ABSTRACT

At its simplest, a census can be described as a regularly occurring official count of a particular population with details about sex, age, occupation and often household with a wide variety of additional categories. This chapter discusses aspects of the identities and politics associated with colonial census practices and then present census taking in the New Hebrides as a case study through which to explore these issues. It focuses on drastically different representations, arrived at from enumerating different populations on the same small chain of islands in the south-western Pacific; the chapter illustrates some of this conceptual terrain in the French and British collection of census figures in the New Hebrides Condominium in the first half of the twentieth century. While the French censuses did not attempt to represent Ni-Vanuatu lives, other Europeans who travelled to the region did.