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Book Review
| Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures, and Self. By GREG DENING. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 376 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
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Historians, anthropologists, and humanists alike, curl into your favorite reading position and pick up this engaging, inspiring book. In Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures, and Self, ethnographic historian Greg Dening tells elegant tales of adventure, discovery, and belonging that take place in and around Fenua'enata, more commonly known as the Marquesas. More than fifty years of Dening's Pacific research, teachings, travels, and reflections have resulted here in an engaging two-thousand-year history of Fenua'enata and the diverse people, including Dening himself, who have crossed its beaches. Readers will emerge from Beach Crossings with a more sensitive understanding of the challenges of ocean voyaging, a more sophisticated grasp of the complexities of cross-cultural encounters, and a deeper humility about the nature of historical scholarship. |
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Dening perceives history, "the transformation of a past, no matter how recent a past, into words or paint or dance or play," as "always a performance" (p. 234). Historians, he describes, are storytellers and performers who research, observe, reflect, and write in order to "make theatre about trivial and everyday things, and about awful and cruel realities" (p. 326). Throughout this volume, Dening shares with readers his personal journeys as a Pacific scholar, intermittently incorporating his reflections on the nature of history and the aspirations of historians. Indeed, the insights afforded in Beach Crossings draw heavily on his experiences as a student and teacher, his strategies as a teacher and researcher, and the personal, intellectual, and emotional challenges he has faced over the past five decades. |
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