Across the Great Divide: Journeys in History and Anthropology
Bronwen Douglas
"[This] is a critical volume in the opening up of new frontiers in
the study of the peoples and histories of Pacific islands,
continuing the work of Sahlins, Dening, Thomas and others." --
Michel Naepels of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,
Marseilles, France
"Bronwen Douglas's combination of ethnohistoric scholarship with
theoretical rigour and reflexivity is unique. No-one else working
in the fertile zone between history and anthropology is so
attentive to the intricacies of past events, so sophisticated in
reading the colonial archive against its grain, and so consistently
concerned to use local histories to illuminate larger problems of
agency and cross-cultural historiography. This book will be
enormously valuable for scholars in Pacific studies, and for
everyone concerned to push the dialogue between anthropology and
history beyond its current limits." -- Nicholas Thomas of Director,
Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National
University
"The divides which Bronwen Douglas crosses in her anthro-historical
journeys are many - between polarities of disciplinary forms,
between theory and practice, between cultural perceptions. Across
the Great Divide puts Western Pacific cross-cultural discourse on a
new plane. The classic issues of leadership, violent encounters and
religious transformation are given an archaeology of knowledge and
are dated postcolonial." -- Greg Dening of Adjunct Professor,
Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University
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