Ways of Knowing

Pacific historiography is marked by a cross-cultural epistemology, differ­ent ways of knowing culture, nature and history.^[256] Cosmologies clashed and converged. Christianity has been massively important in the Pacific context, the counter-reformation Spanish Catholic world extending to the Philippines, in early proselytising conflict with Islam, and eventually creating what remains one of the largest Catholic polities in the world.

Christian mission in the South Pacific coincided with, and often grafted onto, late Enlightenment scientific mission. Sometimes figured historiographically as a ‘laboratory’, the Pacific was rather more a ‘field’ for natural historians.^[261] And given the remarkable biogeography that awaited them, it is little wonder that early natural historians, like the historians of science that later studied them, returned again and again to the Pacific. Bio-prospecting as much as navigation and charting was an explicit element of many, perhaps most, eighteenth- and nineteenth­century expeditions.^[262] Islanders’ knowledge was sought, sometimes demanded and sometimes exchanged; how to grow and process New Zealand ‘flax’, for example, momentarily an enticing prospect as a hemp substitute for sails and ropes.

In the same way, but with more serious implications, the Pacific has long been a site for the production of knowledge about human sameness and difference, and has drawn a great deal of scholarly interest in writing and revising histories of ethnography. Much was specifically ‘seaborne ethnography’, as Bronwen Douglas has argued.^[264] A great deal of knowl­edge about human difference in Oceania - the invention of ‘race’ - rested on ideas about sex and gender.^[265] And reproduction across ‘race’ has engaged historians of Pacific societies in large part because it engaged governments and lawmakers so strongly in past centuries.^[266]

It is often claimed that the Pacific was a place in which Europeans thoroughly ‘naturalised’ and, later in the nineteenth century, ‘biologised’ indigenous people. Certainly a peculiar European view of the world invented ‘savage’ societies in the Pacific. Yet this was, at least originally, more a signifier of hunter-gathering economies, than a biological signi- fier of fixed race difference. Analysis of the ‘biologising’ of Pacific people can be overstated, and serves to misrepresent the cultural inquiry that governed most eighteenth-century accounts. These could be, and were, as dismissive, violent and hierarchical as the crudest post-Darwinian bio­logical anthropology, and yet most European ways of knowing Pacific culture involved inquiry into politico-legal systems, cultures of birth and death, relations between men and women, linguistic variety, modes of thought about spiritual realms, kinship and history. The Pacific has been a site for the development of physical anthropology as well as compar­ative anatomy - even Te Rangi Hiroa proudly recounted his measure­ment of ‘424 heads of full-blooded Maoris’.^[267] Yet such ways of knowing human difference belong to an historical period - and rather a shorter period than is usually claimed. Indeed, even as Te Rangi Hiroa wrote, other anthropologists and biologists were engaged in studies that were to undo the very idea of ‘race’, theoretically. Scientific investigations of mixed-race Pacific populations - almost despite their own ambitions and intentions - ended up challenging the viability of contemporary racial theories.^[268]