed to the investigation of the history of Man, with facts to

serve as data in their reasonings'. His work was brought to the attention of the natural historian

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840). The focus of this paper is Marsden's perceptions of the

connections between the Austronesian-speaking nations of Sumatra, including the Malays, and the

'Polynesians' of the South Seas which attracted the attention of Blumenbach and others in his field.
 Confronting 'Hybrids' in Oceania:

Field experience and the science of race in France

Bronwen Douglas
The Australian National University

Fierce debates about racial crossing recurred in 'medicalized' French anthropology during the mid-

nineteenth century. This paper addresses the nexus of theory and field experience in disputes about

human 'hybrids' as key signifiers of specific boundaries and as racially regenerative or transgressive.

The theorists include the early polygenists Virey, Bory, and Desmoulins; the naturalists Serres,

Quatrefages, Blanchard, and Hamy; and the anthropologists Broca and Topinard. Their diverse global

positions on interracial unions are calibrated with two distinct empirical registers: first, the reportage

and anthropological syntheses produced by naval naturalists following fleeting encounters with a

broad range of Indigenous people during scientific voyages in Oceania to 1840; and second, the much

more focussed ethnographies and anthropological comparisons produced by naval medical officers

following tours of duty in the new French Pacific colonies in eastern Polynesia and New Caledonia

from 1842. The paper concludes by posing an apparent paradox: that Aboriginal Australians and

Tasmanians loomed far larger in discourses on hybridity in France than either 'Melanesian' or

'Polynesian' French colonial subjects, though France had no colonial interests and few direct

ethnographic encounters in Australia after 1840.

 Finding Kin:

The gathering and representation of kinship material in colonial Australia

Helen Gardner
Deakin University

In the 1870s, variations of Lewis Henry Morgan's kinship schedule were circulated around the

Australian colonies by Lorimer Fison and Alfred William Howitt. The successful completion of these

schedules of over 200 relationship terms in the language of the informant required a close and

engaged encounter between collectors and informants over hours and sometimes days. Responses – of

varying quality – came from mission stations, pastoralists, and government officials from Queensland,

New South Wales, South Australia, and Victoria. While accepting that the data from these schedules

was subsequently deployed in evolutionist arguments that largely denigrated Aboriginal people, this

paper focuses on the act of kinship collection and the debates, confusion, and discussions engendered

by the task. The paper also investigates Australian experiments in new forms of kinship representation

– using diagrams rather than relationship lists – as Aboriginal kinship proved too complex for the

models used up until that time.

Edward Fuller, Representation of Fraser Island kinship, 1873

 'A School of Iron, Vexation and Blood, but a School Nonetheless':

The writings of the first PIME missionaries to Oceania in the 1850s

Elisabetta Gnecchi-Ruscone
Università Milano Bicocca

Based on letters and reports written by a small group of Italian missionaries who in 1852-3 took over

the missions on Woodlark and Rook Islands (northeast of New Guinea) from the French Marists, this

paper focuses on early encounters: the assumptions on human difference which the first Italian

Catholic missionaries brought with them to Melanesia; what they learned from their predecessors; the

strategies they adopted; and their perception of indigenous attitudes to their evangelization project –

in particular, their representation of native agency as expressions of amorality. After almost three

harrowing years of disease, fear, and all-round failure, the missionaries resolved to leave both islands.

However, Mazzucconi's killing on Woodlark Island has represented a milestone in the history of

PIME. The bitter conclusion reached by the surviving fathers as they renounced the Melanesian

missions was that the inhabitants of these islands were too uncivilized and backward even to realize

that missionaries had something of value to teach them: it would be better to redirect their evangelical

efforts onto natives with greater experience of white traders and colonization: 'Una scuola di ferro, di

vessazioni e di sangue, ma pure è una scuola'. Only such experience would 'awaken their curiosity

and prepare them to accept the missionaries' love and teachings'.

 'Shrieking Savages' and 'Men of Milder Customs':

Dr Adolf Bernhard Meyer's expedition to New Guinea, 1873

Hilary Howes
The Australian National University

Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840-1911), a German-Jewish doctor and naturalist, travelled and collected in

north-west New Guinea between March and July 1873. He was one of the first Germans to set foot in

New Guinea and the first to publish extensively in German on his experiences there. Though his

subsequent career as a museum director was built on the scientific results and collections from this

expedition, after his death the expedition itself was largely forgotten and the publications resulting

from it – including a lengthy travelogue and works on New Guinean physical anthropology, language,

and religious beliefs – ignored or discredited. I re-examine this neglected corpus of scholarship and

discuss the ways in which Meyer's encounters with indigenous New Guineans influenced his

contributions to metropolitan discussions of racial difference. On the one hand, Meyer's perceptions of

'Papuan' racial identity were shaped by his pre-voyage readings (particularly of the naturalist Alfred

Russel Wallace and the anthropologist Theodor Waitz) and by the constraints of genre and discourse

on his post-voyage publications; on the other, these perceptions were constantly challenged in the

field by his actual encounters with individual 'Papuans' and by the diversity and unexpectedness of

their physical appearances, initiatives, demeanours, and actions.

 The Tasmanian Skull in European and Australian Physical Anthropology, 1870-1939

Elise Juzda
University of Cambridge

As the indigenous population of Tasmania diminished throughout the nineteenth century, European

anthropologists began to rely increasingly upon craniometrical methodology as a means of

investigating the 'place in nature' of the island's natives. This emphasis not only encouraged an

international traffic in human remains, but also contributed to debates on the evolution of human

races, the notion of 'racial purity', and the supposed inevitability of racial extinction as a by-product of

settler-colonialism in Australia. Although the terms of these debates were established primarily in

Britain and France, the apotheosis of negative craniological sentiment towards the Tasmanian

Aborigines came from British-born researches based in Australia itself during the first decades of the

twentieth century. This paper thus argues that the establishment of physical anthropology in Australia

was premised upon traditional conclusions regarding the inferiority of the Aboriginal population and

was for many years a continuation of European racial theory and practice regarding indigenous

peoples.
 The Galapagos of the Mind:

Oceania and the search for the psychological past

Robert Kenny
La Trobe University

At the moment psychologists wanted to leave the realm of philosophy and enter the realm of science,

evolutionary theories took hold in science. Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law – that ontology

recapitulates phylogeny – found a particularly receptive audience among the psychologists. This paper

looks at the work of Georges Romanes, James Mark Baldwin, John Hughlings Jackson, and James

Sully, among others, to show how the evolutionary recapitulative approach to psychology led to a

need for the psychological 'primitive'. This was an understanding that the psychological past was

recapitulated in the development of the 'civilized' child and reasserted itself in the mentally ill. But it

was a past seen to be still alive among the peoples of Oceania, particularly in Australia and Melanesia.

Study of these peoples would reveal much that lay hidden under the civilized mind. It is this which

explains why the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait of 1898 was dominated

by psychologists, (the chief among them, WHR Rivers, had studied under Jackson), and why

Sigmund Freud would turn to the anthropology of Australia to defend his concepts (heavily

influenced by Baldwin and Jackson).

 The Hostile Tropics:

Race, place and politics in Northern Australia

Russell McGregor
James Cook University

This paper examines some ways in which the idea that the white race was congenitally unfitted to

tropical environments was deployed in debates over the destiny of northern Australia in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the earlier part of this period, that idea was commonly

used to buttress advocacy of a racially diverse, but racially stratified, northern society. In the two

decades after federation, pessimistic assessments of the viability of the white race in the tropics

underpinned the most cogent arguments advanced against the strictures of the white Australia policy.

By the 1920s and 1930s, assertions of white unfitness for tropical residence were coming to be used in

support of inter-racial political equality, notably in the advocacy of the geographer Thomas Griffith

Taylor and the Aboriginal activist William Cooper. The point I want to draw from this survey is that

racial (and even racist) ideas were remarkably plastic and able to be mobilized for widely divergent

political purposes.
 Race as Reinterpretation:

The science of race and colonial conditions in Malaya

Sandra Khor Manickam

The Australian National University

This paper uses the specific history of race in Malaya to address wider issues surrounding the

development of ideas of race and their influences and determinants. I argue that ideas of race in

Malaya were the byproduct of a reinterpretation of local inequalities that were present and developing

in the process of Malaya being colonized and that the developments within the science of race in

Malaya were in large part an accommodation to these local conditions. Colonial situations are

important and indispensable aspects of the history of race. The interaction between colonial

governance and the science of race as developed within British Malaya yielded trajectories of its own.

The specific histories of races in the colonies furnish us with various sciences of race, splintering the

meaning of race even further when compared to the ideas of other groups of European intellectuals

(for instance, British, French, and German) and other colonies (for instance, India) which had their

respective concerns and exigencies.

 Colonial Administration, the 'Community of Race' and the Category of indigène

in New Caledonia, 1887-1946

Adrian Muckle
Victoria University of Wellington

From 1887 to 1946 the indigénat provided French administrators with measures to streamline the

government and summary repression of Kanak (the indigenous people of New Caledonia) and those

assimilated to them as indigènes ('natives') by the 'community of race'. In 1915, the indigénat defined

an indigène as 'any person of either Melanesian or Polynesian race or mixed race from New Caledonia

and its dependencies or the archipelago of Wallis and Futuna and who does not exercise the rights

pertaining to the quality of French citizen'. This paper will explore the place of the indigénat and the

role of French colonial administrators in defining a 'community of race' and the category of indigène

in New Caledonia in the period to 1946. Particular consideration will be given to: the influence (or

absence thereof) of the science of race on colonial administrators and their thinking about native

affairs/policy in New Caledonia; the impact of forms of Kanak agency on the administration's making

of racialized subjects and citizens; the situation of the métis ('half-castes'); and the extent to which

cultural and political divisions between the Grande terre (mainland) and the Loyalty Islands were

imagined or constructed in racial terms.

 Xavier Montrouzier, a Nomadic Missionary in Melanesia and his Adjustments to the

Unexpected: Writings from Woodlark Island in the mid-nineteenth century

Anna Paini
Università di Verona

Influenced by his background in Natural History, the French Marist missionary Xavier Montrouzier

adopted different approaches to the unexpected in the course of his Melanesian experiences. In some

instances, he was able to allow his experience to speak by itself, for example, in acknowledging a

wider linguistic diversity than he had expected or in examining the variety of local landscapes, flora,

and fauna. Yet when he came to consider local cultural and social practices, a greater rigidity

emerged. His strong confidence in his own vision meant that in his writings he represented the

lifeways of 'the other' sometimes as unethical but mainly as irrational. Notwithstanding his

ethnographic curiosity, he was unable to face or to acknowledge reciprocity and was baffled that local

people even dared to suggest it. Drawn to open a mission in Woodlark by the presence in the newly

charted island of people who 'seem to belong to the Polynesian race' and regarding the new mission as

'a step made towards New Guinea', a few years later Montrouzier, disillusioned and disappointed by

the lack of concrete results and the seeming pointlessness of these challenges, was led to reconsider

his premises. This paper aims to plot Montrouzier's adjustments to the unexpected over a five-year

time span, highlighting the complexities in his representations of local contexts and thus avoiding the

potential trap of simplistic dualism.

 In Search of 'Black Races' in East Timor, 1870s-1940s

Ricardo Roque
University of Lisbon

This paper will trace the attempts of colonial officers, missionaries, and anthropologists to classify the

races of East Timor in the wider context of the ethnological debates on the Indonesian Archipelago

and in relation to specific colonial encounters. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the

ethnogenealogy of Timor constituted a problem of difficult taxonomic solution for European

ethnologists and anthropologists. By the late nineteenth century, the hypothesis that the mixed-race

East Timorese were, after all, originally affiliated with a 'black race' – the Papuans or perhaps the

Negritos – seemed to attract influential scholarly opinions. This paper investigates the changing

involvement of Portuguese metropolitan scholars and colonial agents with these views. The intention

is to explore the grounds upon which classifications of 'black races' could be claimed and accepted as

truthful. It will consider in particular the ways through which local ethnic stereotypes, concrete

colonial experiences, and the circulation of field materials (including human skulls) interfered with

the identification of Timorese black races in practice and in discourse.

 Secret Societies as Evidence for a more Primitive Race than Polynesians:

Discourse and praxis on the Dukduk in New Britain, 1875-1914

Hirokuni Tateyama
Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Japan

One of the common observations that emerged with the onset of concerted European exploration of

what came to be called Melanesia in the late nineteenth century was that no actual chiefs existed but

secret societies served as a form of government and jurisdiction in the region. Unsurprisingly, this was

deployed to support the by-then orthodox view that people there were more primitive in evolutionary

terms than Polynesians, who had already been found to have hereditary chiefs. Considered as such,

secret societies attracted much hasty scientific attention, with the assumption that such an archaic

institution would vanish soon under the influence of European civilization. Among those which were

made most famous was one in New Britain that was then commonly known as Dukduk; indeed, its

ethnographic and material evidence was eagerly sought by Europeans. However, it is strange that the

number of Dukduk masks – the most obvious piece of material evidence – that are found in museums

worldwide is disproportionately small compared to the multitude of ethnographic accounts. This paper

explores why this is the case by examining interactions between Europeans and indigenous people

over the Dukduk during the heyday of artifact collecting (1875-1914).

 French and British Views on Race Compared in Early Encounters in Oceania

Serge Tcherkézoff
CREDO, Marseille

This paper will examine comparatively how actual early encounters between Pacific Islanders and

visiting Europeans impacted diversely on the visions of indigenous people elaborated by different

national categories of voyagers, expecially the French and the British. A careful scrutiny of particular

cases will juxtapose reports from the expeditions of Bougainville and Cook in Tahiti; and from the

expeditions of La Pérouse and Dumont d'Urville compared with those of Kotzebue and others in

Samoa. A particular focus of the paper will be on how European interpretations of encounters

influenced geographical map-making, again giving rise to different national traditions depending on

whether the geographical schools in question were French or British (and later Anglo-American).
 Dixon, Skinner and Te Rangi Hiroa:
Issues of race in 1920s theories of the settlement of New Zealand

Moira White
Otago Museum, Dunedin

Today's discussions about the settlement of New Zealand centre primarily on the date and

consequences of Māori arrival in Aotearoa. In the early 1920s, however, while Māori were

acknowledged as the existing pre-European population, some participants in the academic debate

questioned whether Māori had supplanted an earlier population; others debated the racial origins of

the Māori population. Of the various theories put forward, some supposed a Melanesian population

living in New Zealand prior to the arrival of the Māori while others suggested that Melanesian

elements could be discerned in Māori art and physiology, implying that the settling population had

absorbed those artistic and/or genetic influences prior to arrival. Roland Burrage Dixon was Curator

of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum from 1912 and Professor of Anthropology at Harvard

University from 1915. His 'A New Theory of Polynesian Origins' (1920) and The Racial History of

Man (1923) stimulated a correspondence with HD Skinner of the Otago Museum and Te Rangi Hiroa

(Dr, later Sir, Peter Buck) regarding the racial origin of New Zealand's tangata whenua. Dixon and

Skinner's purely theoretical perspectives contrast with Te Rangi Hiroa's practical experience of

physical anthropology which he married with the idea of the scientific study of culture. For all three

men, however, the discussion is framed largely in terms of the definitions and characteristics of racial

groups.
 Nature/Nurture and the Sociality of Science:

Re/producing a Melanesian population during the depopulation of the New Hebrides

Sandra Widmer
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

By the early twentieth century, reproduction and nature/nurture had become significant aspects of the

study of human biological difference and the science of race. This paper will focus on how certain

researchers mobilized these scientific concepts in the context of an urgent practical problem. Namely,

how could one measure the declining population in the New Hebrides and how should the problem be

fixed? I will analyze two of the uncertainties the researchers had. First, I will discuss how, due to the

absence of reliable census data, the researchers utilized genealogies that documented the number of

children in each generation to measure the decline as best they could. Second, I examine the scientists'

unsatisfactorily answered questions about what New Hebridean women were doing to control birth

rates and care for babies. I will situate the representational practice of genealogy and gendered

questions of fertility and child nurturance within the focus on biological reproduction and

nature/nurture in the science of the day to reflect on how indigenous knowledge and agency might

have shaped the researchers' inability to answer their own questions.

 Legacies of the German Empire in Oceania:

Nazi racism, German citizenship, and Pacific Islander Germans during the inter-war years

Christine Winter
University of Queensland

One of the legacies of the German Empire in Oceania was German-Pacific Islander families living in

the Mandated Territories of New Guinea and Samoa and in other Pacific Islands. This paper

investigates how these families were categorized, described, embraced, or rejected when the Third
Reich revitalized its interest in the Pacific during the mid-1930s. When it came to the 'brown'

Germans of the Pacific, who won the day: the Foreign Office or the foreign organization of the

NSDAP? Legal frameworks of patrilineal descent, racial theories of purity and Germanness, or the

pragmatism of colonial aspirations?