Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

“No Story, No Myth”

2016; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 58; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.13110/criticism.58.3.0523

1536-0342

Jonathan Lamb,

Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies

"No Story, No Myth" Jonathan Lamb (bio) Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire by Nicholas Thomas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. 336. $35.00 cloth, $28.00 paper. When I started reading Islanders, I was surprised at the author's insistence on two cardinal points. The first was that the entrance of Europeans into the Pacific was an unmitigated disaster for many local populations, nothing short of catastrophic: "Nothing would be the same again" (23). The second followed from the first: along with the destruction of life, culture, memory, and cosmogony went any reliable history of these islands prior to European contact. There are no genealogies, chants, or archives to tell us how many lives were lost or ruined in any given archipelago to venereal disease, measles, blackbirding (the kidnapping of natives for forced labor on sugar plantations), and plain old-fashioned violence. Often Thomas will hazard a guess (almost half of the population of the Marquesas was lost, together with the arts of tattooing and tapa), but always with a proviso: for example, "It is hard to put figures to depopulation.…" (218) and "It will never be possible to quantify.…" (237). And when it comes to what indigenous people felt about all this, the same provisos block our access to the history of their thoughts and emotions: "There is no way of reconstructing the states of mind … [of] islanders whose minds and feelings are inaccessible to us" (260). I was surprised not because I believe otherwise than that European colonization of archipelagos [End Page 523] in the South Seas was a long-term disaster for many communities there, but because the argument has already been made at length in Alan Moorehead's The Fatal Impact (1966), a book that had a decisive influence on the first postcolonial studies of Oceania. Moorehead's work was important not only for postcolonial cultural historians such as Peter Hulme and Rod Edmond, but also crucial for Gananath Obeyesekere when he made his astonishing assault on the work of the region's most respected anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins. Where Sahlins had argued for Cook's unwitting inclusion of himself and his vessel in the Hawai'ian Makahiki festival shortly before his death, Moorehead's Fatal Impact authorized Obeyesekere to ask how we could possibly be certain of the calendar and sequences of that festival, with traditions so obscured and corrupted, and how we could possibly digest the old colonial chestnut of the European explorer hailed as a god. It is a two-step that became more familiar as postcolonial theory grew stronger: the obliteration of local culture meant that moral outrage displaced any attempt at historical reconstruction; the authentic memorial to the purity of primitive rituals was total amnesia. Cannibalism became the issue of choice, endlessly exposed as an ex post facto lie by the simple device of denying any factual evidence for a custom that indisputably had only ever existed in the imaginations of horror-hungry Europeans. A plenary allowance for skepticism was drawn from the ruins of cultural continuity, and populations who had lost so much were about to lose a little more to the indignation of their defenders. Anyone familiar with Thomas's work knows that he has never been friendly towards this slash-and-burn school of pious nostalgia, so why was he introducing its two favorite theses? I think it is clear as one gets further into the book that he is doing the opposite. When he says, "Nothing would be the same again," he doesn't mean that the Oceanic past was forever divorced from the present and the future, but rather that their connections had ceased to be straightforward or predictable: they had changed, and not always for the worse. For instance, population levels actually rose on Oahu in the early nineteenth century, and many inland areas of Fiji, New Caledonia, the Solomons, and New Guinea were for a long time free of all incursions, colonial and Christian, and some still are. Where a phenomenon looks like part of an imperial or missionary plot to eradicate the memory of the people, Thomas shows its other side. When John Williams witnessed the spontaneous throwing...