Should Nicholas Thomas Write More about Today's Islander?

Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire draws together vignettes, voyages, and historical figures from islands throughout the Pacific, from Easter Island and Hawaii to New Guinea and New Zealand, and examines the long nineteenth century, from the 1790s to the 1900s. The book is not, as its author Nicholas Thomas makes clear, a comprehensive history of European colonization in the Pacific, but is instead an argument about “the kind of dealings that shaped the colonial relationships and cultures which emerged in the Pacific during the nineteenth century” (25).

Thomas argues that the European exploration and subsequent colonization of the Pacific islands was not a unilateral domination of primitive, static societies. Instead, Europeans encountered people whose political and cultural lives had long included travel and exchange between islands, as well as travel beyond the boundaries of the Pacific. Islanders incorporated the presence of Europeans into inter- and intra-island conflict, adopted and adapted European material culture, and traveled to Europe, bringing their regional agendas with them. Without denying the violence and destruction that accompanied the nineteenth colonization of the Pacific, Thomas demonstrates that island societies “had long had dealings with people who were more or less unlike themselves” (13).

Early European–Islander contact occurred initially in the context of missionary voyages to Pacific islands and encounters with traders who sought sea vegetables cultivated or collected in Polynesia. During this initial era of encounter, Thomas argues, Islanders remained largely autonomous. But by the the mid-nineteenth century, these encounters had become “confrontations with colonial states and enterprises that would, insofar as they could, claim territory, command labor and presume a responsibility to govern” (26).

The end of the book effectively registers the sense of cultural loss and displacement and the possibilities Thomas suggests were both a part of the experience of empire, using a narrative tool a public historian like myself does well to take note of. The author imagines for his reader the life of an individual born in Polynesia during early contact between Islanders and Europeans, and traces throughout his lifetime when he might have been affected by contact with Europeans. After a long and sometime circuitous narrative, Thomas helps his readers to see how quickly change due to colonization affected the lives of individual Islanders in the Pacific.

Thomas is an anthropologist who currently directs the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University, and his book thinks carefully about and argues effectively with material culture. He uses a Hawaiian feather cape, for example, to delineate Hawaiian monarchs' effective command of a vast labor force, and put to rest any reader's notion that Islanders lived in primitive societies. You can see photographs of a similar cape from the collection of the Cambridge Museum Thomas directs on a blog he contributes to here.

Thomas' analysis of material culture, however, also gave me pause. Positionality has no place in this book – and rightly so. Thomas has crafted a book that is accessible not only to non-specialists, but even to general readers. A reflection on Thomas' position of privilege as a Western scholar who preserves, collects, and displays Polynesian artifacts would have been completely out of place.

But on the basis of Thomas' description, a general reader would never guess that, at least in the United States, the descendants of native Hawaiians now lobby museums and universities under the Native American Graves Protection Act (NAGPRA) to have objects like feather capes returned to tribal governments. Institutions like the Cambridge Museum Archeology and Anthropology are squaring off with the descendants of people whose cultural patrimony has been housed in acid-free boxes on compact shelving, or put on display in glass cases. These descendants claim that such objects should be used in contemporary tribal life, or at least preserved according to Hawaiian tradition, rather than Western archival practices.

Thomas seeks to move beyond scholarship that, by restoring agency to Islanders, also positions them as local rather than global, rooted recipients of “forces, meanings, and commodities emanating largely from the West” (3). He argues that cultural and political currents in Islander life, that predated contact with Europeans meant that these societies were anything but primitive or static. But by ascribing a fundamentally cosmopolitan world to the Pacific Islanders, I fear that Thomas may also be overestimating the comparability of Western and Islander world views, and systems of knowledge. In reinstating the complexities of Islander society, Thomas makes Islanders over to look perhaps too much like us, and leaves out the voices of contemporary aboriginal people who advocate forcefully for the difference between knowledges and world views.