Conclusions

The intentions of this chapter are at once critical and advocatory: I aim to identify elements of essentialism, anachronism, and ethnocentrism in contemporary texts, histories, and ethnographies, while illustrating a historical method based primarily on contemporary action descriptions. Essentialism is apparent in contemporary European images of fixed, territorially defined Melanesian political entities. These contradict likewise indications in the same texts of contingency and fluidity in Melanesian actions and relationships, and a stress in some twentieth-century ethnographies of the significance of flux in Melanesian political practice. A major concern is with

temporal aspects of mirroring, distortions induced by unreflexive present perspectives: anachronism always looms in the assumption that later ethnographic categories are automatically appropriate to past contexts, but the tyranny of the ethnographic present in anthropology is at least matched by the tyranny of outcomes in history, exemplified above with reference to the central region in 1868–69. A congruent, recurrent concern is with ethnocentrism, particularly the Eurocentric passivism of words used to represent Melanesian actions.

The question must arise as to how the rhetorical trappings of contemporary action descriptions may be recognized and penetrated. Most nineteenthcentury texts on New Caledonia were written by French men; their interpretation for ethnographic purposes places a heavy burden on nuance, implication, hints, and single instances, as even the best were written with other ends in view and with a focus on prominent Melanesian males, especially “chiefs.” Vivid insights often emerge from the contradictions and frustrations of refractory experience, displayed in the texts and belying the ethnocentric arrogance and a priori assumptions of their authors. To illustrate: Douarre despaired of Melanesians as a people who would not give or receive a “gift” in the spirit in which he thought it ought to be intended and whose every gesture seemed to have a materialistic double meaning. He wrote disparagingly of a Mwelebeng chief who “opened to me his two great arms to say that he loved me much, much, much; he took care, however, to add finally ‘You will give me a toqui [piece of iron]!’” (“Journal,” 20–24 February 1846). Reading emotion and value across cultures and eras is a slippery enterprise; in this case, as so often, dissonance was interpreted negatively. Though accused of materialism (e.g., Douarre, “Journal,” 16 July, 20 November 1844), Melanesians set far greater store by acts of exchange and the relationships and meanings they mediated and expressed than by the objects as such, though objects were essential to maintain the flow and symbolize the rhythm of exchange relationships. A senior naval officer described aptly the peripatetic quality of objects, but dismissed it as “curious,” token of a “weak … sense of property,” which others deplored as “communism” (e.g., Leconte to Ministre, 31 March 1847, ANOM, Carton 40; Verguet 1854, 61–62):

the possessor of whatever object, given as payment for a service rendered or as a present, parts with it almost immediately in favor of the first comer, who himself gives it to another; such that one often sees an object of great value, in the eyes of the natives, pass through a thousand hands and, from tribe to tribe, make a tour of the island. (Tardy de Montravel to Ministre, 25 December 1854, ANOM, Carton 40)

As in the case of ethnographic field notes and the working sketches of artists on early European voyages of discovery, the more immediate and less

formal and overwrought the text, the more useful the action description. Unpublished mission journals and correspondence are especially valuable, since missionaries, like ethnographic historians, knew that souls, like minds, are inaccessible to mere mortals and that actions and words provide the best clues available as to what people might have thought and felt. There were also different categories of text, especially in colonial contexts, the authors of which had different, often incompatible, axes to grind. Missionaries, settlers, and administrators, for example, were often mutually critical, even hostile: their accounts derived from varied perspectives, giving opportunities for cross-checking; furthermore, in condemning opponents and rivals, they tended inadvertently to caricature their own motivations, intentions, and biases, as in the several estimations cited above of the significance of Melanesian allies to the French cause in 1878–79.

Language is transformative. The rhetorics encountered in contemporary texts and histories are varied: savagery in several guises; primitive cultural conservatism; reflex resistance to colonial domination. All shared a vision of human action—or at least Melanesian actions—as product of impersonal forces or structures. My own rhetoric derives from a philosophical inclination to see actors as intending subjects, rather than passive objects or victims of abstract causal forces (Douglas 1984; Fabian 1979, 13–14; Ortner 1984; Parkin 1982; Philipp 1983, 346–350). I aim to assess both Melanesian and colonial performance in context, in terms appropriate to actors' actions, intentions, and conceptions and the practical constraints under which they operated. I am struck at once by the range of Melanesian actions and choices and by the consistency of restraint: their enduring preference for compromise over martyrdom, their emphasis on selective, intensely psychological violence, often verbal rather than physical and aimed at property rather than persons. Two philosophically opposed ethnographers made similar points in relation to more recent events, though in somewhat essentialist terms. According to Leenhardt, fighting for Melanesians was culturally and linguistically a “corollary of anger” and they abhorred the cold persistence of Europeans: Melanesian soldiers in France during World War I were profoundly astonished “to see Whites capable of coldly making severe war on each other” (1930, 38). Bensa remarked that “Canaques loathe direct violence” and linked this trait to the “constantly unravelling and reforming segmentary structures” of their societies, “to which correspond ideologies of integration, of respect, of ambiguity, of contained and staged violence” (Bensa and Bourdieu 1985, 82–83). Multiplication does not transform interpretation into truth, but it is suggestive that three disparate methods of inquiry focused on very different contexts at widely separated periods should produce similar impressions of Melanesian attitudes to violence, impressions that contradict most past and present stereotypes.