A long and unfortunate voyage towards the 'invention' of the Melanesia/Polynesia distinction 1595-1832

Journal of Pacific History

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 175-196

  Tcherkézoff, Serge ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 14844284762     PISSN: 00223344     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0022334032000120521     Document Type: Review

References (58)

1. Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde: résumé général des voyages de découvertes de Magellan, Tasman, Dampier..., publié mus la direction de M. Dumont d'Urville (Paris 1834-35), vi. This compilation is distinct from Dumont d'Urville's formal reports on his voyages. The inclusion of 'Malaysia' may seem surprising, but, in those years, the French geographical notion of 'Oceanic' (which emerged in the years 1810-20) included parts of Southeast Asia.
2. This fundamental point has already been made by the historian Bronwen Douglas, who draws attention to the fact that Dumont d'Urville's cartographic invention came at a time when, in France and in England, the idea of 'race' in the modern sense (essentialism and gradation of types) was being invented, and was far from the simple idea of 'variety' that prevailed in the 18th century. See Bronwen Douglas, 'Art as ethno-historical text: science, representation and indigenous presence in eighteenth and nineteenth century Oceanic voyage literature', in N. Thomas and D. Losche (eds), Double Vision: art histories and colonial histories in the Pacific (Cambridge 1999), 65-99;
3. idem, 'Science and the art of representing "savages": reading "race" in text and image in South Seas voyage literature', History and Anthropology, 11 : 2-3 (1999), 157-201;
4. idem, 'Seaborne ethnography and the natural history of man', Journal of Pacific History, 38 (2003);
5. idem, 'Inventing "race": the "science of man" and the Pacific connection', in B. Douglas and C. Ballard (eds), Foreign Bodies: Oceania and racial science 1750-1940, forthcoming.
6. Dumont d'Urville, Voyage pittoresque, vi.
7. This 1834 text is fundamental because the author, in addressing the general public, condenses and clearly explains the idea he was working on when he presented his paper to a learned audience in January 1832.
8. Voyage autour du monde exécuté... sur la corvette Im Coquille ... 1825, publié par M. L.-I. Duperrey: vol. 1, Histoire du voyage (Duperrey), vol. 2, Zoologie (Lesson et Garnot), vol. 3, Botanique (Dumont d'Urville, Bory de Saint-Vincent, Brongniart), vol. 4, Hydrographie (Duperrey) (Paris 1826-30).
9. Quotations from Bory de Saint-Vincent (1827) and references to Julien Joseph Virey (1824) were found in Laurent Mucchielli, 'Autour des "Instructions sur les Boschimans" d'Henri Thulié', in C. Blanckaert (ed.), Le terrain des sciences humaines (XVIIIe-XXe siècles) (Paris 1996), 211.
10. Cited by Marc Renneville, 'Un terrain phrénologique dans le grand océan: amour du voyage de Dumoutier sur l'Astrolabe en 1837-1840', in Blanckacrt (ed.), Le terrain, 93.
11. Jacques Guillon, Dumont d'Urville, 1790-1842 (Paris 1986). Guillon gives background information that sheds light on Dumont d'Urville's ambition and thirst for recognition. He was raised by his mother and brought up to feel that his family, who had lost a great deal during the French Revolution, had to regain its position. He considered, both during his studies and later in the 1820s, that his worth and abilities were not fully recognised. This aspect of his character appears to have played a role in his haste to present his divisions of Oceania once he saw that his plans might be forestalled by Domeny de Rienzi.
12. Jean-Baptiste-Geneviève-Marcellin Bory de Saint-Vincent, L'Homme ('homo'), essai zoobgique sur le genre humain, 2nd edn 'with the addition of a new map to help understand the distribution of the human species over the surface of the earth', 2 vols (Paris 1827). In his 1832 paper, Dumont d'Urville referred to the first edition of Bory de Saint-Vincent's text published in 1825 in an encyclopaedia of natural history. See Douglas, 'Seaborne ethnography', n. 7.
13. Bory de Saint-Vincent had previously circulated his text to advertise the forthcoming encyclopaedia in a brochure reviewed critically in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 4:27 (1825), 17-18.
14. Charles de Brosses, Histoire des navigations aux Terres Australes: contenant ce que l'on scait des moeurs et des productions des Contrées découvertes jusqu'à ce jour et où il est traité de l'utilité d'y faire de plus amples découvertes et des moyens d'y former un établissement (Paris 1756), I, 13, 80. The words 'polus' and 'nèsos' are printed in Greek letters in the book.
15. For an article on de Brosses see Tom Ryan, ' "Le Président des Terres Australes": Charles de Brosses and the French Enlightenment beginnings of Oceanic anthropology', Journal of Pacific History, 37 (2002), 157-86.
16. In the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 103-4 (1831), 264-6, there is a summary of the 'session of 16 December 1831'. It mentions about 20 speakers (some merely reading letters). One is described as: 'Mr de Rienzi read a brief description of the fifth part of the world, which he was to have read to the Society in its general session on 25 November. This description, in which the author proposes a new classification and new names, has been sent to the committee of the Bulletin for publication therein.'
17. Grégoire-Louis Domeny de Rienzi, Oceanic ou cinquième partie du monde: revue géographique et ethnographique de la Malaisie, de la Micronésk, de la Polynésie et de la Mélanésie: offrant les résultats des voyages et des découvertes de l'auteur et de ses devanciers, ainsi que les nouvelles classification! et divisions de ces contrées (Paris 1836-37), 3 vols.
18. Which was scarcely a novelty, since people had long spoken of the 'Land of the Papuans' as well as of 'New Guinea', See Chris Ballard, '"Oceanic Negroes": racial science and the inscription of the Papuan body, 1820-1900', seminar, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 28 May 2001.
19. Claude Blanckacrt, 'Monogénisme et polygénisme en France de Buffon à Broca (1749-1880)', PhD thesis, Université Paris-1 (Paris 1981);
20. idem, 'Postface' in Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris 1995), 565-608;
21. idem, 'Le "Manuel opératoire" de la raciologie. Les instructions aux voyageurs de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris (1860-1885)', in Blanckaert (ed.), Le terrain, 139-73;
22. idem, 'La "naturalisation" de l'Homme de Linné à Darwin, Archéologie du débat Nature/Culture', in Albert Ducros, Jacqueline Ducros and Fredéric Joulian (eds), La culture est-elle naturelle? Histoire, épistémologie et applications récentes du concept de culture (Paris 1998), 15-24.
23. See too the proceedings of seminars and colloquia that he conducted at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Centre Alexandre-Koyré and elsewhere, in Gradhiva, 5 (1988), 78
24. and Gradhiva, 7 (1989), 100-3.
25. Laurent Mucchielli, 'Autour des "Instructions sur les Boschimans" d'Henri Thulié', in Blanckaert (ed.), Le terrain, 201-42;
26. idem, 'Sociologie versus anthropologie raciale: l'engagement décisif des durkheimiens dans le contexte "fin de siècle" (1885-1914)', Gradhiva, 21 (1997), 77-95;
27. idem, 'La dénaturalisation de l'homme: le tournant durkheimien de l'ethnologie française (1890-1914)', in Ducros, Ducros and Joulian (eds), La culture est-elle naturelle, 41-69.
28. Serge Tcherkézoff, Le mythe occidental de la sexualité polynésienne, 1928-1999: M. Mead, D. Freeman et Samoa (Paris 2001), Ch. 10.
29. See S, Tcherkézoff, Dual Classification Reconsidered (Cambridge 1987);
30. idem, 'Hierarchical reversal, ten years on (Africa, India, Polynesia)', Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 25:2 (1993), 133-67
31. and 25:3 (1994) 229-53;
32. idem, 'L'inclusion du contraire (L, Dumont), la hiérarchie enchevêtrée (J.P. Dupuy) et le rapport sacré/pouvoir. Relectures et révision des modèles à propos de l'Inde', Culture, 14:2 (1994), 113-34
33. and 15:2 (1994), 33-48.
34. See M. Duchet's excellent summary on 'Africa in the Enlightenment' in her Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris 1995), 33-7.
35. Clements Markham (ed.), The Voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, 1595 to 1606 (London 1904) I, ser.2, XIV, 149 and 188-9.
36. Mendaña called Fatu Hiva 'Magdalena'.
37. For examples and references see S. Tcherkézoff, Blanches Vahinés: la création du mythe occidental de la sexualité polynésienne, 1768-1928 (forthcoming)
38. and for Samoa, S. Tcherkézoff, First Contacts in Polynesia: the Samoan case (1722 1848) and comparisons (forthcoming).
39. When Dumont d'Urville 'invented' the term, he also applied it to the Australians. European academic tradition later separated Australia from Melanesia.
40. Albert Gray (ed.), A New Voyage Round the World by William Dampier (London 1929), 312-13;
41. Richard White, Inventing Australia: images and identity, 1688-1980 (Sydney 1981), 2-3;
42. Jonathan Lamb, Vanessa Smith and Nicholas Thomas (eds), Exploration and Exchange: a South Seas anthology, 1680-1900 (Chicago 2000), 10-14.
43. This was the Spaniard Ortiz de Retes. See Daris R. Swindler, 'Problems of Melanesian racial history', in Andrew P, Vayda, Peoples and cultures of the Pacific (New York 1968), 27.
44. The fact that de Brosses invented the word 'Polynesia' is known to a handful of specialists. But few people are aware that de Brosses is also the author of the first racial summary on the opposition between black and fairer people in the Pacific. Thanks to Tom Ryan who drew my attention to this aspect (pers. comm., European Society for Oceania Conference, Leyde, June 1999).
45. De Brosses, Histoire des navigations.
46. This sentence is on II, 372.
47. All the following quotations are taken from pp 374-83.
48. Title of the last chapter of the Histoire naturelle de l'homme, 1749;
49. see Duchet, Anthropologie et Histoire au siècle des Lumières, 231.
50. Nicholas Thomas, Harriet Guest and Michael Dettelbach (eds), Observations made during a voyage round the world, Johann Reinhold Forster (Honolulu 1996), 155 ff.
51. Talking about human varieties, Buffon wrote 'The first and most striking ... is colour' (Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire, 250).
52. Thomas et al., Observations, 153.
53. The name given by James Cook, apparently in honour of the Royal Society of Astronomy (London) which helped the Admiralty plan Cook's first expedition to observe the transit of Venus in the Pacific.
54. I shall not go into the tragic mistake that led Europeans to measure the social status of Polynesian women by the freedom these women seemed to have to offer themselves sexually to Europeans. Margaret Jolly has already examined this matter in detail. M. Jolly, ' "Ill-natured comparisons": racism and relativism in European representations of ni-Vanuata from Cook's second voyage", History and Anthropology, 5 (1992), 3-4 and 331-64;
55. idem, 'From Point Venus to Bali Ha'i: eroticism and exoticism in representations of the Pacific', in Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly (eds), Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: sexualities in Asia and the Pacific (Chicago 1997), 99-122;
56. idem, 'White shadows in the darkness: representations of Polynesian women in early cinema', Pacific Studies, 20 (1997), 125-50.
57. The idea of degeneration due to climate is already in Button's work, except that Buffon took the example of the people of the 'great north' and compared them to the people of the temperate zones (Duchet, Anthropologie el histoire, 252).
58. In his essay on Forster, Nicholas Thomas credits the naturalist with a rather too scientific approach (according to the theories of the time). Studies on the history of European interpretations of Pacific peoples often overlook the impact of Bougainville's voyage, not only in France but in neighbouring countries, from 1769 (first publication in the Parisian press) and especially after 1772, when Bougainville's book had been translated into English by Forster.