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Cannibalism and Colonialism: Charting Colonies and Frontiers in Nineteenth-Century Fiji

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Tracey Banivanua-Mar
Tracey Banivanua-Mar*
Affiliation:
La Trobe University
*
t.banivanuamar@latrobe.edu.au
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Extract

In my family, stories of our Fijian ancestors' cannibalism have been irreverently recycled in tale-telling moments laced with both solemnity and the absurd. I never seriously questioned the reality of the stories, accepting instead their mythical quality and their underlying social allegory. With almost a wink and a nudge these tales of past cannibalism come to life as fables that nearly always taper off into the redemption of being civilized. As I explore in this article, for us as for many who engage cannibal stories, cannibalism refers to more than the cultural practice of anthropophagy. In the wake of William Arens' provocative critique of this meta-myth, it has become more difficult in recent years to uncritically accept and repeat claims of other peoples' cannibalism. Studies by a generation of scholars of history and culture have ensured that the study of cannibalism now is as likely to interrogate those that view and seek it, as it is to examine those reputed to practice it. Anthropologies of tourism and cultural critiques too have cemented its conceptualization as an enduring discourse of savagery.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , April 2010 , pp. 255 - 281
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2010

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References

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17 The best known of such treatises on Amerindian rights, by Hugo Grotius, Alberico Gentili, and Francisco de Vitoria, carried over in various forms into Protestant and French schools of legal thought whose focus tended to be more on defining the right of discovery. The notable exception within the Spanish school was Bartolome de Las Casas, who famously argued during the Valladolid debate (1550–1551) that cannibalism and human sacrifice were, firstly not universal practices in the Americas, and secondly not enough to justify a war of conquest. See Green, L. C. and Dickason, Olive P., The Law of Nations and the New World (Edmonton, Alberta: The University of Alberta Press, 1989)Google Scholar. See also Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Skinner, Quentin et al. , eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boucher, Cannibal Encounters.

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27 A footnote can barely do justice to the period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which saw massive upheavals in land tenure and notions of property rights in Britain, the United States, and British colonies. While Lockean notions had long justified European occupations of unused land for resettlement, intensified population pressures, famines, and agrarian revolutions throughout Europe, along with the rising dominance of utilitarian philosophies and economies, developed a social and legal sensitivity to the apparent wastage of indigenous land. See Hackshaw, Frederika, “Nineteenth-Century Notions of Aboriginal Title and Their Influence on the Interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi,” in Kawharu, I. H., ed., Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1989), 92–121Google Scholar; and Weaver, John C., The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), 25–28Google Scholar; Yelling, J. A., Common Field and Enclosure in England 1450–1850 (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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39 Hulme, “Introduction,” 24.

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41 Wallis, Life in Feejee, 31.

42 Obeyesekere, “British Cannibals.”

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45 Gaggin, Among the Man-Eaters, 16–17.

46 Robinson, Ronald and Gallagher, John, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961)Google Scholar. For a fascinating study of the deployment of taxonomies of violence at the local level of imperial magistrates, see Bailkin, Jordanna, “The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, 2 (2006): 462–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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49 Tanner, “Colo Navosa.”

50 Martha Kaplan's work on the Ra district offers a fascinating account of the ways in which Christian/Cannibal and ally/rebel dichotomies were readily mapped onto existing pre-colonial divisions between coastal and interior groups. See her, “Meaning, Agency and Colonial History”; and, Neither Cargo nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 19–45.

51 Throughout this period of cyclical violence the people of the interior were known as Kai Colo. While this literally translates as being a person from Colo, kai colo also came to be synonymous with backward, savage, wild, heathen, and of course, cannibal—indeed the term still implies this.

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54 Fiji Times, 3 Feb. 1872. This is in reference to an expedition into the Ba River area in early 1872 to avenge the deaths of Macintosh and Spiers. A participant wrote to the papers soon after to complain of the “chicken hearted whites” that had failed to join the expedition.

55 This was reported by the Fiji Times, and by an eyewitness Georgian Wright who counted three hundred deaths. See Kaplan, Neither Cargo nor Cult, 44.

56 Ibid., 1–46.

57 While there were a number of American settlers in Fiji it is not clear what direct connections there were between the Ku Klux in Fiji and the first Ku Klux Klan in the United States. See Banivanua Mar, “Frontier Space,” 30–39; and on comparative protection societies and volunteer corps in frontier colonies, see Weaver, The Great Land Rush, 55.

58 Acting British Consul to Earl Granville Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 8 Sept. 1873, PRO FO 58/135, pp. 253–81. See also on the legal status of punitive expeditions and vigilante activity, Julian, Charles St., The International Status of Fiji and the Political Rights, Liabilities, Duties, and Privileges of British Subjects, and other Foreigners, Residing in The Fijian Archipelago (Sydney: F. Cunninghame, 1872)Google Scholar, 16–18, 28–19.

59 This is explored more thoroughly in Banivanua Mar, “Frontier Space,” 25–28. On frontiers, see also the contributions to Russell, Lynette's edited collection, Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001Google Scholar; distributed in the United States by Palgrave).

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62 FNA (Fiji National Archives) DCS 88/1876, Arthur Gordon to Carnarvon, 6 May 1876, regarding disturbances in Viti Levu. Gordon repeated the accusation that settlers deliberately spread measles in a public address in 1879 to which “a Colonist” retaliated by implying that Gordon himself could well be accused of deliberately introducing smallpox, cholera, and dysentery. See the pamphlet Anon., Fiji: Remarks on the Address Delivered by Sir Arthur Gordon, G.C.M.G., at the Colonial Institute, March 18, 1879, by a Colonist (Levuka: n.p., 1879), 8–9; copy held at Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Although germ theory was still in its relative infancy in 1874, the notion that diseases, particularly smallpox and cholera, were communicable, and could be deliberately spread, was well established. On British uses of disease in conquest, see Butlin, Noel, Our Original Aggression: Aboriginal Populations of Southeastern Australia, 1788–1858 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983)Google Scholar.

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65 Vunivalu of Bau Cakobau, Sir Hercules George Robert Robinson, and Wilkinson, David, Regulations of the Native Regulation Board, 1877–1882 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1883)Google Scholar.

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67 FNA CG 41 183/1872, W. Burns to the Minister of Lands, 5 Jan. 1872, regarding “The Mountaineers coming down”. FNA CG 43 497/1872, Various to Minister for Native Affairs, 15 June 1872, regarding “The dangerous state of Ba River.”

68 FNA, Entry for Sunday 1:00 a.m., Sunday, 9 Feb. 1873, Diary and Narratives of Edwin J. Turpin, 1870–ca. 1894.

69 Fiji Times, 11 Sept. 1873.

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78 Routledge, Matanitu; Scarr, “Cakobau and Ma'afu”; Kaplan, Neither Cargo nor Cult.

79 FNA CG 43 865/1872, Walter Haynes to Minister for Native Affairs, 31 Oct. 1872; FNA CG 43 730/1872, J. C. Smith to Minister for Native Affairs, 26 Sept. 1872; FNA CG 41 151/1872, J. P. Wilson to the Minister for Native Affairs, 26 Jan. 1872; FNA CG 41 182/1872, J. P. Wilson to Minister of Native Affairs, 12 Feb. 1872.

80 FNA PG 43 460/1875, Exekaia Buli Tavia to Minister for Native Affairs, 26 Aug. 1875; FNA CG 41 186/1872, A. Tempest to Minister for Native Affairs, 27 Jan. 1872.

81 Tanner, “Colo Navosa,” 231.

82 Kaplan, “Meaning, Agency and Colonial History”; Kaplan, Neither Cargo nor Cult.

83 Of those found guilty, fifteen were shot. Twenty death sentences were eventually commuted to hard labor on plantations. Arthur explained that the commutations demonstrated that the “Government is so strong that it can afford to pardon. … There is no man or place in Fiji that, sooner or later, I cannot reach, and if any do wrong in this fashion, most surely, they will be punished for it.” Gordon, ed., Letters and Notes, 423. See also Public Records Office, Kew (PRO) CO 83/10, in letter 10039 of 1876.

84 Guha, “Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” 45–86.

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87 My emphasis. Sahlins, “Raw Women, Cooked Men,” 90. Likewise Peggy Reeves Sanday, in her study of the cultural system of cannibalism in Fiji referred to cases of the “sucking babes,” repeating Lawry's 1850 account virtually word for word. Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 161.

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