Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific
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BODY TRADE The following essays are in honour o f Gananath Obeyesekere BODY TRADE Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific Edited by BARBARA CREED and JEANETTE HOORN | J Routledge Taylor &. Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First published in 2001 by Routledge Published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X 14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA Koutledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Barbara Creed, Jeanette Hoorn and contributors Cover design by Nada Backovic and Justin Archer Cover painting: Portrait o f Three People from Palau, © British Museum, Oil on Canvas, unsigned and undated. From the collection o f The Department of Ethnography, The British Museum, London Copyedited by Lucy Sussex Index by Neale Towart Typeset by Chapter 8 Pty Ltd Australian Cataloguing-in-Pubhcation Data Body trade: captivity, cannibalism and colonialism the Pacific Bibliography. Includes index. 1. Body, Human — social aspects — Australia. 2. Body, Human — social aspects — Pacific Area. 3. Indigenous peoples — Australia. 4. Indigenous peoples — Pacific Area. 5. Cannibalism. 6. Australia — Colonization. 7. Pacific Area - Colonization. I. Creed, Barbara. II. Hoorn, Jeanette. 306.4 ISBN 13: 978-0-415-93884-6 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-93842-6 (pbk) iv Body Trade Contents Acknowledgments vii Foreword by Peter Hulme ix (Professor o f Literature, University of Essex) Introduction xiii Part I: Circus, Trade & Spectacle 1 1 ‘Rare work amongst the professors’: the capture of indigenous skulls within phrenological knowledge in early colonial Australia 3 Paul Turnbull 2 Chained to their signs: remembering breastplates 24 Chris Healy 3 How can one be Oceanian? The display of Polynesian ‘cannibals’ in France 36 Yves Le Fur 4 Captors or captives? The Australian Native Mounted Police 47 Mary Mackay Part II: Manufacturing the ‘Cannibal5 Body 67 5 Narratives of the self: Chevalier Peter Dillon’s Fijian cannibal adventures 69 Gananath Obeyesekere 6 Cannibalising indigenous texts: headhunting and fantasy in Ion L. Idriess’, Coral Sea adventures 112 Robert Dixon 7 Lines of fright: fear, perception and the ‘seen’ of cannibalism in Charles Wilkes’s Narrative and Herman Melville’s Typee 126 Paul Lyons Body Trade v Part III: Captive White Bodies & the Colonial Imaginary in Terra Australis 149 8 Captivating Fictions: Youndh! A Tasmanian Aboriginal Romance of the Cataract Gorge 151 Susan K. Martin 9 ‘Cabin’d, cribb’d, and confin’d’: the White Woman of Gipps Land and Bungalene 167 Julie Carr 10 Material culture and the ‘signs’ of captive white women 180 Kate Darian-Smith Part IV: Film, Desire & the Colonised Body 193 11 Captivity, melancholia, and diaspora in Marlon Fuentes’ Bontoc Eulogy: revisiting Meet Me In St Louis 195 Jeanette Hoorn 12 Breeding out the black: Jedda and the stolen generations in Australia 208 Barbara Creed 13 Blame and shame: the hidden history of the comfort women of World War II 231 Freda Freiberg Endnotes 239 List of illustrations 283 Notes on the contributors 285 Index 289 vi Body Trade Acknowledgments HERE ARE MANY people who provided help in the research and writing o f this book who the editors and authors wish to thank. The National Library o f Australia T provided a Harold White Fellowship and the University of Melbourne a MacGeorge Fellowship which enabled Gananath Obeyesekere to travel to Australia to undertake research on Peter Dillon. The Ian Potter Foundation, the Faculty of Arts, the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne, and James Cook University gave generous support for the running of the Captivity Narratives and the Body Symposium (1997) at which many of the chapters in this volume were delivered as papers. The editors wish to thank the following for permission to repro duce materials in their collections: the Australian Film Institute; the Baillieu Library, Melbourne University; the British Film Institute; Marlon Fuentes; Film Stills Archive, the Museum o f Modern Art, New York; HarperCollins; the La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria; the Mitchell Library and Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales; the National Library, Canberra; the National Museum o f Australia, Canberra; the Library o f the Northern Territory; the John Oxley Library, Brisbane; Screen Sound Australia; the University of Wollongong Archives, University of Wollongong. Individuals to whom special thanks are due include: Patrick Wolfe; Mrs Honore Forster; Mr Graeme Powell of the National Library o f Australia; Sandra Burt, Australian Manuscripts Librarian, National Library of Australia; Amiria Salmond of the Gisborne Museum, New Zealand; Sylviane Jacquemin and Isabelle Guy of the Musee National des arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie, Paris; Marie- Claire Bataille Benguigui of the Musee de l’Homme, Paris; and Harry Persaud, Department of Ethnography, British Museum. Special thanks are due to the team who worked on putting the manuscript together: our editor Lucy Sussex for her wonderfully Body Trade vii trained ‘eye’ and excellent suggestions; and our research assistant Fiona Villella for her expertise and tireless support. Their enthusi asm and labour made the book a much better one than it would otherwise have been. We are particularly grateful to Tony Moore and Kate Florance at Pluto Press who supported the project from the beginning. We wish to thank the following individuals for their help in many different ways: Theo Hoorn; Laleen Jayamanne; Mark Nicholls; Ranjini Obeyesekere; Alan Oldfield; Nikos Papastergiardis; Ian Sheil; Deborah Thomas; Michele Velik; Stuart McIntyre. A special thanks is due to Kay Hoorn, who identified the Mozart piano sonata from which Jedda plays in Chauvel’s film o f the same name. A different version o f Sue Martin’s chapter (first delivered at the Captivity Narratives and the Body Symposium) appears in the forthcoming book, Captive and Free: Colonial Incarceration, edited by G. E. Harper, Cassell, 2001, by mutual permission. Paul Lyons’ chapter was first published in Inside/Out, a collection of essays edit ed by Rob Wilson and Vilsoni Hereniko (Rowan & Littlefield 1998). The editors wish to thank Rowan & Littlefield for permis sion to republish the essay. Some material in Julie Carr’s chapter (first delivered at the Captivity Narratives and the Body Symposium) also appears in her book, The Captive White Woman of Gippsland: In Pursuit o f the Legend, Melourne University Press, Carlton, 2001. We are indebted to the Australian Research Council for a grant which made our research possible. viii Body Trade Foreword IN C E I WAS disappointed not to be able to attend the sym posium for Gananath Obeyesekere on which this book is Sbased, its a particular honour to be asked to become the books first reader and to offer the first comments on its contents. The editors’ Introduction will explain the books structure and describe its chapters in some detail: as a foretaste o f their more sub stantial account, I’ll merely offer a very personal indication of some o f the pleasure and instruction that readers can expect to find. I certainly don’t write as an expert on the Pacific materials which form the subject matter of Body Trade, but it may be appro priate enough for somebody who works on the Caribbean to write about a book which features so prominently the topic o f cannibal ism — a word etymologically cognate with ‘Caribbean’. In addition, several years ago I organised a symposium at the University o f Essex at which Obeyesekere gave the second o f his detailed deconstruc tions o f cannibal stories, the third o f which takes centre stage in Body Traded Obeyesekere s long-running dispute with Marshall Sahlins about the interpretation o f the events leading up to the death o f Captain Cook at the hands o f Hawaiians in 1779 has become one o f the set pieces o f post-colonial studies. Arguably, however, his incred ibly detailed readings o f cannibal stories (also often against the grain o f Sahlins s deployment o f them in his historical anthropology) are even more emblematic o f that important strain o f post-colonial work which brings together literary analysis, historical contextuali- sation, and anthropological understanding in truly interdisciplinary fashion to unpick a set o f colonial ‘truths’. What marks all three o f Obeyesekere s cannibal pieces is an alertness to the social dynamics o f the various cultural encounters that produced the cannibal ‘evi dence’: he knows just how to read what Paul Lyons calls ‘the poet ics o f “witness’”.2 Obeyesekere s essay in this book is especially impressive for its development o f the connection between the can Foreword ix nibal story and the ‘narrative o f the self’ — that autobiographical strategy which tends to seduce the reader through ‘the power o f eye witness narrative couched in the language o f verisimilitude’.3 Peter Dillon, the subject of Obeyesekere s paper, claimed to have been born in Martinique, previously a stronghold of the Carib people whose name became synonymous with cannibalism, although Martinique seems to feature in his story as a link to the Franco-Irish aristocratic family resident there, who were connected through marriage to the Empress Josephine.4 Dillon’s possibly imag inative trajectory from the Caribbean to Ireland to the Pacific to the Indian subcontinent is one small example of the truly global rela tionships that began to develop after European settlement of Australia and the Pacific islands in the second half o f the eighteenth century: the careers o f individual soldiers and scientists and admin istrators could subsequently expect to unfold all around the world. Even more noticeably, relative improvements in transportation meant that commodities, including people, could now be moved more easily around the globe. The vast and tragic saga o f indigenous people brought forcibly to Europe and the U.S.