Across the Great Divide: Journeys in History and Anthropology

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 This collection of revised essays and previously unpublished work provides a coherent and incisive investigation into significant elements of received scholarly wisdom about oceania, and deploys ethnographic and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.