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The Vaitupu Company Revisited: Reflections and Second Thoughts on Methodology and Mindset*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Doug Munro
Doug Munro*
Affiliation:
University of the South Pacific
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Extract

It has been said that “Old movies seen again after many years seem different not because they have altered but because we have.” For the same reason, a rereading of older historical texts will convey different meanings, and reveal deficiencies and perhaps even profundities that were not initially apparent. In this paper, these observations are applied to a piece of research that was special to me at the time. I now see more clearly the extent to which my methods and mindset were a product of time, of place, and of my own training and preferences. So I will retrace my footsteps—insofar as is possible after all these years—and consider how the preconceptions and expectations of the moment affected the outcome. In other words, to reflect on the nature of thinking and writing.

My research was not concerned with African but Pacific Islands history. From the mid 1970s through to the early 1980s I engaged in dissertation work in the nineteenth-century history of Tuvalu, formerly the Ellice Islands. Older maps will identify Tuvalu as the southern portion of a British dependency, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony (astride the equator and just east of the International Date Line). The nine Tuvalu islands are tiny even by the standards of coral atolls; by far the largest is Vaitupu at about six square kilometers, and the group remains economically unimportant and strategically insignificant. During the nineteenth century Tuvalu was incorporated into the world economy through the whaling industry and the copra trade, and further exposed to Western influences by missionization. The paucity of exploitable resources, however, coupled with an inhospitable environment and smallness of scale, rendered the islands unsuitable for large-scale European settlement and muted the potential disruptions of outside contacts. But there were aberrant events, such as the Vaitupu Company, which placed individual island communities under strain from time to time.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 24 , January 1997 , pp. 221 - 237
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1997

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Footnotes

*

My colleagues Graham N. Mills, Michael Monsell-Davis, and Ian Cowman, and my graduate student Asinate Mausio, assisted in the preparation of this paper. I am most grateful for their willingness to help.

References

Notes

1. Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1984), 241.Google Scholar

2. Munro, Doug, “The Lagoon Islands: a History of Tuvalu, 1820-1908” (PhD Macquarie University, 1982).Google Scholar

3. For an excellent history see Macdonald, Barrie, Cinderellas of the Empire: Towards a history of Kiribati and Tuvalu (Canberra, 1982).Google Scholar

4. The LMS was a Congregational-based Protestant body. In organizational terms, Tuvalu formed part of the Northwest Outstations of the Samoan District Committee of the LMS. No European missionary resided in Tuvalu during the nineteenth century; rather, Samoan pastors were posted on individual islands and subjected to brief annual inspections by a touring European missionary. See Munro, Doug, “Samoan Pastors in Tuvalu, 1865-1899” in Munro, Doug and Thornley, Andrew, eds., The Covenant Makers: Islander Missionaries in the Pacific (Suva, 1996), 124–57.Google Scholar

5. Munro, Doug and Munro, Teloma, “The Rise and Fall of the Vaitupu Company: an Episode in the Commercial History of Tuvalu,” Journal of Pacific History (hereafter JPH), 20 (1985), 174–90.Google Scholar I researched and wrote the article, and take responsibility for it. My wife translated the transcriptions of the oral testimony that I collected.

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11. Davidson, J.W., “Problems of Pacific History,” JPH 1 (1966), 13.Google Scholar

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14. Thompson, Paul, The Voice of the Past (2d ed.: London, 1988), 110.Google Scholar

15. These are itemized in Munro and Munro, “Rise and Fall,” n14.

16. Maude, H.E., “Foreword” to Crocombe, R.G. and Crocombe, Marjorie. eds., The Works of Ta'unga: Records of a Polynesian Traveller in the South Seas, 1833-1896 (Canberra, 1968), ix–xGoogle Scholar; Davidson, J.W., “Introduction” to R.P. Gilson, Samoa, 1830-1900: the Politics of a Multi-Cultural Community (Melbourne, 1970), x.Google Scholar

17. E.g. Maude, H.E., Of Islands and Men: Studies in Pacific History (Melbourne, 1968), xix-xx, xxiiGoogle Scholar; Latukefu, Sione, “Oral Traditions: an Appraisal of Their Value in Historical Research in Tonga,” JPH 3 (1968), 135–43Google Scholar; idem., “The Collection of Oral Traditions in Tonga,'” and Ron Crocombe, “Oral History in the 1970's,” both in H.E. Maude et al., Source Materials Related to Research in the Pacific Area, Australian UNESCO Seminar (Canberra, 1973), 23-27, 28-32.

18. Maude, H.E., “Pacific History—Past, Present and Future,” JPH 6 (1971), 9, 11, 21.Google Scholar

19. Maude, H.E. and Crocombe, Marjorie Tuainekore, “Rarotongan Sandalwood: the Visit of Goodenough to Rarotonga in 1814,” JPS 71 (1962), 32–56Google Scholar; republished in Maude, , Of Islands and Men, 343–71.Google Scholar

20. See Davidson, J.W., “Understanding Pacific History: the Historian as Participant” in Munz, Peter, ed., The Feel of Truth: Essays in New Zealand and Pacific History (Wellington, 1969), 25–40.Google Scholar

21. E.g. Brady, Ivan, “Christians, Pagans and Government Men: Culture Change in the Ellice Islands” in Brady, Ivan A. and Isaacs, Barry L., eds., A Reader in Culture Change, II: Case Studies (New York, 1975), 111–45Google Scholar; Chambers, Anne, Nanumea Report: a Socio-Economic Study of Nanumea Atoll, Tuvalu (Wellington, 1975), 46–54.Google Scholar

22. White, G.M., Kioa: an Ellice Community in Fiji (Eugene, OR, 1965), 139.Google Scholar I should have been forewarned. White collected his oral testimony in 1962 at Kioa, an island in Fiji which Vaitupuans had settled. He reported that Kioan accounts of the Vaitupu Company “conflict, and do not coincide with the historical data.” (White consulted only missionary accounts).

23. The disparaging views of present-day Tuvaluans towards their “unenlightened” forbearers is attested by the anthropologist Chambers, Anne, Nanumea. Atoll Economy: Social Change in Kiribati and Tuvalu, no. 6 (Canberra, 1984).Google Scholar

24. White, , Kioa, 167–68.Google Scholar

25. For a similar scenario see Dutton, Tom, Queensland Canefields English of the Late Nineteenth Century (a Record of Interviews with Two of the Last Surviving Kanakas in North Queensland) (Canberra, 1980), vi.Google Scholar

26. E.g., Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (2n ed.: (London, 1976), esp. 375Google Scholar; and Tudor, Henry, Political Myth (New York, 1972), 37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Community ideologies in Tuvalu are discussed in Goldsmith, Michael, “Church and Society in Tuvalu” (PhD, University of Illinois, 1989), 78–82.Google Scholar

27. Malinowski, Bronislaw, Magic, Science and Religion, and Other Essays (New York, 1954), 100–01.Google Scholar

28. Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition (London, 1965), 12, 51, 73-74, 84–86.Google Scholar

29. Munro, Doug and Munro, Teloma, “Vaitupu's Debt: an Exercise in the Combined Use of Documentary Records and Oral History,” Oral History Association of Australia Journal 5 (1982/1983), 63–64.Google Scholar The analysis of myth was refined in the eventual JPH article, but only because of the crucial intervention of a colleague. Keith S. Chambers, personal communication, 16 August 1983.

30. Keith S. Chambers, personal communication, 16 August 1983.

31. This piecing together of ‘snippets’ of information is a well-known feature of researching the Islands trade. See Maude, , Of Islands and Men, 233.Google Scholar

32. What happens, say, when a working class autobiography, which is internally inconsistent and whose details cannot be verified or corroborated, is presented as serious history? See the devastating critique by Cannadine, David, “Socialist History” in his The Pleasures of the Past (London, 1991), esp. 190.Google Scholar

33. See Tudor, , Political Myth, 123–24.Google Scholar

34. Henige, David, Oral Historiography (London, 1982), 51.Google Scholar

41. Keith S. Chambers, personal communication, 10 May 1977; Isala, Tito, “The Meaning of a Faatele: Comment on ‘The Rise and Fall of the Vaitupu Company’,” JPH 22 (1987), 108–10.Google Scholar

42. The other ethical question concerned the island of Niulakita, which the Vaitupuans sold to help repay the debt. In the late 1940s the various Tuvalu islands were invited by the British colonial administration to submit claims for the ownership of Niulakita. Although Vaitupu clearly had the strongest historical claim, Niulakita was handed over to Niutao—a gesture towards alleviating the land hunger of the most densely populated island in the group. Aware that Vaitupu had never reconciled itself to this decision, I was concerned that certain passages in my dissertation and JPH article might reactivate Vaitupuan claims and leave me open to charges of political interference. In the event, my fears were unfounded.

43. See Crocombe, R.G. and Spate, O.H.K., “Pacific Research: the Need for Reciprocity,” Australian National University News 4:3 (1960), 1–3Google Scholar; Daws, Gavan, “On Being a Historian of Pacific” in Moses, John A., ed., Historical Disciplines and Cultures in Australasia: a Reassessment (Brisbane, 1979), 119–32.Google Scholar

44. Isala, Tito and Munro, Doug, Te Aso Fiafia: te Tala o te Kamupane Vaitupu, 1877-1887 (Funafuti/Suva, 1987).Google Scholar

45. The local reception of the booklet is discussed in Munro, Doug, “Pacific Islands History in the Vernacular: Practical and Ethical Considerations,” NZJH 29 (1995), 86–88.Google Scholar

46. Besnier, Niko, Literacy, Emotion, and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll (Cambridge, 1995), 165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47. Ibid., 166.

48. Kennedy, D.G., Field Notes on the Culture of Vaitupu, Ellice Islands (New Plymouth, 1931).Google Scholar

49. Lawrence, Peter, Road Belong Cargo: a Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Maaang District, New Guinea (Melbourne, 1964), 21-102, 179–221.Google Scholar

50. The whereabouts of oral testimony collected by G.M. White at Kioa in 1962 is unknown.

51. Vansina, Jan, “How the Kingdom of the Great Makoko and Certail Clapperless Bells Became Topics for Research” in Curtis, L. P. Jr., The Historian's Workshop (New York, 1970), 237.Google Scholar

52. See Jenkins, Keith, Re-Thinking History (London, 1991), 23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53. Hempenstall, Peter, “The Line of Descent: Creating Pacific Histories in Austrralasia,” in Moses, John A., ed., Historical Disciplines in Australasia: Themes, Problems, and Debates [special issue of Australian Journal of Politics and History 41(1995)], 158.Google Scholar

54. Ward, Alan, “Comfortable Voyagers?: Reflections on the Pacific and Its Historians,” JPH 31 (1996), 238.Google Scholar Ward has also served a term as joint-editor of JPH.

55. An early critique of JPH's orientation and the broad thrust of Pacific Islands historiography is McQueen, Humphrey, “Across the Mexique Ocean,” Meanjin Quarterly 34:1 (1975), 51–52.Google Scholar Another critique, this time from within the fold, is Howe, K.R., “Pacific Islands History in the 1980s: New Directions or Monograph Myopia?” Pacific Studies 3:2 (1979), 81–90.Google Scholar