Reviewed by Roger Abrahams | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2

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Reviewed by Roger Abrahams | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Roger Abrahams, University of Pennsylvania

Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures, and Self. By Greg Dening. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 385 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
Some writers defy categories because they conceive their task to be one of communicating across disciplines or other divides. Greg Dening is certainly one of these authors. He has invented an idiosyncratic yet very transparent writing style, thus revealing how people are, past and present, bound together in beach crossings. Those who have been introduced to Dening's work through his earlier classics, such as Mr. Bligh's Bad Language or History's Anthropology: The Death of William Gooch, will recognize that Beach Crossings is a summa of his life and work.¹ Through recounting his own experiences of transition, he shares with the reader some of the kinds of personal working through that is usually reserved for those writing memoirs. For this reviewer, who has been reading the Dening oeuvre for many years, Beach Crossings is a good introduction to his unique way of observing others (he calls it "ethnogging," and why not?) and also an explanation of how to write about it.	1
Dening is involved in a life project that has him going through a remarkable number of passages, or, as he calls them, beach crossings. This volume is the latest in a series of books in which he has revealed what life in Oceania has been like for a great long time. He tells his own stories exquisitely, yet in a way in which past and present are so intertwined that the singular life he has led is secondary to a larger sense of how roles and identities are worked out within groups through the exercise of power and systematic understanding. His systematics are not those of the structuralists, nor the structural functionalists of his anthropological mentors, but rather involve a pragmatics of culture, calling on an ability not only to read anthropology and history well but also to transcend those disciplines through the benefit of experience itself. His aim is not that of discovering more about (him)self but more about others.	2
This book deserves the close attention of early Americanists and all historians not only because it includes in its sweeping history the first discovery of what is now the state of Hawaii but also because it is a set of profound reflections on recovering an anthropological history of our own as well as distant cultures. Dening is an extraordinarily informed storyteller who conveys the excitement and insights to be fathomed in a story well told. "Let me tell the story of this first beach crossing" (1), he invites, and who could resist? The prospective reader is warned, by such direct prose, that Dening is a craftsman when it comes to circulating his reading and his ideas. He will deceive the casual reader by his plain and highly reiterative style, developed out of the need to teach and be understood by everyone, not just other scholars. This is a big book, yet each sentence involves obvious editorial deliberation; sometimes they are pearl-like, and sometimes they read like their author was writing to be read aloud. He interprets the documents of travelers to Oceania from first contact by modern Europeans to those written in more recent times. Happily, those who wrote on the subject of transpacific migration were mapmakers of many different kinds with different tasks: explorers of the European and Oceanic sort, scientific observers, schooled anthropologists and historians, and so on. He treats the materiality of their maps with care but never in blind admiration. (He says of Marshall Sahlins, the widely read and influential anthropologist of Oceania, in a characteristically honest moment: "I was jealous of him because he was reading everything that I was reading and was reading it differently and more creatively, —wrongly, but more creatively" [175].)	3
This worthy, deliberate scholar's scholar brings significant insight to the lives of others, using his own experiences as a Jesuit priest, a professor, a fieldwork ethnographer, and a historian. He excavates his own mind and the personal experiences he is able to recover in common with a diarist or letter writer as well as with his students and readers. He describes the whole process with such gravity that he carries the argument far beyond the banalities of everyday life.	. . .

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