ABSTRACT
The much longer original of this chapter was published in History and Anthropology (1995) and elaborated the nuanced concept of agency I had begun to theorise in 1992 (1992b). It also marked my first explicit deployment of the notion of strategic appropriation as a way of conceptualising indigenous encounters with novelties—people, ideas and things—and Islanders’ engagements in their own personal and collective transformations. The dual stress on actors I actions and change which had long threaded through my work thus came together in the linked concepts of agency and appropriation. These concepts were at once woven into the fabric of the narrative and reflexively interrogated in terms of a shifting politics of reading and representations: particularly my academic’s tendency to ethnocentric universalisation of liberal secular values. The chapter retains elements of theoretical reflection, but these themes are developed more fully in the Prelude.
