Ritual Encounters of the ‘Savage’ and the Citizen: French Revolutionary Ethnographers in Oceania, 1768–1803

Abstract

In the long term, encounters between Enlightenment explorers and Oceanic peoples impacted significantly on European government and colonialism. Accounts of the contact, and observations and evaluations made during these meetings, were read widely among the public and were used by philosophers, naturalists and eventually scientists to advance theories about the nature of humanity, society and ‘civilisation’. Yet in the moment, these encounters were unpredictable, precarious events fraught with fear and confusion, approached with high anticipation and coloured by a heady mix of sights, sounds and smells. Newcomers and locals each tried to bring some order to these episodes and to navigate them according to their respective needs. While circumstances varied from beach to beach and from one experience to another, participants routinely performed a combination of customary, ritualistic, practices: signs of peace and friendship, exchanges of gifts, products and knowledge, sharing of food and drinks, demonstrations of weaponry, planting of gardens and sometimes acts of possession.¹ In different ways, they sought either to enter into a new relationship or to reaffirm and advance an existing but tenuous one. Indigenous communities often dealt with Europeans as with more familiar visitors, according to their usual protocols and sometimes by incorporating them into their existing relationships of exchange, while the voyagers sought to fulfil immediate needs—resources, respite and fieldwork—and to familiarise the ‘savages’ with European ‘civilisation’.² Given the mixed objectives, the process was never entirely smooth, nor was the experience entirely shared; often, it proceeded no further than a burst of shouts and spears from a distant shore. However, the protocols of contact generally rendered meetings something which explorers could interpret and describe in a coherent report.³ The cross-cultural encounter might indeed be treated as a ritual.