Oceanic Encounters: A Prelude

Abstract

This volume explores encounters, those encounters between indigenous peoples of the Pacific and foreigners during that longue durée of exploration, colonisation and settlement, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century.By highlighting the idea of encounter we hope to stress the mutuality inherent in such meetings of bodies, and of minds.This is not to say that such encounters were moments of easy understanding or pacific exchanges.As many of the chapters in this volume attest, such encounters, from Quirós' sojourn in Espiritu Santo in 1606 (see Jolly 2007) to Australian patrols in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea from the late 1920s, were often occasions of tumultuous misunderstanding and extreme violence.But, even in the midst of massacre and revenge, there was a meeting of meanings, of bodies and minds, whereby pre-existing understandings, preconceptions from both sides of the encounter, were engaged, brought into confrontation and dialogue, mutual influence and ultimately mutual transformation.We thus prefer the notion of "encounter" to the more common sobriquet -"first contact" -for several reasons (see Connolly and Anderson 1987; Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991; and compare Ballard 2003 [1992]).

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