ABSTRACT
Postcolonial anthropology analyses the debts that societies owe each other as a result of their shared history. This is an awkward proposition that anthropologists cannot explore fully within their own discipline. It requires historical investigation to complement ethnographic insight. In the case of the Pacific Islands, Thomas, the scholar of postcolonial society, observed how the anthropological object was entangled in historical and cultural processes of the exploration and colonization of the region. An interdisciplinary approach to postcolonial history was needed if anthropologists were to assess how those historical and cultural processes created alienation of wealth from societies there. How did misunderstandings about gift exchange become a fulcrum from which to lever out wealth from Pacific Island societies? While some anthropologists have described the history of colonial and postcolonial relations in terms of specific transactions, many other anthropologists study the context of those postcolonial transactions. The language of debt and the idiom of indebtedness pervade much of the writing about the postcolonial world. By examining several cases of mutual misunderstandings about debt and obligation in colonial and postcolonial encounters, I outline the various ways that anthropologists have used ‘historical context’ as a concept. Historical context in each of these case studies provides a motor that turns the processes of cultural transformation: sometimes with brutal force, sometimes with good intentions directed towards bad ends, and other times to codify living processes into meaningless forms.
