Suchergebnisse

Beginning with an attempt to define "colonial times" and the "colonial past," this article examines the question of indigenous remembrance or remembrances of the past in the Pacific region—a subject that lies at the heart of the collaboration between disciplines of history and anthropology. The situations of the two main French colonies in the region—New Caledonia and French Polynesia—are quite different. What is similar is that, in both cases, indigenous peoples do not seem very interested in the period of first contact with Western navigators, and both tend to cast the evangelical work of nineteenth-century missionaries in a positive light. But colonial experiences in the two places are given distinctly different representations. New Caledonia has a violent past, with opposition between Kanak groups and French settlers as well as between some groups of Kanak. For this reason, it is necessary for work of remembrance to take place before a strong path toward the future, in the spirit of the Matignon and Nouméa accords, can be developed. In French Polynesia, on the other hand, the colonial wars of the nineteenth century have only recently begun to be a subject of public interest, but the period of nuclear tests (1966–1996) is still fresh in the collective memory. This period is the main reason for the tension in French Polynesia's relations with the French State, which, for members of the independence movement (and others), makes it impossible to forget and difficult to forgive.

This article is both an introduction to this special issue of The Contemporary Pacific and a more general reflection about francophone research in the Pacific Islands and about their cultures and populations. The common topic of the essays selected here is the difficulty of maintaining an indigenous identity within the French colonial system in the French or francophone islands of the Pacific (New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna). Four contributions from contemporary scholars of New Caledonia and French Polynesia bring their research on the cultural, social, and political struggles of their interlocutors to better visibility for a broad, largely anglophone audience in Pacific studies. The Resources section, produced by the chief librarians of the University of New Caledonia and the University of French Polynesia, provides a very useful overview of bibliographic and research materials about these two territories. Putting things in broader perspective, this introduction discusses what may be a common denominator in research work produced by francophone scholars that makes it distinctly different from the work of Anglophones. As well, it raises the epistemological issue of the political commitment of researchers born in the francophone Pacific Islands or living there on a permanent basis.