Overview

Across the Great Divide tracks a Pacific historian's fruitful, ambivalent engagements with History and Anthropology, anticipating experiments in each discipline with the other's theories and praxis. The revised and new essays comprising this collection provide systematic critiques of aspects of received scholarly wisdom about Oceania and are linked by reflexive commentaries addressing recent postcolonial concerns. A varied but coherent set of ethnographic and historical narratives about colonial encounters in Island Melanesia is informed by particular critical focus on the paradoxes and politics of knowing indigenous pasts through colonial texts.

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9781032340395

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"""[This] is a critical volume in the opening up of new frontiers in the study of the peoples and histories of Pacific islands, continuing the work of Sahlins, Dening, Thomas and others."" -- Michel Naepels of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Marseilles, France ""Bronwen Douglas's combination of ethnohistoric scholarship with theoretical rigour and reflexivity is unique. No-one else working in the fertile zone between history and anthropology is so attentive to the intricacies of past events, so sophisticated in reading the colonial archive against its grain, and so consistently concerned to use local histories to illuminate larger problems of agency and cross-cultural historiography. This book will be enormously valuable for scholars in Pacific studies, and for everyone concerned to push the dialogue between anthropology and history beyond its current limits."" -- Nicholas Thomas of Director, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University ""The divides which Bronwen Douglas crosses in her anthro-historical journeys are many - between polarities of disciplinary forms, between theory and practice, between cultural perceptions. Across the Great Divide puts Western Pacific cross-cultural discourse on a new plane. The classic issues of leadership, violent encounters and religious transformation are given an archaeology of knowledge and are dated postcolonial."" -- Greg Dening of Adjunct Professor, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University"

[This] is a critical volume in the opening up of new frontiers in the study of the peoples and histories of Pacific islands, continuing the work of Sahlins, Dening, Thomas and others. -- Michel Naepels of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Marseilles, France Bronwen Douglas's combination of ethnohistoric scholarship with theoretical rigour and reflexivity is unique. No-one else working in the fertile zone between history and anthropology is so attentive to the intricacies of past events, so sophisticated in reading the colonial archive against its grain, and so consistently concerned to use local histories to illuminate larger problems of agency and cross-cultural historiography. This book will be enormously valuable for scholars in Pacific studies, and for everyone concerned to push the dialogue between anthropology and history beyond its current limits. -- Nicholas Thomas of Director, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University The divides which Bronwen Douglas crosses in her anthro-historical journeys are many - between polarities of disciplinary forms, between theory and practice, between cultural perceptions. Across the Great Divide puts Western Pacific cross-cultural discourse on a new plane. The classic issues of leadership, violent encounters and religious transformation are given an archaeology of knowledge and are dated postcolonial. -- Greg Dening of Adjunct Professor, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University

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Bronwen Douglas

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