Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History of Man*

This paper examines intellectual interchanges between European theorists in the science of man and sailors, naturalists and artists on scientific voyages in Oceania during the century after 1750. I argue that travellers' narratives and ethnographic representations were not mere reflexes of dominant metropolitan discourses, but were also personal productions generated in the tensions and ambiguities of cross-cultural encounters. I identify countersigns of indigenous agency embedded in such materials and evaluate their trajectory from the interactions which provoked them, through varied genres and media of voyagers' representations, to their contorted appropriation by European savants. My examples are drawn from British and French accounts of visits to New Holland and Van Diemen's Land between 1770 and 1802. In this paper, Aboriginal Australians, especially Tasmanians, serve as synecdoche for the indigenous inhabitants of Oceania generally, using the regional term in its extended early 19th-century sense which encompassed the present Indonesia and Australia along with Papua New Guinea, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.     

Dreams,Laki, and Mourning: A Psychoanalytic Ethnography of the Yagwoia ‘Inner Feminine’

This is a three‐part study of dream‐experiences and their existential reality in the life‐world of the Yagwoia of the Papua New Guinea highlands. The focus is on a single conjugal couple, their life‐trajectory, and the articulation of their bond as specifically expressed in their dreams. In the first instalment is presented the general cosmo‐ontological background of Yagwoia dreaming and the fundamental dialectics of the contra‐sexual self‐identity of the couple manifest in their oneiric encounters. The second part explores the intrinsic relationship between dreaming and the practice of gambling which in the Yagwoia life‐world is a domain of men's homo‐social participation in the self‐generative life‐death flow of the world‐body at large. In this aspect, Yagwoia gambling exhibits its true characteristic as an extension and modification of the male‐exclusive domain of hunting, warfare, and the ceaseless in‐/ex‐corporation of the cosmic life‐death flow. The third part continues to explore this cosmic dialectics in the context of the death of the woman and its impact on her man through the period of mourning. The study as a whole presents a cosmo‐poetic ethnography of the Yagwoia dream life developed through the systematic long‐term field‐work grounded in phenomenology and psychoanalysis.     

DREAMS,LAKI, AND MOURNING: A Psychoanalytic Ethnography of the Yagwoia ‘Inner Feminine’

In the first part of this study (Oceania, 76/1) I presented the general cosmo‐ontological background of Yagwoia (Papua New Guinea) dreaming and the fundamental dialectics of the contra‐sexual self‐identity of a conjugal couple (Tilm and QANG) manifest in their oneiric encounters. The second part (Oceania, 76/2) was focused on the man, QANG, and the vicissitudes of his soul's power to affect gambling outcomes. I showed that Yagwoia gambling exhibits its true characteristic as an extension and modification of the male‐exclusive domain of hunting, warfare, and the ceaseless in‐/ex‐corporation of the cosmic life‐death flow. In this third and Final part I deal with the vicissitudes of his favourite wife's presence in his life following her death whereby she became a spirit of the dead. Here my focus is on the practice and intersubjective dynamics of mourning, a process which with singular force realises the Yagwoia life‐world as an indissoluble socius of the living and the dead. It is in this context that the ethnographer also comes to experience and appreciate the palpability of spirits as the real denizens of the Yagwoia world.     

‘Balkan Mentality’: History,Legend, Imagination

Abstract. In this article I attempt to do two things. First I consider in what sense it could be reasonable to talk of a ‘Balkan mentality’, shared across national divisions by all peoples in Southeastern Europe. I argue among other things that nationalism and its impact on culture and scholarship has been a major stumbling block for the conceptualisation of a shared ‘Balkan mentality’. Secondly, I go on to examine one possible context in which a shared mentality could be said to have existed among the Orthodox Christians in the Balkans. I suggest that such a context could be located in the pre-nationalist Balkan society of the eighteenth century, a period in which the region was politically united by Ottoman rule. To illustrate the content of the mental outlook shared by the Balkan Orthodox in the eighteenth century I examine the autobiographical writings of three major authors, one writing in Greek (Caisarios Depontes), one in Bulgarian (Sofroni Vra?anski) and one in Serbian (Matija Nenadovi?). I identify the shared mental elements reflected in their texts and point out how the transition to a national self-conception taking place at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Balkans, marked the end of this shared ‘Balkan mentality’. The study is thus an exploration in the ‘prehistory’, as it were, of nationalism in the Balkans, an exploration which also looks at the symbolic origins nationalism in the region as reflected in the texts of two of the three authors.     

John Calvin and the Jews: A Problem in Political Theology

Abstract

Although John Calvin rejected the angry invective of Martin Luther against the Jews, he nevertheless agreed with him that Christian biblical interpretation was a more reliable guide to the mind of the patriarchs in Genesis than the exegesis of Rabbinic Judaism. The Hebrew Bible was therefore properly understood as Christian Scripture and had always been addressed to the Church as well as to ancient Israel.     

John Breuilly: ‘Eric Hobsbawm: nationalism and revolution’

This article considers how Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) connected the concepts of revolution and nationalism, analysing this in relation to his biography, his politics and his work as a professional historian. It traces major changes in Hobsbawm's understanding of revolution and nationalism as he, the political world and the ways of writing history all changed over the course of his long life.     

History and Story: Unconventional History in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and James A. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific

"Literary history" is a cross between conventional (scientific) history and pure fiction. The resulting hybrid provides access to history that the more conventional sort does not (in particular, a sense of the experiences of the historical actors, and the human meaning of historical events). This claim is demonstrated by an analysis of two novels about World War II, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, and Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener. These two very different novels in English are by writers themselves very different from each other, writers from different times, different social and political backgrounds, and different points of view. Their novels examine the effects of the Second World War and the events of 1942 on the human psyche, and suggest how human beings have always searched for the silver lining despite the devastation and devaluation of values. Both novels resist any kind of preaching, and yet the search for peace, balance, and kindness is constantly highlighted. The facts of scientific history are woven into the loom of their unconventional histories. The sense of infirmity created by the formal barriers of traditional history is eased, and new possibilities for historical understanding are unveiled.