No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
On Being a Historian of Tuvalu: Further Thoughts on Methodology and Mindset*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
Extract
Over twenty years ago, I started writing a doctoral dissertation on the history of the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu, an exercise that has had enduring professional and personal repercussions. Tuvalu is an atoll archipelago near the junction of the equator and the international date line, and is identified on older maps as the southern portion of a British dependency, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony—now the independent nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu respectively. The nine Tuvalu islands are tiny even by atoll standards, an aggregate 26km2 spread over 360 nautical miles. During the nineteenth century Tuvalu was incorporated into the world economy by a succession of European influences. The early explorers gave way in 1821 to whalers, who, in turn, were superseded by copra traders during the 1850s. From mid-century the pace of events quickened, with the traders being joined by the very occasional labor recruiter and, more to the point, by a concerted missionary drive.
Accomplished largely through the instrumentality of resident Samoan pastors, missionization was comprehensive in scope and repressive in character. From the 1870s the occasional naval vessel visited the group and a British protectorate was declared in 1892, interspersed by the occasional scientific expedition and a brief and disastrous interlude in 1863 when some of the atolls were caught in the final stages of the Peruvian slave trade. The dominant European influences were the familiar triad of commerce, the cross, and the flag, with the primacy of trade giving way to missionary supremacy which, in turn, was displaced in local importance by a British colonial administration.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © African Studies Association 1999
Footnotes
*
The present paper is a follow-up to Doug Munro, “The Vaitupu Company Revisited: Reflections and Second Thoughts on Methodology and Mindset,” HA 24 (1997), 221-37. My indebtedness to Stewart Firth will become apparent.
References
1 Munro, Doug, “The Lagoon Islands: A History of Tuvalu, 1820-1908” (PhD, Macquarie University, 1982).Google Scholar
2 Brady, Ivan A. “Land Tenure, Kinship and Community Structure: Strategies for Living in the Ellice Islands of Western Polynesia,” (PhD, University of Oregon, 1970), 45.Google Scholar
3 Separation and independence are analyzed in Macdonald, Barrie, “Secession in Defence of Identity: The Making of Tuvalu,” Pacific Viewpoint 16 (1975), 26–44Google Scholar; Wilson, John F., “Tuvalu Achieves Independence,” Commonwealth Law Bulletin 4 (1978), 1003–09Google Scholar; Connell, John, “Tuvalu: Independence or Dependence?” Current Affairs Bulletin (Sydney), 56(1980), 27–31.Google Scholar
4 Davidson, J.W., The Study of Pacific History: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered in Canberra on 24 November 1954 (Canberra, 1955), 11, 13.Google Scholar Other such statements are listed in Moore, Clive and Munro, Doug, “The Nature of Pacific History: A Bibliography of Critical and Reflective Writings,” Journal of Pacific Studies (hereafter JPacS), 20 (1996), 155–60.Google Scholar
5 See Shineberg, Dorothy, “The Early Years of Pacific History,” JPacS 20 (1996), 6.Google Scholar
6 Howe, K.R., “Pacific Islands History in the 1980s: New Directions or Monograph Myopia?” Pacific Studies 3/2 (1979), 81–90.Google Scholar
7 Davidson, J.W., “Problems of Pacific History,” Journal of Pacific History (hereafter JPH), 1 (1966), 3–21.Google Scholar
8 This is not as Davidson originally intended. In his inaugural lecture, which is now seldom read, he envisaged that Pacific historians would soon be making “incursions into South-east Asia and later, I hope, into India,” the unifying theme being “the contact of European and non-European societies.” Davidson, , Study, 13–14.Google Scholar This never eventuated and he dropped the suggestion in his 1966 update.
9 The most articulate advocate of Islander agency is Howe, K.R., “The Fate of the ‘Savage’ in Pacific Historiography,” New Zealand Journal of History (hereafter NZJH), 11 (1977), 137–54Google Scholar; Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from Earliest Settlement to Colonial Rule (Honolulu, 1984), esp. 347–52.Google Scholar
10 Davidson, “Problems,” 13. Canberra-school historiography has been tendentiously critiqued by Thomas, Nicholas, “Partial Texts: Representations, Colonialism and Agency in Pacific History,” JPH 25 (1990), 139–58Google Scholar; and perceptively by Chappell, David A., “Active Agents versus Passive Victims?: Decolonized Historiography or Problematic Paradigm,” The Contemporary Pacific 7 (1995), 303–26.Google Scholar
11 The response to a more self-conscious age has resulted in three reflective volumes on Pacific Islands historiography. Lal, Brij V., ed., Pacific Islands History: Journeys and Transformations (Canberra, 1992)Google Scholar; Munro, Doug, ed., Reflections on Pacific Islands Historiography, special issue of JPacS 20 (1996)Google Scholar; Borofsky, Robert, ed., Exploring Pacific Pasts: An Invitation (Honolulu, in press).Google Scholar
12 Howe, K.R., “The Future of Pacific Islands History: A Personal View” in Lal, , Journeys and Transformations, 229.Google Scholar Excellent recent discussions on the state of Pacific Islands historiography include Hempenstall, Peter, “The Line of Descent: Creating Pacific Histories in Australasia” in Moses, John A., ed., Historical Disciplines in Australasia: Themes, Problems and Debates, special issue of Australian Journal of Politics and History 41 (1995), 157–70Google Scholar; Macdonald, Barrie, “‘Now An Island Is Too Big:’ Limits and Limitations of Pacific Islands History,” JPacS 20 (1996), 23–44.Google Scholar
13 Spate, O.H.K., “The Pacific as an Artefact” in Gunson, Niel, ed., The Changing Pacific: Essays in Honour of H.E. Maude (Melbourne, 1978), 42Google Scholar; idem., “Islands and Men” in F.R. Fosberg, ed., Ma's Place in the Island Ecosystem: A Symposium (Honolulu, 1963), 253.
14 Macdonald, Barrie, “Policy and Practice in an Atoll Territory: British Rule in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, 1892-1970” (PhD, Australian National University, 1971.)Google Scholar The dissertation was extensively revised and expanded into Cinderellas of the Empire: Towards a History of Kiribati and Tuvalu (Canberra, 1982).Google Scholar The following year another history of Tuvalu was published: Laracy, Hugh, ed., Tuvalu: A History (Suva/Funafuti, 1983).Google Scholar One of the so-called “indigenous histories” produced under the auspices of the Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, the individual chapters were written by a hurriedly-assembled group of Tuvaluans under the occasional oversight of a group of exatriate “facititators.” The book claimed to represent the authentic voice of the culture but in reality it made little use of oral testimony, most of the authors depended on the very European sources they so criticized, and two of the chapters were plagiarized. For this and more see Macdonald's, review in NZJH 19 (1985), 89–90Google Scholar; my own in Journal of the Polynesian Society 95 (1986), 392–95Google Scholar; and Besnier's, Niko in American Anthropologist 88 (1986), 215–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The production of another indigenous history is recounted in Huntsman, Judith, “Just Marginally Possible: The Making of Matagi Tokelau,” JPacS 20 (1996), 138–54.Google Scholar
15 Shineberg, Dorothy, They Came for Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the South-west Pacific. 1830-1865 (Melbourne, 1967)Google Scholar; Maude, H.E., Of Islands and Men: Studies in Pacific History (Melbourne, 1968).Google Scholar Despite Maude's pioneering work having a somewhat dated feel, it stands as a model of the careful empirical research that difficult retrieval exercises entail.
16 Founded in 1830 and reaching its fullest extent in the 1840s, the Port Arthur Penal Settlement was finally disbanded in 1877. It was already in headlong decline by the 1860s, exactly when the pace of events in Tuvalu quickened with the advent of the Peruvian slavers and the LMS missionaries. I found this chronological disparity initially quite disorienting and it took several months before the conflicting time frames became second nature.
17 Sahlins, Marshall D., Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island (Ann Arbor, 1962), 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18 Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 149–53.Google Scholar
19 Thus when a missionary was prepared to speak his mind, as in the case of W.E. Goward (1891 and 1897), his reports present such a contrast that the sanitized quality of the others is thrown into sharp relief.
20 Moss, Frederick J., Through Atolls and Islands in the Great South Seas (London 1889), 7.Google Scholar
21 Dana, Julian, Gods Who Die: The Story of Samoa's Greatest Adventurer (New York, 1935), 238.Google Scholar
22 Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 225.Google Scholar
23 Another newly-literate group, the New Zealand Maori also produced a “veritable flow” of letters, but many have survived. New Zealand was then a settler society and some formal provision, however inadequate, was made for the preservation of records in ways that were impossible in Tuvalu. E.g., Ward, Alan, “Documenting Maori History: The Arrest of Te Kooti Rikirangi Te Turuki, 1889,” NZJH 14 (1980), 27–28.Google Scholar
24 Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991), 145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I owe this reference to Robert Borofsky of Hawaii Pacific University.
25 Kennedy, Paul M., The Samoan Tangle: A Study in Anglo-German-American Relations, 1874-1900 (Dublin, 1974), ix.Google Scholar
26 Firth, Stewart, “German Firms in the Pacific Islands, 1857-1914” in Moses, John A. and Kennedy, Paul M., eds, German in the Pacific and Far East, 1870-1914 (Brisbane, 1978), 3–25.Google Scholar
27 If the case of Tuvalu sounds grim, then consider that of the northern Cook Islands, which the LMS vessel usually visited every second year and where the report for each island was typically about a handwritten page, as against the four or five pages devoted to each Tuvalu island on an annual basis. (By contrast, there was a resident European missionary on some of the southern Cook Islands, and the documentation relating to these islands is considerable.) The lack of documentary evidence relating to Pacific Islands which Europeans infrequently visited, lived on and observed still needs to be stressed.
28 Zeldin, Theodore, “Social History and Total History,” Journal of Social History 10 (1976), 243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
29 Take, for example, the activities of Captain Allen of the Samoan Trading and Shipping Company in the early twentieth century. I plotted the voyages of his trading vessels through the shipping columns of the Samoanische Zeitung and identified his vessels' arrivals and departures from Tuvalu (he eventually set up his headquarters at Funafuti atoll.) I also discovered where else his ships were roaming and from this I was able to make better sense of his Tuvalu activities because I could see how the archipelago fit into a wider pattern. The same applied to my investigations of another Samoa-based trading company which was active in Tuvalu. Munro, Doug, “Tom De Wolf's Pacific Venture: The Life History of a Commercial Enterprise in Samoa,” Pacific Studies 3/2 (1980), 22–44.Google Scholar
30 E.g. Evans, Richard J., In Defence of History (London, 1997), 62–66Google Scholar; Tosh, John, The Pursuit of History (2d ed.: London, 1991), 70–71.Google Scholar Tosh is perplexing on this point. He asserts that that “to argue… that the principles of historical enquiry defy definition altogether is a mystification.” He does not spell out these principles but does claim, on the same page, that there is “something to be said for the view that what historians bring to their sources is not so much a method as an attitude of mind—almost an instinct…”
31 See Thornley, Andrew, “On the Edges of Christian History in the Pacific: A Personal Journey,” JPacS 20 (1996), 179.Google Scholar A thoughtful essay, by a social anthropologist, on whether non-believers have the capacity, or even the ‘right’, to study Christianity is Goldsmith, Michael, “Understanding or Believing?: On Researching Christianity in Tuvalu,” JPacS 20 (1996), 161–74.Google Scholar
32 Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 207–10, 220–28, 253–55.Google Scholar
33 Ibid., 85, 90, 98-99.
34 Carr, E.H., What is History? (London, 1961), 12–13.Google Scholar Critiques of Carr's distinction include Elton, G.R., The Practice of History (London, 1969), 75–76Google Scholar; Stanford, Michael, The Nature of Historical Knowledge (Oxford, 1987), 71–72.Google Scholar
35 Evans, , In Defence of History, 76–78, 265n4.Google Scholar
36 Bebbington, David, Patterns of History (2d ed.: Leicester, 1991), 8–9.Google Scholar
37 Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 110, 110n7.Google Scholar
38 Ibid., 122-23; Chambers, Keith S., “Heirs of Tefolaha; Tradition and Social Organization in Nanumea, a Pacific Atoll” (PhD., University of California—Berkeley, 1984), 110–11.Google Scholar
39 Another safeguard was two periods of fieldwork (1977-78, 1979) spread over thirteen months, an experience I would not care to repeat. Limitations of space preclude discussion but some thoughts are expressed in Munro, “Vaitupu Company Revisited.”
40 Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 35–45, 269–80, 283–89.Google Scholar
41 Ibid., 96-98.
42 Ibid., 135-61. This has been published as “Samoan Pastors in Tuvalu, 1865-1899” in Munro, Doug and Thornley, Andrew, eds. The Covenant Makers: Islander Missionaries in the Pacific (Suva, 1996), 124–57.Google Scholar
43 Davidson, J.W., “European Penetration of the South Pacific, 1779-1842,” (PhD, Cambridge, 1942), 313.Google Scholar
44 Maude, , Of Islands and Men, 134.Google Scholar
45 A refreshing alternative to the “waves/occupational categories” approach is the recent historical ethnography of Tokelau, an island group of similar ecology and culture and where, moreover, many of the same missionaries and trading companies were involved. Huntsman, Judith and Hooper, Antony, Tokelau: An Historical Ethnography (Auckland, 1997).Google Scholar
46 Published as “The Lives and Times of Resident Traders in Tuvalu: An Exercise in History from Below,” Pacific Studies 10/2 (1987), 73–106.Google Scholar Interestingly, a colleague almost simultaneously reached similar conclusions that traders—in this case in the Solomon Islands—were, by and large, life's losers who got caught in a rut from which it was difficult to extract themselves. Bennett, Judith A., Wealth of the Solomons: A History of a Pacific Archipelago, 1800-1978 (Honolulu, 1987), 58–77.Google Scholar
47 Munro, Doug, “Migration and the Shift to Dependence in Tuvalu: A Historical Perspective” in Connell, John, ed., Migration and Development in the South Pacific (Canberra, 1990), 29–41.Google Scholar A subsequent such study is Hezel, Francis X., “The Expensive Taste for Modernity: Caroline and Marshall Islands” in Robillard, Albert B., ed., Social Change in the Pacific Islands (London, 1992), 203–19.Google Scholar
48 A much better account of the conversion process is Goldsmith, Michael, “Church and Society in Tuvalu” (PhD, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1989), ch. 5.Google Scholar
49 Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 95.Google Scholar
50 Ibid., 107.
51 These tendencies are exemplified in some of the chapters in both Rubenstein, Donald, ed., Pacific History: Papers from the 8th Pacific History Conference (Mangilao, 1992)Google Scholar, and Greenwood, Emma, Neumann, Klaus, and Sartori, Andrew, eds., Work in Flux (Melbourne, 1995).Google Scholar
52 Macdonald's Cinderellas of the Empire, after all, is subtitled “towards a history of Kiribati and Tuvalu.” See also Rudé, George, Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Aristocracy and the Bourgeois Challenge (London, 1972), 11–15, 301–16Google Scholar; Evans, , In Defence of History, 103–04, 109, 143, 148, 158Google Scholar; Keegan, John, The Face of Battle (London, 1975), 74.Google Scholar The latter book is remarkable, given its mid-1970s publication, for the extent to which the author meditates on his evidence, on historiographic issues, and about the nature of historical knowledge.
53 Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 31-35, 80–82Google Scholar,
54 Ibid., 57-61, 163-65, 195-205, 268, 300.
55 Spate, , “The Pacific as an Artefact,” 34Google Scholar; Howe, “Monograph Myopia.”
56 Kennedy, Dane, “The Expansion of Europe,” Journal of Modem History 59 (1978), 331–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
57 Hempenstall, Peter, “‘My Place:’ Finding a Voice Within Pacific Colonial Studies” in Lal, , Journeys and Transformations, 62.Google Scholar
58 Firth, S.C., “German Recruitment and Employment of Labourers in the Western Pacific Before the First World War” (D.Phil, Oxford, 1973)Google Scholar; Hempenstall, Peter J., Pacific Islanders under German Rule: A Study in the Meaning of Colonial Resistance (Canberra, 1978).Google Scholar
59 Firth, , “German Recruitment,” i.Google Scholar
60 Kennedy, Samoan Tangle, which has recently been criticized for “illustrating important premises and concerns of imperial historiography,” particularly his use of an analogy that suggests that Samoans are “less civilised, peripheral people.” This is to downplay the larger issue of an outstanding research effort involving the masterly synthesis of a massive documentation. Linnekin, Jocelyn, “Contending Approaches” in Denoon, Donaldet al, eds., The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders (Cambridge, 1997), 23.Google Scholar
61 Spate, , “The Pacific as an Artefact,” 34.Google Scholar
62 Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 173–94.Google Scholar
63 Macdonald, , Cinderellas of the Empire, ix.Google ScholarMacdonald, discusses his book in his “Limits and Limitations,” 38–41.Google Scholar
64 Poff, Basil, “The Fivizzano Inheritance,” History Now (Christchurch), 1/2 (1995), 12–18.Google Scholar
65 Macdonald, , “Limits and Limitations,” 35.Google Scholar For all its faults the indigenous history of Tuvalu (referred to in footnote 14) attempted to bridge this divide. As well as ‘national’ chapters (e.g., “Palagi and Pastor,” “Colonial Rule”), there was a section containing a potted history of each island.
66 In a 1975 discussion on the state of Pacific historiography (published in 1979) Oskar Spate did not want to be seen as suggesting “a dichotomous share-out, the islander taking the ‘inner’ or local function, the European relating it to outside world forces and trends.” Daws, Gavan, “On Being a Historian of the Pacific” in Moses, John A., ed., The Historical Disciplines mid Culture in Australasia: An Assessment (Brisbane, 1979), 131Google Scholar; Spate, , “The Pacific as an Artefact,” 44.Google Scholar But that is what is tending to happen: an increasing number of Pacific Islanders are studying their own past and, in contrast to expatriate historians, who are becoming more expansive in their outlooks, the Islander historians are typically narrowing the focus of concern. See Denoon, Donald, “The Right to Misrepresent,” The Contemporary Pacific 9 (1997), 404Google Scholar; Macdonald, , “Limits and Limitations,” 41–42.Google Scholar My additional concern is that Pacific Islanders avoid studying islands other than their own. See Munro, Doug, “Interview with Brij V. Lal—Historian of Indenture and of Contemporary Fiji,” Itinerario 21/1 (1997), 25.Google Scholar
67 Lal, Brij V., “The Passage Out” in Howe, K.R., Kiste, Robert C., and Lal, Brij V., eds, Tides of History: The Pacific Islands in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu, 1993), 440Google Scholar; Firth, Stewart, “Colonial Administration and the Invention of the Native” in The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders, 266–67.Google Scholar
68 Munro, , “Lagoon Islands,” 78–79.Google Scholar The standard work is Maude, H.E., Slavers in Paradise: The Peruvian Labour Trade in the Pacific, 1862-1864 (Canberra, 1981).Google Scholar
69 See also Besnier, Niko, Literacy, Emotion, Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll (Cambridge, 1995), 44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
70 A clear statement of this position is Howe, K.R., The Loyalty Islands: A History of Culture Contact, 1840-1900 (Canberra, 1977).Google Scholar
71 Chappell, , “Active Agents,” 304.Google Scholar A further influence in my concluding that Tuvaluans got off lightly in their encounters with the West stemmed from Brown's, DeeBury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (London, 1970).Google Scholar When reading this book at the commencement of dissertation work, I was struck by the fact the Native Americans were always going to “lose:” they were outnumbered and outgunned, fragmented into often mutually hostile tribes which could be picked off one by one or else set against each other, had women and children to defend, and they were occupying land or preventing access to other resources, such as gold. The contrast with Tuvalu was immediately apparent.
72 Cannon, John, ed., Historians at Work (London, 1980), 2.Google Scholar
73 Skidelsky, Robert, Interests and Obsessions: Historical Essays (London, 1993), ix–xiv.Google Scholar
74 E.g., Moore, Clive, Leckie, Jacqueline, and Munro, Doug, eds, Labour in the South Pacific (Townsville, 1990)Google Scholar; Lal, Brij V., Munro, Doug, and Beechert, Edward D., eds, Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation (Honolulu, 1993)Google Scholar; Munro, , ed., Migration and Labour, special issue of JPacS 18 (1994–1995).Google Scholar
75 Munro, Doug, “Who ‘Owns’ Pacific History?: Reflections on the Insider/Outsider Dichotomy,” JPH 29 (1994), 232–37Google Scholar; “Pacific Islands History in the Vernacular: Practical and Ethical Considerations,” NZJH 29 (1995), 83–96Google Scholar; “The Isolation of Pacific History,” JPacS 20 (1996), 45–68.Google Scholar
76 Roman Grynberg, Doug Munro, and Michael White, The National Bank of Fiji Crisis, in progress.