ABSTRACT
Recently many anthropologists — sensitive to accusations of essentialism, primitivism and Orientalism — have fervently embraced history, but their perspectives on the past tend to differ from historians’. This chapter concentrates on the first phase – colonial invention of native names, groups and relationships in particular settings – but exemplifies or alludes to the others. In formal descriptions of native polities, contemporary Europeans invoked a tidy geopolitical schema, which took for granted a permanent segmentary structure of bounded, mutually hostile, sociopolitical entities, constituted by common descent and neatly mapped on to discrete territories. To Europeans seeking to convert, control and exploit Melanesians, the mobility, competition and ambiguous allegiances of smaller groups throughout New Caledonia were easily dismissed or ignored: Europeans of all persuasions did their best to immobilize Kanak.
