Islands and Beaches. Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774-1880 by Greg Dening

Islands and Beaches. Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774-1880 Reviews

• 
  Brenda

  Greg Dening was inspired to write Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a silent land: Marquesas 1771-1880 after a chance meeting with an old Marquesas man by the name of Teifitu in 1974. Finding a shared knowledge with Teifitu and a continued relationship, both Dening and Teifitu made the effort to cross the beach. Dening is the first to admit that “we do not know what our visit cost that small valley or what was the price of knowledge” (p2). Dening uses ‘islands and beaches’ as a metaphor for the different ways in which human beings construct their worlds and for the boundaries that they construct between them. To Dening, “history and anthropology are both plagiarisms, replays of life and living. . . in re-presenting the past, in re-constructing the different, there is no avoiding our present or ourselves” (p 2-3).
  Dening bluntly claims that he shares knowledge that is second hand but through his searches in archives and libraries throughout the world he feels that he has met the men and women he writes about in his book. He admits that there were some customs and institutions among the Marquesas that he could not understand so he borrowed the consciousness that anthropologist seem to have to delve into meanings about relationships, rituals, and symbols. Dening is skeptical about using sources after 1835 because of the rapid changes caused by the arrival of the Europeans. But he does include material after this period which he leaves up to our “reflection”. Through the use of metaphors, Dening feels that the context of person and circumstances can be captured. The metaphoric use of the term tapu is effectively woven throughout his history of the Marquesas. For Dening, “to know a culture is to know its system of expressed meanings. To know cultures in contact is to know the misreadings of meanings” (p6) So we must look for the misreadings of meanings. This is Dening’s main thrust as he examines the sources at hand. The intruders made their islands in their own image. What was common to all intruders lies in the fact that they all arrived on ships. I agree with Dening that the lives of these men who came on ships is extraordinary in that they were able to detach themselves from the ordinary circumstances of their lives. The undeniable fact is that just less than three hundred ships visited the Marquesas between the years 1774 to 1842. What manner of men landed on the beaches can only be conjectured.
  The Marquesas consists of twelve islands. The island group as a whole, each individual island, each harbor, and each valley belies a variety of names according to who did the naming; who took ‘possession’. The name Marquesas is a legacy of the Spaniards who were the first to arrive in these islands in the year 1595. At first meeting, more than 200 Enata (the name that the islanders used when referring to themselves) lost their lives. This bloody beginning and the deluge that followed would in the end leave the Enata decimated.
  A few of the concepts that Dening efficaciously covers include: ‘taking possession’; cultural self-centeredness; the redeeming of souls; implications of violence; territorial rights of disciplines with particular emphasis on ethnohistory and anthropology; space and time; and the differences between model and metaphor. Dening’s discourse is definitely of a poetic nature inundated with metaphoric meanings.
  Voyagers is the word Dening attaches to the intruders. He aptly describes them as “ . . .men of no settlement. They came and they went. The future did not bind them in their relationships with Enata. They had no tomorrows in the places they visited. Their lives were in their baggage and they became jealous custodians of property. They came to exploit the natural and social environment with no sense of obligation to replenish what they exhausted or to the consequences of the change they caused. The reasons which brought them to the places they visited bore no relevance at all to the interests and welfare of the islanders” (p22). Each group of voyagers had their own agenda; the missionaries came to save souls; the French needed land; the Americans offered ‘freedom’; the whalers only to satisfy their physical needs; and the traders their greed. The Enata did not have a chance.
  The world of the Enata is entangled in the two complex concepts of haka’iki and tapu. These two concepts organized Enata’s space and time. The Aoe (the intruders) do not comprehend the meanings and they were unlike any other place they visited in the Pacific. There was no sovereignty and no subordination, the dependency was on influence rather than authority. Tapu was the social map of each island. The haka’iki controlled the tapu and thus the rhythm of the people and the environment. “Tapu, category, the spirit dimension, and sign reading were the ways in which Enata made their islands” (p59).
  Dening does, at times, seem to twist concepts around with his use of metaphors. The concepts and themes he covers are complex in nature and use of metaphors does, on other occasions, convey the message of the meaning. Clifford Geertz uses the term ‘thick description’ to describe the almost infinite set of readings for all the ways in which meanings are externalized and communicated. The metaphors of the Enata are gone but according to Dening “ . . . the suggestions we can make are only groping guesses” (p87). Dening’s book can be classified under ‘thick description’ because he not only tries to cover the breath of culture contact but also the depth. Dening’s book can be employed as a springboard for those interested in studies of the Pacific Islands. The concepts and themes that Dening covers hold promise for further investigation. Dening is insistent when he says that “[d]iscourse is unending. Nothing is discovered finally” (p42). We are all voyagers.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Corey Johnson

  Excellent. Along with Epeli Hau'ofa's "The Ocean in Us," this remains one of the most significant touchstones for Pacific scholarship.