In a corner of the Student's Reading Room of the
Department of Ethnography (formerly the Museum of Mankind) in the British
Museum hangs a painting of three people from the Pacific. Represented
loosely within the convention of the Three Graces, the trio is striking and
unique. The central figure is sexually ambiguous. Unlike the accompanying
figures, she/he is naked. A suggestion of hermaphroditism is achieved
through an ambiguity of signifiers - a feminine face, phallic spear, penis,
small breasts. The painting disturbs because it seems to undermine the
classical image of the Three Graces as one of consolidated femininity and
racial and sexual otherness. As in the classical tradition of the Three
Graces, the identity of the black three grades is unknown. The British
Museum has very little information about the picture, which is thought to
have been painted by the Chinese painter known as Spoilum. This artist
painted in Macau in the late eighteenth century; he was one of the first
Chinese artists to paint in a western style. The subject of the painting is
thought to be three people from the Palau Islands who were taken captive by
a Russian sea captain and landed in Macau. further research into the
painting has revealed almost nothing.
As with so many texts about captivity, this image
is marked by anonymity, ambiguity and loss. Who were these people? Why is
one painted as a hermaphrodite? where were they going? What was their fate?
Why did the trade in bodies produce such enigmatic texts? We have chosen
this image for the cover of Body Trade because it raises all of these
questions. Like the hermaphroditic body in the painting, the body of the
black captive fascinated its white captors because it signified otherness as
a mystery-something to be conquered and captured, in 'primitiveness'
transformed into a more civilized, known, identifiable form. Captive peoples
who resisted such changes were frequently put on display in circuses and
fairs, living testimonials to what was thought to be their immutable
difference and hence inferiority. body Trade explores the image of the
captive body in a variety of contexts in order to re-examine myths about
captivity, cannibalism and colonialism in a range of texts and practices in
Australia and the Pacific. The central site for this exploration is the body
itself.
In theoretical debates of the past two decades,
much has been written about the body-the gendered body, the decorated body,
the desiring body, the abject body, and the politicised body. These
discussions have proven central to debates in psychoanalysis, feminism,
queer theory, post-colonial writings, the cinema, literature and the visual
arts. In many of these discourses the notion of the subjugated, captive body
has emerged as a central construct in relation to debatres about the body.
For instance, the feminist theory, the captive female body is related to
concepts of patriarchal power, female disenfranchisement and sexual slavery,
in post-colonial theory, slavery assumes a central theoretical place in
terms of the history of the colonised indigenous other; in psychoanalytic
writings the master/slave relationship is aligned to notions of sadism and
masochism; in writings on spectatorship, the look has been conceptualised as
a 'controlling gaze'; and in theories of narrativity, the spectator/reader
has been posited as 'captive' of the text. Notions of captivity and
imprisonment are also fundamental to Foucault's writings about the nature of
power and the ambiguous way in which it is exercised by and between
individuals caught up in relation of power and powerlessness.
Drawing on contemporary theories about the body,
this book uses the concept of 'body trade' as a means of re-reading
traditionally racist, sexist and Eurocentric vies about race relations in
the Pacific from the time of early European contact to the present. A
further aim is to demonstrate the relevance of feminine and psychoanalytic
theory for post-colonial theory which, with the exception of the writings of
scholars such as Homi Bhabba and Michael Taussig, often ignores the crucial
areas of desire and the unconscious. Body Trade is also
indebted to Henry Reynolds, whose pioneering working on the history of race
relations in Australia has inspired a considerable body of work on the above
topics. This book uses the concepts of body trade to bring together the many
inter-related ways in which the indigenous body has been marked and
exploited by colonial practices. The various chapters (as per the following
relevant Web sites linked to this Introductory Web site), address issues of
racism, sexism and post-coloniality in relation to a range of Pacific
nations such as Australia, New guinea, New Zealand, Fiji, the Marquesas
Islands, New Caledonia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Korea. Body Trade
is the first book to theorise the body in relation to the colonial histories
of Australia and the Pacific. Its themes include: cannibalism and the
nineteenth-century trade in heads in the Pacific; the holding of indigenous
women by white colonisers; mythic tales of the real/imaginary capture of
white women by black others; the touring and display of native peoples in
circuses throughout Europe and America; and the representation of the
colonised/captive body in literature, photography; painting and film. The
conventionally understood captivity narrative, namely stories about the
holding of white women captive by indigenous people in a frontier context,
is revisited and the definition of the term broadened to include a range of
circumstances involving the captivity of indigenous people. The essays also
explore, in more detail than has been possible in the past, the
politics of contact in the Pacific during the period 1770-2000, through such
themes as friendship and betrayal, disavowal and ambivalence and the making
of the exotic/erotic body.
The essays are divided into four sections. The
first, 'Circus, Trade & Spectacle', deals with the trade in human heads in
the Pacific; the 'gift' of breastplates by white colonisers to Australian
Aborigines; the exhibition of Polynesian 'cannibals' in France; and a series
of paintings depicting members of the Australian Native Mounted Police. All
of the chapters in this section examine different ways in which the bodies
of indigenous subjects (through trade, display, the wearing of colonial
artefacts) are used by colonial cultures to advance their discourse about
the superiority of white civilisation while simultaneously attempting to
supplant indigenous culture with its own.
The early circulation of heads, their arrival in
centres of learning and the development of craniology and other
pseudo-sciences in nineteenth-century England and Europe was an important
tool in the circulation and consolidation of imperial power. From the first
visit of Captain Cook to New Zealand the officers and crew were interested
in the collection of artefacts and these included Maori heads. On his second
visit (1772-1775) the effects of these demands were already being felt among
the native population. Reinhold Foster reports that because 'artefacts' were
scarce in the area, native people raided other tribes in order to 'possess
themselves of those things which are so coveted by the Europeans'. Interest
in the construction of the Pacific as a site of unspeakable horrors led to
the emergence of cannibalism as a trope in travel writing and fiction. The
pseudo-scientific and literary representation of so-called abject primitive
practices, however, reveals more about the culture that produced written
texts about the 'other' than it does about the cultures themselves.
WELCOME EVERYBODY
- DOMAINS
Thank you so much for visiting the above three Domains. I am
very pleased to be able to share with you that further limited
advertising on our Oceania Origins Home Page, along with other Web
Pages within the above afour Domains, are now available. Potential
advertisers are cordially invited to choose from several thousand Web
sites available for placement of your important advertisements. For further
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or
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|
Paul Turnbull's opening chapter examines the
scientific interest in the bones of Aboriginal peoples and demonstrates how
this interest led to widespread desecration of traditional burial places and
in some instances to the illegal procurement of remains. by the 1860s, many
European museums and universities had become the site of scientific work
focused on re-interpreting the nature of human origins in the light of
evolutionary theories. A consequence of this interest in mapping the course of
human prehistory was that the bodies of Australian Aboriginal people took on
different meanings and value. The morphological peculiarities of Australian
skulls and skeletons were viewed as a crucial source of information about the
relation of modern Europeans to what were thought to be very ancient and
primitive forms of humanity.
In the hands of European anatomists, the remains of
Aboriginal people were, as Turnbull argues, made to perform acts of
ventriloquism in so far as they were used by anthropologists to justify their
belief in the primitive nature of Aboriginal ways and - as a consequence - the
inevitability of the expropriation of their traditional lands by so-called
superior peoples. Often the testimony generated through a study of Aboriginal
remains made explicit the violent entanglement between science and colonialism
in nineteenth-century Australia. Turnbull's chapters the surviving utterances
of collectives, revealing how they were caught up in a system of exploration
and were force4d to resolve as best they could the conflicting claims of
morality, ambition and the needs of science. 'Chained to their signs:
remembering breastplates' examines the political and cultural uses of
photographs of Aboriginal people wearing breastplates conferred upon them by
the colonial invaders. 'the first appearance of breastplates in Australia is
officially recorded in 1815. These were granted by Governor Lachlan Macquarie
to Aboriginal people 'willing to abide by a proclamation which had outlawed
armed individuals or groups of six or more from coming within a mile of any
town, village or farm occupied by British subjects'. Aboriginal men who
contravened this law could be shot. Macquarie decreed that their bodies should
be hung 'on the highest trees and in the clearest parts of the forest'.
Aboriginal men who obeyed the ruling were granted a 'passport' that offered
some protection. The practice of conferring breastplates persisted in all
states in Australia except Tasmania and South Australia until the 1930s. The
argument that the breastplates also acted as a signifier of a genocide-to-come
brings a piece to a powerful conclusion.
The third chapter examines the arrival of the first
Polynesian peoples into France. How can one be Oceanian? This question
embodies the responses of Europeans who for the first time came face to face
with 'the physical reality of exotic bodies' coming from the South Pacific. Le
Fur argues that the case of the first Polynesians arriving in Europe is
important because they were presented more or less as 'consenting guests'.
Their tattooed bodies inspired engravings, drawings and paintings and exerted
a profound influence on the evolution of contemporary thought, which ranged
from wonderment to repulsion.
A journalist and author of several publication about
New Caledonia described his visit to the village of Kanak in the Colonial
Exhibition of 1931. Frightened to approach the 'eaters of men', his fear
turned to surprise when he recognized some kanaks, whom he knew to be educated
men working in such French trades as printing. The presence of fake cannibals
in the form of shop mannequins in the Musee de L'Artillerie, and in the
Trocadero in Paris, enhanced the general impression that it was possible to
observe, in leisurely way, dangerous bodies supposedly capable of swallowing
the spectator. Le Fur's chapter draws attention not only to the practice of
exhibiting the so-called 'primitive' body but also to the voyeurism of the
so-called civilised European spectator whose curiosity involved a different
but equally central form of racism based on codes of looking.
The final chapter of the first section examines a
perverse aspect of the history of black and white relations in
nineteenth-century Australia, that of the Native Mounted Police Corps and
their representation in the paintings, postcards and drawings of the period.
In embracing and operating under a power system that was remote in every sense
from tribal values and rules, the native police upset the stereotype of
'primitive' or 'savage' constructed by the white settlers and entered a space
where their cultural identity was rendered ambivalent. Frequent hostile
confrontations with members of warring clans contributed to their difficult
position as black troopers enforcing white rule. The result of these
encounters often left members of the Corps in a political no-man's land where
they were scorned by blacks as turncoats and criticised by the whites as
taking on the trappings of a cultural code in conflict with their own. Their
interaction with European-based society and their zeal in exerting authority
in situations of wrongdoing was often misinterpreted by white offenders, and
contributed further to the perversity of their situation. In taking on the
trappings of whiteness, their new 'white' identity was expressed through a
form of mimicry. Mackay, however, argues that despite the public stat4ments
issued by the colonial culture about assimilation - the native Police offering
an instance of this - a close study of the representations (paintings,
photographs, drawing) of the period reveals that the police were more captive
than captors and that the colonial intentions underlying their creation were
racist.
The second section, 'Manufacturing the "Cannibal"
Body', examines the different ways in which Europeans constructed -
consciously or otherwise - the myth of the 'cannibal' through journals,
literature and other forms of story-telling in order to represent indigenous
people as primitive savages. The authors in this section also draw attention
to the voyeuristic nature of European interest in cannibalism. The opening
chapter is central to the project of this Web site. It is written by Gananath
Obeyesekere, whose groundbreaking research, which has led to a
reconceptualisation of the origins, meaning and - in some instances - the very
existence of cannibalism, is fundamental to the theoretical approaches which
inform Body Trade.
