ABSTRACT
This chapter was first published in 1979 in a special issue of the Journal of Pacific History (14: 2–27), which I initiated after convening a colloquium on the theme of south Pacific Islands leadership. The article first brought my work to anthropological attention by interrogating key elements of received wisdom about Oceanic societies: their a priori distribution into “Polynesian” and “Melanesian” cultural/racial types, differentially located in a social evolutionary hierarchy and characterised by the opposed leadership modes of hereditary chieftainship and achieved bigmanship. That it could do so while hardly mentioning race, evolution or gender—failing to historicise the racialisation of human difference in the Pacific and innocently reinscribing the profoundly gendered standpoints of most colonial, academic and indigenous discourses—now seems remarkable, but was in keeping with contemporary criteria of scholarly objectivity and gender neutrality (cf. Clark and Terrell, 1978: 294–300; Douglas, in press b; Hau’ofa, 1975: 285; Jolly, 1987; Thomas, 1989b). While it is apt to historicise the article and signal certain shortcomings, it is also fair to emphasise its strengths, especially its anticipation—pragmatic and empirical, without explicit reflective or theoretical design—of positions which would become canonical in “post-Orientalist” anthropology from the mid 1980s: anti-essentialism; factoring in history, colonialism and change; mediating oppositions via an optic on similarities as well as differences; problematising reified categories and categorical boundaries.
