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The Culture of Culture Contact: Refractions from Polynesia
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I. C. CAMPBELL
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
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The moments when different cultures first came into contact were occasions of wonder and uncertainty, full of dramatic potential. Each meeting was a confrontation with an unknown more unfathomable than any other social event. The dynamics of such occasions are matters of uncertainty also for the historian especially if, as is usually the case, the historian has a closer affinity with, and better insight into, the behavior of one party. Moreover, historical sources are most likely to have been generated by one side only, making attempts to understand the process of contact hostage to partisan accounts. Further, studies of culture contact often suffer a teleological fallacy: knowledge of the later outcome of contact influences perception of the nature of early contact, and even of first contact. Thus a history of displacement gives rise to explanations of first contact couched in terms of aggression and intrusion; a history of acculturation or assimilation gives rise to collaborative explanations. |
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One of the contributions of modern Pacific historiography to the study of culture contact is the development of a third model, which may be called postcolonial in its emphasis on native rationality and practicality. According to this scenario, Pacific Islanders were neither trammeled nor victimized; they were active agents, not passive, in the making of their new histories in the context of Euro-American contact. This "indigenous agency" perspective was taken so far in some publications as to discount the role of foreigners in Pacific Islands historical change, accentuating the role of islanders to such an extent that the new historians came to be seen by Pacific Islanders as apologists for colonialism and exploitation, and as deniers of depopulation. The sense of outrage appears in recent nativist histories from Hawai‘i and New Zealand, where the effects of dispossession have been greatest, and in reactions from a century-old Pacific Islander population in Australia whose ancestors were relocated by labor recruitment. For these critics, and for historians who do not wish to concede ground to these nativist outlooks, the willingness to incorporate a native perspective against the reality that all the written evidence was generated from the other side presents an epistemological challenge that has been only partly met. |
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Culture contact was not necessarily either a meeting of two worlds, or a meeting of raw instinct, although it is often portrayed in terms of "two worlds" and examples of Hobbesian, "state of nature" ethics are not hard to find. The polemical potential of partisan history thus raised may be avoided by the recognition that the events of culture contact present a pattern that is neither implicit in later events nor shaped by the existing cultures of the contacting parties. Culture-contact occasions elicited forms of behavior that might reasonably be described as not being part of the normal cultural expressions of the parties involved. They belonged, in other words, to the culture of contact only, not to the culture of daily life or the culture of normal experience. |
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