I’m fascinated by the ideological ramifications of this exploration project and how it has become such a deep and important part of the western psyche. It’s common sense that people are isolated, and then we bring them into civilization through ‘contact’.

I wonder, what are accounts of exploration and contact in other cultures like? What are Japanese, Chinese or Indian accounts like? How did Arab traders and sailors describe their first contacts with ‘isolated tribes’?

Anyway, this post/discussion has been very productive in challenging/refiguring ‘first contact’ by drawing out many other linkages between people. But my woah there Batman moment involves looking at the historical Anglo idea of ‘first contact’. I’m not sure we can say “but actually x was trading with z” without asking why we need to point that out in the first place. So I’m going to say a little bit, forget what I’m on about, put a bit of guff in, etc.

‘Contact’ and ‘discovery’ were intricately bound up in the imperial project. Claiming these often meant exerting a right to exploitation, but it also meant increasing esteem in self and nation and forming a lasting conception of ‘us’ and ‘them’. For example, narratives along the lines of “they all waved their spears … then they venerated us as gods” contributed quite meaningfully. Other factors like a desire for monolithic scientific knowledge should be added in here as well. Many a tome has been devoted to talking to this stuff so I’m not going to bore you with a précis, but you get the picture. (I should add that I’m not bringing this up as a bit of po-co hand-wringing. I find it anthropologically fascinating and my research has been on colonialists).

Anyway, these ideas still have cultural currency … hence some folk diligently put quotation marks round works like ‘discovery’ in an effort at reconstruction, and other folk reckon newspaper photos of ‘uncontacted Amazonian tribes’ tremendously exciting.

And, Tim, kumala was also used by the Kwaio of Malaita (Solomon Islands) for sweet potato, which I put to the fact that there, at least, sweet potato has been introduced from New Zealand by missionaries, although sweet potatoes were not a dominant crop on Malaita until after WWII.

Of course none of this should be seen as damaging to Rex’s point about long term down-the-line contact. The island southeast asian connection was very strong – e.g. bronze artefact transferrals, and the bird of paradise feather trade. Pam Swadling’s “Plumes from Paradise” is the classic source book for these connections…

I was fascinated by the linguistic cognates between ’sweet poato’ in Hawai’i and Ipili. Since chickens are of southeast Asian origin, is there a correlate with regard to domestic fowl? I don’t know how far domestic fowl are represented in the Highlands, though they are In the Admiralties. Archaeologically, there has always been a thin line connecting western New Guinea (and even Arnhem Land through Bugis sailors) with the Bunda islands. Echoing the McNeills, New Guinea has never been totally cut off from island Southeast Asia. There seems to have sporadically been some contact. So what is ‘first contact’?