Narratives of encounter : the anthropology of history on Niue

Abstract

This thesis, on one level, is about different types of cross-cultural encounter, and narratives of the same, in and around the Polynesian island of Niue. Chronologically-speaking, it begins with a detailed account of the encounters at sea and on shore between Niueans and Europeans between the year 1774, when “contact” was first historically recorded, and the 1860s, when the full “impact” of the encounter with the West began to be felt by the island’s indigenous inhabitants. A second type of encounter is that which occurred around the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, with Niue’s formal incorporation as, first, a British protectorate, and second, a New Zealand colony. Specifically, I focus on how this period of political disjuncture led to a “rediscovery” of Captain James Cook by both Niueans themselves and by Europeans involved in the imperial process, and the subsequent emergence of diverse and contradictory narratives about Cook’s 1774 visit to Niue. My own experience of fieldwork on the island, more than two centuries after Cook, constitutes the most recent type of cross-cultural encounter dealt with. In this part it is my intention to evoke the harsh realities of contemporary Niue, particularly the effects on village life of large-scale migration to New Zealand. This ethnographic backdrop is also used to illustrate the severe limitations of conventional ethnographic approaches to situations of radical change and sociocultural disruption. On another level, however, this study is intended as an intervention in the significant but problematic encounter between anthropology and the field of history, particularly as their relationship has developed over the past decade or so. My particular concern in this instance is to pursue, interweavingly, deconstructionist and genealogical analyses of the phenomena described above, with a view to illustrating their combined relevance to the wider historical anthropological project. Finally, I argue that the historical anthropological gaze must be focussed equally on Western and non-Western subjects, since both have become inextricably linked since the emergence of the modern era - albeit usually with the former dominating the latter - and because neither has a mandate on “truth” or “authenticity”.