Intimate strangers: friendship, exchange and Pacific encounters

Abstract

Crowd scenesWhat beings surround me? -Hume If 'friend or foe' is the implicit first question of cross-cultural contact, in the Pacific it is articulated in a context that has disappeared from view: that of the crowd. 1 In the literature of early European encounter in Oceania, crowds are everywhere, and the experience of the mass is presented as overwhelming.Gauging crowd feeling -ascertaining whether the bodies that surround one are fascinated or afraid or aggressive -is imperative to the instigation of trade, and the possibility of obtaining essential supplies.Robertson's account of the Dolphin surrounded by hostile canoes at 'King George's Island' in 1767 contrasts with Bougainville's depiction of pirogues manned by clamorously friendly Tahitians crowding his vessel less than a year later, but both observers give a sense of the immediate effect of mass scrutiny and the need for interpretation it instigates.The focus of this book is the relationship for which crowd scenes set the stage: the highly particularized connection of taio, through which access to local resources is ultimately mediated.That term or its cognates -almost invariably the first word of early European-Oceanic encounter -emerges, again almost invariably, from the crowd scene.In European accounts, it seems, the named friendship requires the background of the unnamed mass to become distinguishable.On the other hand, as reports of the death of James Cook show, the hostile crowd remains intransigently collective: harbouring rather than surrendering up its guilty individual.1 Paul Lyons, discussing nineteenth-century American representations of Pacific islanders, suggests that 'fear and friendship . . .comprise poles of the discursive continuum along which Euro-Americans anticipate and/or retrospectively organize their relations with Oceanians . . .Recurrently in the archive, "friends" are those from whom there is nothing to fear' (Lyons 2006:98).As should already be clear, however, my own analysis seeks to acknowledge friendship as a concept charged with resonances that exceed the logic of binarism.