Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance

Anthropologists engaged inpost-colonial studies are increasingly adoptingan historical perspective and using archives. Yet their archival activity tends to remain morean extractive than an ethnographic one.Documents are thus still invokedpiecemeal to confirm the colonial invention ofcertain practices or to underscore culturalclaims, silent. Yet such mining of the content of government commissions,reports, and other archival sources rarely paysattention to their peculiar placement and form .Scholars need to move fromarchive-as-source to archive-as-subject. Thisarticle, using document production in the DutchEast Indies as an illustration, argues thatscholars should view archives not as sites ofknowledge retrieval, but of knowledgeproduction, as monuments of states as well assites of state ethnography. This requires asustained engagement with archives as culturalagents of ``fact'' production, of taxonomies inthe making, and of state authority. What constitutes thearchive, what form it takes, and what systemsof classification and epistemology signal atspecific times are (and reflect) critical featuresof colonial politics and state power. The archive was the supreme technology of thelate nineteenth-century imperial state, arepository of codified beliefs that clustered(and bore witness to) connections betweensecrecy, the law, and power.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/41825/1/10502_2004_Article_5096461.pd

Sea people of the west

Two thousand years ago, or thereabouts, a double canoe sailed on a northeast tack (or maybe a southeast tack) from a Homeland (Hawaiki) among the islands of Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji. After a voyage of 7,000 kilometers, which bypassed the many as yet uninhabited islands of the central Pacific (such as Tahiti) and the stretch of the seventy atolls of the Tuamotu that spread umbrellalike across the eastern entry of the Pacific, the canoe landed on islands that the Spaniards in 1595 were to call "the Marquesas." The descendants of these first settlers call their islands "Fenua'enata" (Land of the People). Here I tell the story of this first beach crossing after what I consider to be the most remarkable voyage of discovery and settlement in all of human history. These first settlers (shall we say a dozen adults?) brought the animals and food plants that would make their island inhabitable. More mysteriously, these voyagers were - in body, mind, and spirit - all that we have come to call "Polynesian" in the great triangle of Hawai'i, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). "Sea of Islands" is the name the descendants of this first voyage prefer to call that great triangle. I here celebrate a Sea People's mastery of their Sea of Islands

Too Many Captain Cooks. "Citizen Labillardière: A Naturalist's Life in Revolution and Exploration (1755-1834)" by Edward Duyker. [review]

Duyker’s latest contribution to our knowledge of the French in Australia is a biography of Labillardière, the natural historian on board Bruny d’Entrecasteaux’s 1791–93 expedition. "Citizen Labillardière" is a gentle read. Duyker is an historian’s historian. Where there is no direct documentation, he is always in lateral pursuit. So the book is full of wonderful word images of culture and nature.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori