"Across the great divide" tracks a Pacific historian's fruitful, if at times ambivalent engagement with history and anthropology, anticipating recent experiments in each discipline with the other's theories, modes or perspectives. This collection of revised essays and previously unpublished work provides a coherent and incisive investigation into significant elements of received scholarly wisdom about oceania, and deploys ethnographic and historical narratives about colonial encounters in New Caledonia and elsewhere in Melanesia to varied reflective ends. The essays cluster about three internally coherent themes - indigenous leadership, fighting and encounters with Christianity. These themes are linked by shorter, reflexive pieces which probe changing but related theoretical, methodological and discursive concerns recurrent in the essays: notably, to denaturalize conventional categorical boundaries, and to explore ways of knowing indigenous pasts through critical readings of colonial texts.
The collection is prefaced by an introduction identifying those concerns and relating them to changing wider discourses within and beyond the disciplines, particularly postcolonial and feminist critiques, which are subject to reciprocal scrutinity from the standpoint of collection.
Industry Reviews
"[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