Fear of a cannibal island
Colonial fear, everyday life, and event landscapes in the Erromango missions of Vanuatu
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2405487 |
|---|---|
| Authors | J L Flexner (0000-0002-2577-5991, Department of Archaeology, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, corresponding author), Jerry Taki (Vanuatu Cultural Centre, Happy Lands, Erromango, Vanuatu) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 104-127 |
| Publication date | 2022-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Social Archaeology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1469-6053 • E-ISSN: 1741-2951 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/14696053211036269 |
| OpenAlex | W3197460030 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 41 |
Archaeological landscapes of colonial encounter were shaped to varying degrees by mutual mistrust, misunderstanding, anxiety, and the inherent terror of frontier violence. In the mission encounters of Island Melanesia, the colonial trope of 'cannibalism' added a particular tinge to these fears of the colonized other. Mythologies of cannibalism both repulsed and motivated Christian missionaries who were led to places such as Erromango in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). Cannibalism as a practice was rare or even non-existent in these encounters, but it remained part of the European imaginary of the region. Several highly-publicized missionary martyrdoms on Erromango between 1839-1872 remain important to local social memories enacted in place. At the same time, there is a backdrop of relatively peaceful everyday life for missionary families as revealed by the archaeological record of mission houses. The structural and actual violence perpetrated by Europeans in missions and other colonial encounters are historically and currently underemphasized
Archaeology · Art · Cannibalism · Colonialism · Ethnology · Everyday life · Frontier · Literature · Mythology · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Trope (literature · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Law · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies · Psychology · Ecology
They came for sandalwood
The Anthropology of Cannibalism
Man-Eating Myth
The Tree and the Canoe
Europe and the people without history
‘Death and his body-servant’
Under the mission steps
The Sediment of Voyages
Te Puna - A New Zealand Mission Station
Preliminary Results of the South Vanuatu Archaeological Survey
The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis
Mapping Local Perspectives in the Historical Archaeology of Vanuatu Mission Landscapes
Poromoi Tamu and the Case of the Drowning Village
Historical Archaeology, Contact, and Colonialism in Oceania
An Archaeology of Desperation
Horizons beyond the Perimeter Wall
Historical Archaeology
The Parsonage of the Reverend Willoughby Bean
Fortified Homesteads
Lining the Path
Approaches to the Archaeology of Ethnogenesis
Remotely Sensing Affective Afterlives
The Barbarians Speak
The spectral geographies of W.G. Sebald
Sherds of Paradise
The Brutish Museums
The Archaeology of Anxiety
Their God is their belly
Oceanic Historicities
The Southern New Hebrides
A Good Moral Effect
Cannibal Talk
Excavating and interpreting ancestral action
Nervous Landscapes
The Archaeology of Emotion and Affect
Occulting the past. Conceptualizing forgetting in the history and archaeology of Sylvester Manor
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |