B Douglas
Biographic Data
| ID | 3598 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Douglas |
| GIVEN NAMES | B |
| FAMILY NAME | Douglas |
| SIGNATURE | DOUGLAS B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7952-9673 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 264 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Seaborne Ethnography, Voyage Art, and the Racial Cartography of Oceania
Cet article aborde une triple articulation générique entre l'« ethnographie maritime » produite après 1760 par les voyageurs scientifiques européens et étatsuniens, générée lors de rencontres avec les peuples et les lieux autochtones en Océanie ; l'ethnologie philanthropique de James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848), en particulier son traité populaire The Natural History of Man (1843, éditions augmentées en 1845 et 1848) ; et la « cartographie racial…
Manuscript Xlviii
Comprendre la race et la géographie
Cette contribution est une composante de l’hommage rendu à Claude Blanckaert par la Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines dans son numéro 47, hommage composé de neuf témoignages personnels, amicaux et scientifiques, qui, chacun à leur manière, illustrent la force et l'importance de l’héritage intellectuel qu’il nous a légué
Manuscript XLV
J.H.F. (Frits) Sollewijn Gelpke (1922–2013) was a Dutch civil servant in Nederlands-Nieuw-Guinea from 1945 to 1962, ending his administrative career as appointed chairman of the short-lived self-governing Nieuw-Guinea Raad (Council), following open elections in January 1961. After his retirement, he brought multilingual scholarship and deep familiarity with places, Indigenous people, and their toponyms to the history of West New Guinea, the Raja …
Manuscript XLV
J.H.F. (Frits) Sollewijn Gelpke (1922–2013) was a Dutch civil servant in Nederlands-Nieuw-Guinea from 1945 to 1962, ending his administrative career as appointed chairman of the short-lived self-governing Nieuw-Guinea Raad (Council), following open elections in January 1961. After his retirement, he brought multilingual scholarship and deep familiarity with places, Indigenous people, and their toponyms to the history of West New Guinea, the Raja …
Tracing Presence
This article excavates signs of the empirical impact of Indigenous agency and place in European charts and maps of New Guinea over three centuries. In the process, it incidentally summarizes the island’s cartographic history. Voyagers’ primary toponymic praxis bestowed honorific eponyms and descriptive or associative names on places seen. However, read critically with other materials generated on the spot, charts and maps also disclose traces of …
Very Beautiful Land’
In 1545, Ortiz de Retes ‘took possession’ for Spain of a ‘very beautiful land’ southeast of Maluku and named it New Guinea. This article charts the interplay of local knowledge, Iberian experience, and European cosmography in the fragmentary knowing, naming, and mapping of New Guinea’s coasts in the two centuries after 1511. From Malay stories about the islands, coast, or land of the papuas (Papuans) told to Portuguese and Spaniards in Maluku, em…
Remembering Deryck Anthony Scarr (7 September 1939–29 March 2024)
Born at the outbreak of the Second World War in Newbury, England, Deryck Scarr graduated BA (Hons) at Exeter University in 1961, winning the History medal. He was awarded his PhD in 1965,1 working
Contact tracing
This article introduces the special issue on ‘Material Encounters’ by addressing the praxis of materiality across time, disciplines, areas of study, and technologies. We use the metonyms of track and trace and the distinction of objects and things to disentangle ways in which materials and understandings of the material mediate dynamic encounters with specific people or places, particularly in Oceania. These material encounters generate diverse, …
Mapping the once and future strait
Thematically, this article tracks European imagining, ‘discovery’, naming, and mapping of the geographical space between modern Papua New Guinea and Australia – called Torres Strait since the 1770s – and the local encounters with places and people which enabled or constrained that knowing from the early sixteenth century. The methodological focus is materiality. This cartographic knowledge was generated empirically in embodied encounters; materia…
Darwin and the French
Naming ‘Polynesia’
This paper is a narrative history of European placenaming in the ‘fifth part of the world’ or ‘Oceania’, focusing on the ambiguous toponym ‘Polynesia’. The ‘Southern World’ remained little known and undifferentiated in 1756 when Charles de Brosses partitioned it into the geographical regions ‘Polynesia’, ‘Australasia’ (both neologisms), and ‘Magellanica’. The term Polynesia is traced through its chameleon usages in Euro-US cartographies and geogr…
‘Polynesians’ in the Brazilian hinterland? Sociohistorical perspectives on skulls, genomics, identity, and nationhood
In 1876, Brazilian physical anthropologists De Lacerda and Peixoto published findings of detailed anatomical and osteometric investigation of the new human skull collection of Rio de Janeiro’s Museu Nacional. They argued not only that the Indigenous ‘Botocudo’ in Brazil might be autochthonous to the New World, but also that they shared analogic proximity to other geographically very distant human groups – the New Caledonians and Australians – equ…
Ethnohistory and Historical Ethnography
This article situates ethnohistory historically, conceptually, methodologically, and geographically in relation to its intertwined "parent" disciplines of anthropology and history. As a named interdisciplinary inquiry, ethnohistory emerged in the United States in the mid-1950s in the "applied" context of academic involvement in Native American land claims hearings after 1946. However, anthropology (the science of humanity) has overlapped, interse…
Tupaia’s Map
On 4 October 2017, the editorial office of the Journal of Pacific History (JPH) received an email from Lars Eckstein, informing us of his research with Anja Schwarz on the famous map produced by Tu
Eponymy, Encounters, and Local Knowledge in Russian Place Naming in the Pacific Islands, 1804–1830
This history of Russian place naming in the Pacific Islands from 1804 to 1830 systematically juxtaposes, correlates, and compares toponyms inscribed in varied genres of Russian texts: map, atlas, journal, narrative, and hydrographic treatise. Its empirical core comprises place names bestowed or recorded by naval officers and naturalists in eastern and northern Pacific archipelagoes during expeditions led by the Baltic German circumnavigators Krus…
Pacific Futures
Medium, Genre, Indigenous Presence
Changing Contexts, Shifting Meanings
This book sheds new light on processes of cultural transformation at work in Oceania and analyzes them as products of interrelationships between culturally created meanings and specific contexts. In a series of inspiring essays, noted scholars of the region examine these interrelationships for insight into how cultural traditions are shaped on an ongoing basis.The collection marks a turning point in the debate on the conceptualization of traditio…
Rough Justice
This essay introduces the special issue by setting the concept and specific practice of the "punitive expedition" in Oceania in historical, linguistic and etymological contexts. In the process, we seek to classify punitive expeditions as a historically particular category of event in one global zone, with identifiable qualities, precursors and recursions. A brief consideration of sixteenth-century Spanish violence against Pacific Islanders sugges…
Affect, Agency, and Ambiguous Praxis
This article considers the praxis and representation of military actions by French naval forces in the Pacific, exemplified in the interplay of agency and affect during three precolonial expeditions before 1850. I problematize the timing, motivations and goals of violent imperial retaliation to perceived Indigenous transgressions and disentangle the varied ontologies of justice, morality or efficacy that stimulated protagonists. Refusing simplist…
Agency, affect, and local knowledge in the exploration of Oceania
Since the 1990s, a number of Scholars have sought to uncover 'hidden histories' of exploration. Various approaches are pursued. The result is a more complex and multivocal account of the practices and politics of European exploration, the social and historical contexts in which it occurred, and the relationships, networks and institutions it created and on which it depended
Remoteness and maternal and child health service utilization in rural Liberia
Within a rural Liberian population, distance is associated with reduced health care uptake. As Liberia rebuilds its health system after Ebola, overcoming geographic disparities, including through further dissemination of providers and greater use of community health workers should be prioritized
Confronting “hybrids” in Oceania
Des débats intenses autour du croisement racial se produisirent dans l’anthropologie en France au milieu du xixe siècle. La controverse de longue date sur la question des « hybrides » a noué des questions de théorie, d’expérience sur le terrain et de matérialité humaine. Les diverses positions sur les unions interraciales ont émergé dans deux contextes distincts : les rapports, les collections anatomiques humaines et les synthèses anthropologique…
Art in Oceania
In 1995, Thames & Hudson published Oceanic Art in the authoritative World of Art series. Written by the Australian Pacific historian Nicholas Thomas, this acclaimed survey and synthesis celebrated
Rank, power, authority
From Invisible Christians to Gothic Theatre
This paper is a history and textual critique of the anthropology of millennial, pentecostal, and charismatic Christianity in Melanesia located in relation to interpretations of indigenous religiosities worldwide, particularly mainstream Christianity but including cargo cults and millenarianism generally. An important subtext is the correlation between anthropological scholarship and the empirical settings of fieldwork, historicizing ethnographic …
Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania, 1511–1850
Blending global scope with local depth, this book throws new light on important themes. Spanning four centuries and vast space, it combines the history of ideas with particular histories of encounters
Encounters with the Enemy? Academic Readings of Missionary Narratives on Melanesians
Western" societies today are by and large post-Christian, in the sense that many people do not seriously identify with a religious denomination or sect, major public discourses-particularly academic ones-are secular, and Christian institutions and values are no longer naturalized in public politics.My secular sense that Australia is among the most secular societies in a largely secular "Western" world is evidently shared by committed Christians. …
Patterns of sexual behavior and condom use in a cohort of homosexual men
To measure the magnitude of risk reduction within a cohort of homosexual men, questionnaire responses in April 1984-March 1985 were compared to those in October 1986-September 1987. A total of 361 subjects were eligible (231 seronegative, 130 seropositive). The annual number of sex partners declined significantly from a median of 8.0 to 5.0 with no difference between the serologic groups. The number of subjects reporting no receptive anal interco…
Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History of Man
This paper examines intellectual interchanges between European theorists in the science of man and sailors, naturalists and artists on scientific voyages in Oceania during the century after 1750. I argue that travellers' narratives and ethnographic representations were not mere reflexes of dominant metropolitan discourses, but were also personal productions generated in the tensions and ambiguities of cross-cultural encounters. I identify counter…
"Science and the art of representing "savages
Terra Australisto Oceania
This paper is a synoptic history of racial geography in the 'fifth part of the world' or Oceania - an extended region embracing what are now Australia, Island Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. The period in question stretches from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment, to focus on the consolidation of European racial thinking with the marriage of geography and raciology in the early 19th century. T…
Naming places
Slippery Word, Ambiguous Praxis
This paper traces the presence, absence, and shifting connotations of the term 'race' and the idea of human classification in representations of indigenous Oceanian people by navigators, naturalists and artists on 18th-century British and French voyages
Notes on ‘Race’ and the Biologisation of Human Difference
Conflict and alliance in a colonial context
Power, discourse and the appropriation of god
1995). Power, discourse and the appropriation of god: Christianity and subversion in a Melanesian context. History and Anthropology: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 57-92
Almost constantly at war'? An ethnographic perspective on fighting in New Caledonia ∗
(1990). ‘Almost constantly at war'? An ethnographic perspective on fighting in New Caledonia. The Journal of Pacific History: Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 22-46
Hierarchy and reciprocity in New Caledonia
1994). Hierarchy and reciprocity in New Caledonia: An historical ethnography. History and Anthropology: Vol. 7, No. 1-4, pp. 168-193
Eponymy, Encounters, and Local Knowledge in Russian Place Naming in the Pacific Islands, 1804–1830
This history of Russian place naming in the Pacific Islands from 1804 to 1830 systematically juxtaposes, correlates, and compares toponyms inscribed in varied genres of Russian texts: map, atlas, journal, narrative, and hydrographic treatise. Its empirical core comprises place names bestowed or recorded by naval officers and naturalists in eastern and northern Pacific archipelagoes during expeditions led by the Baltic German circumnavigators Krus…
Philosophers, Naturalists, and Antipodean Encounters, 1748-1803
This article addresses a complex nexus of discourse and praxis: varying Enlightenment visions of Man; emergent ideas about human differences; and encounters between European scientific voyagers and Indigenous people in New Holland (Australia) and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) at the start of the nineteenth century. Discursively, I trace two strands of ‘anthropological’ thinking. One, philosophical and economic, is epitomized in French and Scottish…
Confronting “hybrids” in Oceania
Des débats intenses autour du croisement racial se produisirent dans l’anthropologie en France au milieu du xixe siècle. La controverse de longue date sur la question des « hybrides » a noué des questions de théorie, d’expérience sur le terrain et de matérialité humaine. Les diverses positions sur les unions interraciales ont émergé dans deux contextes distincts : les rapports, les collections anatomiques humaines et les synthèses anthropologique…
Darwin and the French
Ethnohistory and Historical Ethnography
This article situates ethnohistory historically, conceptually, methodologically, and geographically in relation to its intertwined "parent" disciplines of anthropology and history. As a named interdisciplinary inquiry, ethnohistory emerged in the United States in the mid-1950s in the "applied" context of academic involvement in Native American land claims hearings after 1946. However, anthropology (the science of humanity) has overlapped, interse…
Race, Place and Civilisation
Changing Contexts, Shifting Meanings
This book sheds new light on processes of cultural transformation at work in Oceania and analyzes them as products of interrelationships between culturally created meanings and specific contexts. In a series of inspiring essays, noted scholars of the region examine these interrelationships for insight into how cultural traditions are shaped on an ongoing basis.The collection marks a turning point in the debate on the conceptualization of traditio…
Rough Justice
This essay introduces the special issue by setting the concept and specific practice of the "punitive expedition" in Oceania in historical, linguistic and etymological contexts. In the process, we seek to classify punitive expeditions as a historically particular category of event in one global zone, with identifiable qualities, precursors and recursions. A brief consideration of sixteenth-century Spanish violence against Pacific Islanders sugges…
Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania
Beginning with a brief historiographic survey of the prolific literature on European voyages of exploration in Oceania, in particular those of James Cook, this article considers how embodied encounters helped shape the written and visual representations of indigenous Oceanian people by Cook and his naturalists and artists in New Holland (Australia), the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). I treat encounters as situated and pe…
Dorothy Shineberg
The export trade in tropical products in New Caledonia 1841-1872
Les premiers européens à entretenir des contacts réguliers avec une grande partie de la Nouvelle-Calédonie ont été des commerçants de Sydney qui recherchaient le bois de santal et la bêche-de-mer. Après l'annexation par la France en 1853, les produits tropicaux, principalement l'huile de coco, la bêche-de-mer et le bois de santal, sont restés jusqu'en 1870 et les quelques années qui suivirent, les principaux produits exportés de la colonie. Ceux …
Rank, power, authority
Conflict and alliance in a colonial context
Patterns of sexual behavior and condom use in a cohort of homosexual men
To measure the magnitude of risk reduction within a cohort of homosexual men, questionnaire responses in April 1984-March 1985 were compared to those in October 1986-September 1987. A total of 361 subjects were eligible (231 seronegative, 130 seropositive). The annual number of sex partners declined significantly from a median of 8.0 to 5.0 with no difference between the serologic groups. The number of subjects reporting no receptive anal interco…
Almost constantly at war'? An ethnographic perspective on fighting in New Caledonia ∗
(1990). ‘Almost constantly at war'? An ethnographic perspective on fighting in New Caledonia. The Journal of Pacific History: Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 22-46
Winning and losing? Reflections on the war of 1878–79 in new caledoni
equivalence and restraint; in colonial contexts, fighting included, Melanesians acted in creative and meaningful ways which often contradicted European as sumptions of external imposition and reflex reaction; and both contemporary texts and histories tend to anticipate the colonial 'conquest' of New Caledonia, overstate French military advantage, underestimate the significance of Melan esian agency and generally denigrate Melanesian performance.1…
Hierarchy and reciprocity in New Caledonia
1994). Hierarchy and reciprocity in New Caledonia: An historical ethnography. History and Anthropology: Vol. 7, No. 1-4, pp. 168-193
Power, discourse and the appropriation of god
1995). Power, discourse and the appropriation of god: Christianity and subversion in a Melanesian context. History and Anthropology: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 57-92
L'histoire face à l'anthropologie
■ Bronwen Douglas : L'histoire face à l'anthropologie : le passé colonial indigène revisité. L'histoire critique ici mise en œuvre confronte et questionne des documents coloniaux du xixe siècle et des écrits ethnographiques contemporains relatifs à un même événement survenu en 1862 en Nouvelle-Calédonie. La perspective est autant scientifique que politique puisque l'auteur entend restituer la spécificité de l'action et de l'argumentation indigène…
Introduction
Performances
Provocative Readings in Intransigent Archives
Anticolonialists — my past self included — tend to read colonial texts with hostile but literal eyes, assuming that colonial intentions were realised and taking at face value colonisers' representations of their own centrality for indigenous people. In such discursive settings, indigenous — especially female — agency is likely to be elided or denied. I argue instead for a reading strategy that decentres colonial representations by identifying and…
"Science and the art of representing "savages
Imperial Benevolence
Across the Great Divide
Rank, power, authority - a reassessment of traditional leadership in South Pacific societies ritual and politics - the inaugural meeting of High Chiefs in New Caledonia almost constantly war? ethnographic perspectives on indigenous fighting in New Caledonia reading indigenous pasts - the Wagap Affair of 1862 winning and losing? reflections on the War of 1878-79 in New Caledonia autonomous and controlled spirits - indigenous rituals and encounters…
From Invisible Christians to Gothic Theatre
This paper is a history and textual critique of the anthropology of millennial, pentecostal, and charismatic Christianity in Melanesia located in relation to interpretations of indigenous religiosities worldwide, particularly mainstream Christianity but including cargo cults and millenarianism generally. An important subtext is the correlation between anthropological scholarship and the empirical settings of fieldwork, historicizing ethnographic …
Encounters with the Enemy? Academic Readings of Missionary Narratives on Melanesians
Western" societies today are by and large post-Christian, in the sense that many people do not seriously identify with a religious denomination or sect, major public discourses-particularly academic ones-are secular, and Christian institutions and values are no longer naturalized in public politics.My secular sense that Australia is among the most secular societies in a largely secular "Western" world is evidently shared by committed Christians. …
Christianity, Tradition, and Everyday Modernity
This paper approaches its central theme of women's groupings in Melanesia via critique of several longstanding shibboleths, including examples of their strategic appropriation by indigenous people. These stereotypes include the romantic image of rural dwellers as pre‐modern traditionalists on whom Christianity is an imposed foreign veneer; the hoary rhetorical opposition of ‘West’ and ‘non‐West’/modernity and tradition/individual and community; a…
Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History of Man
This paper examines intellectual interchanges between European theorists in the science of man and sailors, naturalists and artists on scientific voyages in Oceania during the century after 1750. I argue that travellers' narratives and ethnographic representations were not mere reflexes of dominant metropolitan discourses, but were also personal productions generated in the tensions and ambiguities of cross-cultural encounters. I identify counter…
Prologue
Dorothy Shineberg
Notes on ‘Race’ and the Biologisation of Human Difference
Slippery Word, Ambiguous Praxis
This paper traces the presence, absence, and shifting connotations of the term 'race' and the idea of human classification in representations of indigenous Oceanian people by navigators, naturalists and artists on 18th-century British and French voyages
The Lure of Texts and the Discipline of Praxis
The main aim of this paper is to tell stories \nabout interactions between European \nvoyagers and Aboriginal people in New \nHolland (mainland Australia) and Van \nDiemen's Land (Tasmania) at the end of \nthe eighteenth century
Climate to Crania
In letters written to a friend in 1790 and 1791, the young, German-trained French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) took vigorous humanist exception to recent 'stupid' German claims about the supposedly innate deficiencies of 'the negro'. 1 It was 'ridiculous', he expostulated, to explain the 'intellectual faculties' in terms of differences in the anatomy of the brain and the nerves; and it was immoral to justify slavery on the gro…
History (50 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (29 works) · Archaeology (24 works) · Geography (21 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (21 works) · Anthropology (20 works) · Art (18 works) · Genealogy (18 works) · Indigenous (18 works)