ABSTRACT
In 1990 I published an article in the Journal of Pacific History with a title similar to the above. It derived ultimately from my major work then in progress: an ethnographic history of fighting in New Caledonia. More immediately; the article was excised from the original manuscript of a reflective, rather didactic contribution to Carrier’s edited collection on anthropology and history in Melanesia (1992a), and rewritten along lines appropriate for a journal notorious (or celebrated!) for empiricist rectitude and allergy to authorial presence. The present chapter is effectively new. Its content and import differ significantly from those of the article, with greater emphasis on the ethnographic recuperation and transcription of traces of indigenous fighting inscribed in early colonial texts, and relatively less on colonial encounters, which are the particular focus of Chapter Five. It is also more explicitly reflective than the article, but remains representational in intent and execution: that is, it is an ethnographic distillation of a complex of actions and meanings in a past indigenous world, strategically larded with scraps of realist narrative. In Chapter Four I spell out the epistemological politics of my reading and deconstruction of colonial texts, and illustrate strategies and method for their ethnohistorical exploitation. That chapter might usefully be read before the present one, which is, however, antecedent to it in structural, historical and chronological terms.
