Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence

Whose Paradise? Encounter, Exchange, and Exploitation

“…Some two hundred years after Mendaña, the French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville sailed to Tahiti in 1768. Bougainville's report of his voyages to Tahiti describes an Edenic locale where local women readily entered into sexual liaisons with sailors (Bougainville 1772;Tcherkézoff 2009;Jolly, Tcherkézoff, and Tyron 2009). Here, the alluring nature of the newly "discovered" landscape is entwined with the libidinous longings of the French sailors and explorers for Tahitian women.…”

“…In his account of his voyages, Bougainville repeatedly references an Edenic idyll, where people live in harmony amid nature's bounty, provoking something of a "Polynesian vogue" in Europe (Kahn 2003, 310). The voyages of Bougainville, along with those of George Anson and James Cook, created in the European consciousness the idea of tropical islands as practical locations of utopia, defined in both social and physical terms by Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars (Dening 1992;Salmond 2003;Thomas 2003Thomas , 2010Jolly, Tcherkézoff, and Tyron 2009;Tcherkézoff 2004Tcherkézoff , 2009.…”

From ‘Stone-Age’ to ‘Real-Time’: Exploring Papuan Temporalities, Mobilities and Religiosities – An Introduction

“…For instance, a particular thread that runs through many of the chapters indicates ways that Papuan experiences of colonial hierarchies and ideologies of diminishment invoke contestations familiar in other cultural and historical contexts (Robbins 2004(Robbins , 2005Rosaldo 2003). Contestations are related to ways of being seen and being known, and negotiating the frameworks that each party brings to the encounter (Balme 2007;Jolly et al 2009). In thinking about how Papuans are responding to encounters, even how and when they may also produce and evoke primitivist identities, contributors are building on widely discussed experiences of encounter in Melanesian contexts (for Papua, see Ploeg 1995;Ballard 2009; for elsewhere in Melanesia see Clark 2000;Douglas and Ballard 2008;Bashkow 2006).…”

Indigenous Participation in Australian Economies II: Historical engagements and current enterprises

“…The recent edited volume by Jolly et al (2009) provides interesting points of comparison regarding early or initial intercultural encounters in the Pacific that encompassed both extreme violence and exchange. In Papua New Guinea, several writers have discussed emergent relationships with Australian patrols (Bonnemère and Lemonnier 2009;Strathern 1992).…”