Bronwen Douglas - Across the Great Divide

Across the Great Divide

Studies in Anthropology and History

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Bronwen Douglas

Across the Great Divide

Journeys in History and Anthropology

First published 1998 by Harwood Academic Publishers

Published 2013 by Routledge

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Copyright 1998 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Douglas, Bronwen

Across the Great Divide : journeys in history and anthropology : selected essays, 19791994. (Studies in anthropology and history ; v. 24)

1. Oceania History 2. Oceania Civilization

I. Title

ISBN 13: 978-9-057-02306-4 (hbk)

The illustration on the cover, entitled Nieuw Caledoniers, is an aquatint by Portman from a drawing by Kuyper published in Stuarts Dutch humanist treatise De mensch [On man] (18027, II: facing 68). The images were appropriated with considerable licence from Pirons neoclassical representations of Kanak engraved in Labillardires account of his visit to New Caledonia in 1793. There is thus nothing empirical in the depiction of the woman and the man though their accoutrements are shown with typical exemplary accuracy. Yet the picture inadvertently condenses ambiguities in ethnographic readings of indigenous gender relations and politics which this book seeks to convey: the woman kneeling in conventional deference beside the warrior may be meant to connote female subservience, but her extended arm tells another tale, of assault barred on an unseen third party. The image resonates with one of the books theses: that Kanak women exercised significant restraint on male excess and aggression in fighting.