From the Stacks: Islands and Beaches
Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a silent land: Marquesas 1774-1880 by Greg Dening (The Dorsey Press, 1980)
Appreciated by Elizabeth Stice
I first encountered Islands and Beaches in graduate school at the University of Hawaii in a course about history and anthropology. I knew nothing about Pacific history and probably had not even really heard of the Marquesas, even though they are the location for Melville’s Typee (he spent time there himself). That’s not surprising, because, in most cases, Pacific history gets overlooked. And when Polynesia does come up in Western culture, it’s as a place of escape. We think of Gaugin and Robert Louis Stevenson, off seeking something. Jack London met “Nature Man” (Ernest Darling) in Tahiti during his 1908 voyage—Darling wanted to live on coconuts and fruits and wear very little clothing and essentially “return to nature” and “escape civilization.”
But Polynesia is not an absence of the West, it has its own presence. One strength of Islands and Beaches is the introduction it offers to Marquesan history and culture for readers. The time period, 1774-1880, aligns with the arrival and increasing presence of Europeans (Aoe) and it catalogs the accompanying changes and the ways in which many of the original inhabitants (Enata) became alienated from their land and culture. Making use of beaches and beachcombers, Dening addresses the initial impressions of the islands by Aoe, the initial interactions between Aoe and Enata, and the short and long-term effects of that interaction. But this book is far more than another colonization narrative, even if it includes one.
Rather than utilizing the constructs typical to anthropology and history, Dening prefers to conceive of culture as being bound by metaphor and he resists the fixed models of scholarly inquiry. It is not only interesting reading, it is part of his argument. As he traces the changes in Marquesan culture, he identifies the ways in which the problems arose in part because older traditions became “culturally senseless” and lacked context, meaning, and justification (243). At the end of the day, this is a book “about knowledge.”
Islands and Beaches is an example of ethnohistory, “the bastard child of history and anthropology” (35). And like the liminal spaces of Marquesan beaches, this book seemingly exists on the boundaries of disciplines. That makes it hard to categorize, but conceptually very rich. It deserves to be read as widely as Clifford Geertz’s article on cockfighting. Anyone interested in theory or the study of culture, past and present, can get something from this book. Arguably, if Islands and Beaches was about a better known part of the world, it would already be better known itself. It could still easily become better known and is quite deserving of a reprint.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
