BRONWEN DOUGLAS

Recuperating Indigenous Women:

Female Sexuality and Missionary Textuality in Melanesia*

This paper is an ethnohistory of several interlinked projects to rescue and control

or discipline indigenous women in the island of Aneityum in Vanuatu in the mid-

nineteenth century.1 Textually, the most salient of the projects are missionary endeavors

to save and domesticate native women by controlling their bodies and disciplining female

sexuality and reproduction. The same texts also bear the obscure ethnographic imprint,

refracted through the prism of an often hostile missionary discourse, of unstable

indigenous controls on female sexuality, reproduction, labor, and life by high-ranking

men in ambiguous alliance with senior women and latterly in competition or collusion

with the sexual desires of resident European traders. Still more problematic and

conjectural are countersigns of women's efforts to control their own bodies and sexuality.

Finally, reflexively, my intention to write about nuanced, situated indigenous female

agency is doubly recuperatory – of past women and of textual traces of their actions.

Most of the representations considered were written by Evangelical missionaries,

leavened by a handful produced by other categories of colonial author and placed in

comparative critical relief by a modern indigenous history. Methodologically, the paper

rests on a careful investigation of the shifting interplay of signifiers, signifieds, and

referents – between colonial tropes, their ambiguous meanings, and the indigenous

actions and relationships they were intended to signify which in turn subtly inflected

colonial representations. The technique decenters colonial authors and exposes the
tensions, distortions, and linguistic sleights of hand in their texts to ethnohistorical
 2

critique and exploitation.2 Specifically, I interrogate the recurrent missionary stereotype

of pre-Christian Aneityumese women as inert victims of violent male domination and

predatory sexuality. This dominant trope jostles with vestiges of women's circumstantial

strategies adopted to serve their own barely decipherable, by no means consistent or

homogeneous ends. The strategies unearthed include "desertion," "prostitution,"

"promiscuity," "suicide," "violence," and "conversion."

Substantively, the paper considers a few episodes during a short period on a small

island which today is a footnote in an insignificant, struggling state.3 Yet Aneityum's

place in the early missionary tropology of the southwest Pacific far exceeded the island's

geopolitical or material significance.4 Moreover, that textual legacy speaks to wider

methodological, discursive, ethical, and comparative questions. Thus, the paper addresses

the key methodological issue of how to excavate traces in dominant texts of the actions of

historically-suppressed categories of persons, in this case indigenous women (Foucault's

"archaeology"). It does so in terms of the discursive issue of relationships between

"subjected knowledge" about women's actions and the systems of male control and

colonial discipline in which it was enmeshed (Foucault's "genealogy").5 In the process, I

grapple with ethical issues raised by the recuperation of horrific representations of

indigenous male violence against women and by my own concern to identify

countersigns of the agency of women who have been variously objectified by violence,

lust, and missionary victimology. The paper's final section draws comparatively on

accounts of similar practices in other parts of Melanesia in order to evaluate colonial or

indigenous explanations for the Aneityumese practice of making a naputu, "a person

killed on the death of another."6 The strangled widow is a central symbol in the heroic

missionary narrative of the redemption of indigenous women in Aneityum. She is also an

ambiguous figure in my dismantling and redeployment of that narrative to assemble a

provisional ethnohistory of women in Aneityum. Equivalent female figures feature in

colonial texts, ethnographies, and histories about places elsewhere in Melanesia and
 3

beyond, notably in Lata Mani's disturbing histories of colonial discourse on sati, widow

burning, in India. Like Mani, I seek to engage simultaneously with "the material and

discursive registers" of such accounts rather than indulge in a purely textual critique.7

Missionary Representations
Objectifying Women: "in a most degraded and pitiable state"

The Protestant mission on Aneityum was pioneered from 1841 by Polynesian

teachers sent by the London Missionary Society (LMS). The first permanent European

missionaries were the Nova Scotian Reformed Presbyterians John and Charlotte Geddie
who settled on the island in July 1848 and were joined in 1852 by the Scots John and

Jessie Inglis. Scattered through every genre of text written on Aneityum by Evangelical

missionaries are fulminations on the "degraded and pitiable state" and low status of pagan

indigenous women.8 For Evangelicals generally, "degradation" was a master trope in an

origin myth of universal human degeneration from original perfection, reworked as an

ethnological metanarrative of relative racial distance "from the original seats of

civilization and true religion."9 In the missionary schema considered here, degradation

was at once the generic state of "heathens" – amongst whom the Aneityumese, as

"Papuans" or "Melanesians," had supposedly "sunk" to "the very lowest strata of an

ignorant and degraded section of humanity"10 – and the peculiar condition of heathen

women in Aneityum. A then-unpublished letter by Charlotte Geddie provides the earliest

mention I have found of a key referent of degradation, the strangled widow: "They are a

very degraded people. Since I commenced this letter, I have heard of two women being

strangled on the death of their husbands,– this is a custom among them, but it is the first

instance that has taken place since our arrival." Charlotte mentioned such killings only

twice more in her extant correspondence.11

Charlotte's husband John was ultimately far less constrained. At first, his journal
and letters made only scattered references to indigenous women but by 1850 the
 4

purported status and treatment of females was a major concern, emblematic of the horrors

of heathenism and the licentiousness of the ungodly. "When we landed on the island," ran

Geddie's retrospective refrain, "women were viewed and treated as brutes;" "as an

inferior order of things;" "as little better than the brute creation." He routinely referred to

heathen women as "poor." "Our object all along," he asserted, "has been to elevate her to

the position to which God has assigned to her, as man's equal and companion." The

missionaries' wives were specifically "devoted to the improvement and elevation of the

degraded females."12 In an ethnographic overview written in 1850 or 1851, Geddie

essentialized in dismal terms the "degradation of the female sex" in Aneityum. "Woman"

was here "grievously dishonored and injured," was "made the victim of every species of

suffering," and was "despised and trampled upon." Inspiring "no demonstrations of

parental joy" at birth, often killed "at a tender age," a female had "no voice in the article

of marriage" and became "to all intents and purposes the slave of the husband,"

consigned to "drudgery and hard labor" and "immediately strangled" on his death. 13 In the

course of this paper, I chart a genealogy of Geddie's negative ethnographic wisdom about

Aneityumese women and plots its entanglement with ambiguous countersigns of

indigenous female agency and relationships.

The missionary concatenation of indigenous female "darkness and woe" was

condensed in two main signifieds of degradation: "brute" and "slave." I have elsewhere

considered the representation of pagan Aneityumese women/wives as "slaves,"

"drudges," or "beasts of burden."14 These contemptuous figures – standard colonial

stereotypes for indigenous women in Melanesia – alluded partly to the sexual division of

labor within indigenous marriage where women clearly did much of the routine garden

work. I identified shadowy imprints of the local relations of production which provoked

missionary disapproval and obscure hints of women's strategies and choices. In her
groundbreaking study of missionary representations of women in south Vanuatu,

Margaret Jolly saw "drudgery" as the primary Christian signified of the alleged
 5

degradation of Aneityumese women with its referent the fact "that they did hard manual

work outside the home." This emphasis matched her focus on the Protestant bourgeois

discourse of gendered "separate spheres" with its ideal of "wifely domesticity" and

largely unsuccessful strategies for the domestication of indigenous women.15 I argue by

contrast that "slave" was a secondary meaning of heathen female degradation for

missionaries in Aneityum. Their primary signified was "brute" and its main purported

referents were the strangled widow, the battered wife, and the prostituted wife, daughter,

or dependent.
There was a politics of representation in these, as in all texts. In their journals,

letters, reports, and books, missionaries forged a classic teleological Christian narrative of

a Manichaean battle. It would tell, anticipated Geddie, of "the contest between the

darkness and light" in which, thanks to "a vigorous agency and the divine blessing,"

"truth must and will triumph at last."16 There was also a pragmatic, formulaic element to

all public missionary texts, designed to titillate and encourage rather than appall or

dishearten the metropolitan faithful on whose contributions mission work depended,

while confirming that their money was well spent. Evidently, missionary tropes for

indigenous people must not be read literally but neither should they simply be discarded

as ideologically offensive. Rather, such tropes can be disassembled to reveal oblique

traces of the indigenous actions and social arrangements which partly generated them.

Women as Victims: "regarded as brutes, and treated as such"

In Evangelical discourse on Aneityum, the several interrelated referents of brute

clustered about the core assertion that "poor" heathen women, (almost always nameless),

were helpless, passive victims of rigid heathen customs, of the arbitrary violence of

dominant local males, and of the "licentiousness" and "depravity" of European traders.

Pre-eminent amid "the cruel and abominable rites and customs of heathenism" was the
"horrid practice of strangling."17 For more than a year after his arrival on the island,
 6

Geddie's extant texts referred to the theme of female degradation only incidentally or by

insinuation. In sharp contrast, other briefly resident and visiting missionaries made

explicit claims about the incidence of strangling during that year or recounted specific

episodes. Table 1 juxtaposes Geddie's remarkable silences with other missionaries'

references to two such occasions in August and September 1849. During the same period,

Geddie's colleague Thomas Powell recorded in chilling detail the most confronting of all

the narratives of widow strangling in Aneityum, prefaced by the claim that "eight women,

to our knowledge, have been strangled during our residence here." Powell's is the only
certain eyewitness account of the actual procedure of strangulation, though a vivid

reminiscence by a trader who had evidently resided in Aneityum in the 1850s might have

been based on personal observation.18 Geddie made no such claim.

(a) Selwyn cf. Geddie (b) Murray and Hardie cf. Geddie

Selwyn: "[Aug. 1849] As I walked along the
villages on the West side of the Island, I saw a
party sitting on a fallen tree in deep mourning,
i.e. with their naked skins painted black, and on
enquiring the name of the person who had died,
Mr Geddie ascertained that it was a young chief
of some rank, and that his widow, according to
custom, had been strangled. Among the
mourners sat the executioner, her own
brother."19
Geddie: "Aug 28th ... During the Bishop's visit
I accompanied him to the north side of the
island. We … walked home over the mountains.
Our visit was pleasant and the Bishop was
favourably impressed with the natives."20
Murray and Hardie: "[Sep. 1849] No
less than ten poor widows have been
strangled during the short space of about
twelve months; and one was added to the
number from a place at a short distance
from where the Missionaries lived, while
we were gone to visit the islands
beyond."21
Geddie: "Sept 8th The long looked for
'John Williams' has arrived at last. She
brings the Rev. Messrs Murray and
Hardie as a deputation to visit the
islands....
Sept 28th ... The 'John Williams' took her
final departure today."22

Table 1: Widow strangling absent and present in Geddie's and other Protestant
missionary texts, August-September 1849
 7

To reiterate, none of Geddie's extant texts mentioned the three episodes attributed

to August-September 1849 or gave figures for widows killed during the previous year.

Yet transforming the allegedly brutalized condition of women, epitomized in strangling,

became an axis of the teleological Christian narrativization of what Geddie called "the

struggle between christianity and heathenism" and the missionary-historian A.W. Murray

collapsed into 1850 and 1851 as the "period of transition from darkness to light."23 This

triumphal narrative is told in Murray's 1863 history and in the extant version of Geddie's

"Journal" which he reworked in the mid-1860s.24 Both braided momentous events culled
from Geddie's contemporary journals and letters into the story of a "mighty movement"

or "progress" made to culminate in November 1851 in what Murray labeled "the crisis"

and Geddie with hindsight called "a turning point in the history of the islands."25

The plot of the Christian narrative is the workings of "Divine power" effected

through a hierarchy of human "agency:" pre-eminently Geddie's own, seconded by his

wife, Polynesian teachers, and "native instrumentality."26 Its peak moments or junctures

are compressed into about thirty dramatic events – a strategic mix of trials and triumphs.

In Geddie's narrative of struggle between November 1849 and December 1851, twelve

junctures involve "works of darkness and cruelty"27 committed by violent men on the

passive bodies of female victims, usually set against intrepid rescue attempts by

missionaries and the local Christian party. Represented as objects of male violence,

indigenous women were also objectified in representation by male missionaries,

especially Geddie, who almost never mentioned women except as brutalized, dying, or

dead and actually named only one. His twelve narrative junctures involving women

include five separate episodes of actual or threatened strangling, twice of mothers rather

than widows, with attempted intervention by Geddie or his supporters, three times

successfully. There are also two suicide attempts by "cruelly treated" wives, one
successful. The narrative culminates in triumph when a minor chief died as a Christian

and "the subject of strangling his wife, according to native custom, was never
 8

mentioned."28 The "heathen," though, subverted the Christian script by continuing to

practice strangling for at least five years: from 1852 to 1857, Geddie himself recorded

four actual or attempted occurrences while the naturalist John MacGillivray, who spent

nearly a month in Aneityum in 1853, reported in November that "3 instances are known

to have occurred during the last 12 months." By 1857, the reiterated protest "that

strangulation may now be numbered among the things that were" was wearing somewhat

thin but an incident that year was the last reported.29

Historical Ethnography: "the horrid system of strangulation"

This exposition of part of the missionary construction of female degradation in

Aneityum and the narrative structure and strategies through which it was achieved shows

the flimsy empirical foundations of the textual edifice of the "horrid system of

strangulation," given the politics of narrativization and, in Murray's version, a heavy

reliance on Powell's single eyewitness account. Powell is supplemented only by three

detailed Geddie anecdotes – in two of which a strangling took place, not witnessed by

Geddie; an account by Charlotte Geddie of one of these episodes; and Murray's detailed

description of another successful intervention in mid-1852 involving Charlotte, some

traders, and the Christian party.30 Counterbalancing the formal missionary narrative are

the anonymous trader's description, two fleeting visitors' accounts, and a modern

indigenous commentary.31 Here is Powell's story:

[Following a man's death,] I said, "this woman must not be strangled." Several women joined me, and said,

"Oh, no; don't let her be strangled." I commenced leading her away; but immediately several young men,

her relatives, seized her, and attempted to lead her in the opposite direction. The women appeared to be

assisting me, and the confusion became so great, that they all fell together against a small hut, and knocked

it down. Again the poor woman was seized, and now all the men took to their clubs. Some seemed

determined to prevent the dreadful deed, and others still more determined on its accomplishment. A relation

of the poor woman's pushed me aside, and held up his club in a threatening attitude; and, by this time,
 9

another of her relations, a powerful young man named Maukavi, had seized her by the necklace, and

commenced strangling her therewith. The proper instrument had been taken off her neck.– I made an

attempt to interrupt the murderer, but he endeavoured to kick me, and gave a push with one hand, while he

held his victim with the other. Meanwhile, several were standing around with uplifted clubs, and one,

especially, behind me, ready to prevent effectually any interference on my part. I called aloud for the Chief

to come and forbid it, but in vain, and prudence dictated that I must stand aside and allow the fearful scene

to proceed, the particulars of which are too shocking to describe. The women who pretended to join me in

forbidding the death of this poor woman, held down her arms and legs while she was being murdered, and,
32
when the deed was done, commenced their awful lamentation.

The passage is perhaps especially unsettling because the protagonists in the killing are the

woman's own relatives and because women are treacherously complicit. Its impact is in

the chaotic, improvisational quality of the actions – a feature of accounts of strangling in

Aneityum, in contrast to the formal, ritualized cadence of colonial narratives on sati in

India or loloku (widow strangling) in Fiji.33 Textually, the episode was for Murray "but a

specimen of what frequently occurred in the early days of the mission when the teachers

or missionaries interposed to rescue poor creatures doomed to death."34 Yet as a singular

specimen in several respects it necessarily bore a heavy interpretive weight.

Ethnographically, the passage registered traces of how and by whom such killings

were done. Powell's enigmatic phrase "the proper instrument" was explained by Geddie:

"every woman wore around her neck the instrument of death.... a kind of stout cord of

native manufacture, so arranged that a moderate pull is sufficient to effect strangulation."

Potential Christians were required to "lay aside this emblem of their darkness and woe."35

The "strangler," explained Murray, ought to be "the woman's own son, if she had a son

old enough; if not, her brother, if she had a brother; or, if she had neither son nor brother,

her next of kin ... In some cases it was done by a daughter!"36 This and Powell's anecdote
 10

are two of only three references I have found to active female participation in strangling.

The other is the anonymous trader's depiction of the deed as an entirely female affair:

[the widow] rises to her feet and says she his ready to go with her husband .. finding the cords and putting

the Bight around her Neck .. and holds out the Ends in Each hand .. the Ends is taken by other woman .. and

tauhting [tautened?] up .. and Perhaps 3 or 4 woman on Each End will Pull away till Life his Extinct.

At this state of affairs .. these woman stranglers haves a Cry and a laugh .. and begins tying her up
37
in a mat for burial.

Every other perpetrator identified was a near male relative of the widow, suggesting that
her death was a prestation to her husband's family by her own kin or even by herself.

I came to the topic of strangulation in Aneityum secure that the textual corpus was

relatively rich. But deconstructing it has exposed a deeply partial, teleological narrative.

The imponderables in how many, how often, and what proportion of wives were

strangled on the death of their husbands are condensed in Powell's claim that the

missionaries knew of eight women strangled during their year's residence in the island

and "how many more it is impossible to say." A month later, Murray and Hardie gave a

figure of ten for much the same period but thought it likely there were more, "as the

Natives try to conceal their deeds of darkness from the Missionaries and Teachers, and

doubtless, they often succeed, especially in the remoter districts."38 Geddie's strategic

silences, anecdotes, and ambit claims,39 together with his pivotal role in the construction

of the Christian narrative as both historical source and historian, make his texts both

highly problematic and indispensable. Strangling clearly happened, perhaps routinely,

perhaps regularly, perhaps occasionally. I cannot be more specific. Nor could Philip

Tepahae, a long term field worker with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, chairman of the

custom council of Aneityum, a rigorous critical historian, and an authority on Aneityum

kastom ("custom"). On the one hand, custom stories generalized the killing of a wife on
the death of her husband as a binding obligation for her family: "there was a custom here
 11

that when a woman's husband died her brothers must come and kill that woman."

Conversely, he stressed that the stories contained few traces of the actual performance of

the custom.40

Female Sexuality
Conceptualizing Agency

There is an inherent irony in my appropriation of missionary texts to a search for

indigenous female agency because individual agency was also a key element in the

flexible Christian explanatory hierarchy of divine purpose, satanic subversion, and

individual free will. Heathens, as prisoners of Satan, exercised agency only for evil.

"Natives" might exercise agency, limited by their level of civilization, once their souls

had been infused by "the light of the glorious gospel, which is alone able to transform

them, and make them like human beings."41 European Christian women also exercised

agency but within a hegemonic discourse of domesticity which in principle consigned

them, often complicitly, to a private sphere at once idealized, dependent, devalued,

separate, and largely ignored in conversion narratives. Geddie sometimes did

acknowledge the agency of his wife, usually in connection with her work with local

women. This meant conceding that Charlotte was effectively the missionary during the

first year: "Our adherents are to be found chiefly among the women and young persons ...

Mrs Geddie spends much of her time in teaching the women and the cause has been

greatly advanced through her means. The women are in a great measure inaccessible to

us, and can only be reached through their own sex." He also allowed that Charlotte "has

perhaps been more directly instrumental than I ... in saving some of the poor females who

had been marked out as victims of degradation" by "licentious" white men.42 But the

missionary paradigm privileged certain Christian agency in the realization of "Divine

power." That of the male missionary-hero, cynosure of the classic conversion narrative,
 12

encompassed the agency of lesser actors such as missionary women, male teachers, and

male converts while teachers' wives and female converts hardly counted as actors at all.43

Agency in the Christian sense is "instrumentality" – the chosen means to effect

God's will. It is not agency in my secular, antipositivist sense which rejects the

philosophical subordination of human beings as objects of the inscrutable operation of

abstract causal forces. My position does not entail a modernist notion of the individual as

a bounded, autonomous subject or attribute intentionality to all human actions but it does

presume a general potential to desire, choose, and act strategically, historicized within the
limits and possibilities of unstable assemblages of culture, structure, personality, and

circumstance. Indigenous agency in this sense infiltrates and partly shapes colonial

representations and practices in subtle but significant ways. A quest for its imprints in

hostile texts which hardly allowed its possibility is not as quixotic as it might seem.

Missionaries knew vocationally that actions and words are the only humanly accessible

signs of what people think and feel. Accordingly, to edify the metropolitan faithful they

wrote much on local "conduct and habits."44 Moreover, like all authors, they strategically

juxtaposed varied constellations of voice and genre, underwriting anecdote and moral

with the seemingly detached authority of ethnography (see Table 2). Such narrative ploys

are doubly revealing. They exemplify the labored blend of apriority and contingency,

Providence and human instrumentality in Christian explanations. And they tempt

ethnohistorical exploitation by making "chinks" in the discourse in which the ambiguous

traces of indigenous actions and relationships are most likely to be found.45

Marriage in Aneityum

In mission texts on Aneityum, heathen indigenous women mostly figured as

wives – thereby eliding their personal and collective relationships as sisters, mothers,

daughters, aunts, nieces, friends … – and wife signified brute and slave. Yet this
relentlessly negative construction of heathen marriage is repeatedly subverted internally
 13

by countersigns of female actions, desires, and strategies. It was the qualified exercise of

female agency which necessitated a countervailing missionary discourse on indigenous

marriage: wives required not only rescue but control or discipline. For Evangelicals,

heathen agency was ipso facto perverse – diabolical – until transformed by grace: the

occasional hint of uncontrolled female sexuality was by definition satanic;46 the obstinate

complicity of women in their own immolation was enslavement to custom or public

opinion; the recourse of wives to suicide was at once a graceless act and a despairing

reflex of male brutality; the decision to become Christian was a providential impulse. For
missionaries (as, I assume, for Melanesians), strategic indigenous agency in my sense

was literally inconceivable but its countersigns abound in mission texts.

The glaring anomaly in missionary representations of indigenous women as

brutally enslaved in marriage – a key signified of "before" in their conversion narrative –

was evident in Geddie's earliest ethnographic pronouncement on the subject. His standard

assertion that "The wife is to all intents and purposes the slave of the husband" had an

odd corollary: "the marriage bond is but slightly observed by the female sex, who are thus

treated. Wives are constantly deserting their husbands, and taking up their abode with

other men."47 Fickle, mobile slaves! The countertrope of desertion became a core motif in

the discourse of marital discipline which jostled with that of rescue in the missionaries'

texts and by 1854 had largely supplanted it in their practical, by now mainly pastoral

agenda. Inglis, who arrived near the end of the initial conversion phase, paid lip service to

the trope that "in heathenism" women were "slaves," but he was more concerned about

"practical difficulties" with "the professedly Christian natives," particularly the problem

of "desertion of their husbands on the part of the women." He complained that a

"domestic quarrel" or "mere caprice" would see a wife abandon her husband and go "to

be a wife to some other man."48 He and Geddie described a kind of serial polyandry
motored by demographic imbalance which was in turn "a legacy bequeathed to us by

heathenism" – specifically widow strangling and female infanticide. The drastic shortage
 14

of women was further "aggravated" by "successive epidemics" between 1861 and 1866

which disproportionately afflicted women.49 In consequence, they "often forsook one

husband for another," making it "difficult to find on the island a woman under 30 years of

age who has not been the wife of several men." Inglis "knew one or two women who had

had as many as ten husbands."50 His confident ethnographic declaration on "the normal

state" of pre-Christian marriage conspicuously omits the earlier conventional missionary

equation, wife = brute or slave, and foregrounds the agency of wives:

[Arranged] marriages were generally celebrated when the girl was about sixteen or seventeen years of age.

The husband was generally much older than the wife. As a general rule she lived quietly with him, through

fear, for five or six years, till she reached the full vigour of womanhood, when she showed that she had a

will and a power of her own. She then began to cast her eyes on some vigorous young man of her own age,

of that class who could more than hold his own with her husband ...; they then eloped ... After a year or two

... the woman would quarrel with her new husband or he with her, and she would leave him and become the
51
wife of a third husband. This was ... the normal state of society. .

Given these concerns, which were evidently shared by indigenous men, it is

hardly surprising that "the first case of discipline in our infant church" was the members'

suspension of a woman who had "fallen into sin." While missionaries preferred moral

suasion, "chiefs," who had had to renounce their monopoly of women and "cast off" their

surplus wives in order to become Christian, endeavored to control female sexuality and

marital mobility via statute and penal sanctions. Their respective methods cleaved neatly

along the control/discipline fault line, as Inglis explained: "To prevent or restrict this evil

[sin], the Church plies all the moral means at her command [via warning, exhortation,

admonishment, reproof, suspension], while the State employs penal inflictions, and tries

to strike terror into the hearts of evil-doers [via hard labor, banishment, tying up,

flogging]." The "State," of course, was in this case indigenous, not colonial, but neither
State nor Church seems to have been notably successful in enforcing its agenda. In that
 15

year alone – 1876 – fifteen out of 370 odd church members at Inglis's station were

suspended for adultery, most of them evidently women.52

Missionaries clearly calculated indigenous marriage as a critical node where

important battles against the forces of evil would be fought and won. Much of what they

most deplored in heathen society hinged on marriage and its perceived functional

deficiencies and corollaries: child betrothal, polygyny, adultery, desertion by wives, the

poor nurturing, education, and disciplining of children, the sexual division of labor,

domestic violence, widow strangling, infanticide, demographic imbalance of the sexes,

promiscuity. "In these circumstances," said Geddie, "a regard for the social, political and

religious interests of the island" induced him and Inglis "to use our influence in

promoting judicious marriages among the natives" – discouraging unions where the age

difference was "unreasonable" and there was likely to be "absence of affection." Inglis

insisted that "We did what we could by advice to prevent unsuitable matches; but we

forced nothing."53 On their own admission, their success was considerably less than they

hoped, due partly (I think) to female intransigence as well as (they said) to "tenacious"

local determination to maintain endogamous alliance patterns: "owing to old notions,

customs, and traditions, all of heathen origin, but still possessing much vitality, especially

the principle, so rigidly carried out, that young women must be married in their own

tribes or within their own districts – ... many of their marriages are ill assorted, and often

aggravate these evils [adultery and the numerical discrepancy of the sexes] instead of

removing them."54

From an ethnohistorical perspective, I too find a battleground metaphor for

marriage useful, conceiving it as an actual and discursive locus of struggle to control or

discipline female bodies as sexual, reproductive, and productive resources. Protagonists

cleaved and blurred ambiguously and unsteadily along gender, ethnic, age, and class
lines, producing shifting, overlapping, circumstantial permutations of male and female,

European and indigenous, senior and junior, missionary and secular. However, I also
 16

maintain – in opposition to missionary tropes though not to the implications of some of

their action descriptions – that the utilitarian "battleground" metaphor is only partially

apt. It is fundamentally distorting to elide or disdain on principle the possibility of strong

and positive emotions in indigenous relationships, even the arranged polygynous

marriages between old men and young women so deplored by the missionaries.

Battered wives?

I alluded earlier to two other referents of the missionary trope of indigenous

Aneityumese women as brutes, aside from the institutionalized violence of widow

strangling: women, especially wives, were routinely described as victims of violent

domestic assaults and of the "licentiousness" and "depravity" of European traders, in

contention or complicity with local men. Geddie attributed two suicide attempts to "ill

treatment" of women "by their inhuman husbands,"55 but the texts contain few other

references to actual assaults on women. Those few are not incidental but are strategic

tokens in a conversion narrative. There is a horribly violent classic instance, reiterated

since as moral proof or "compelling" ethnographic sign of "violence towards women" in

Aneityum56 – Geddie's gory eyewitness description of injuries suffered by a woman

whose skull was shattered by her husband's club and whom Geddie rescued and nursed to

recovery.57 It served him as anecdotal support for the ethnographic assertion, sustained by

claims to personal knowledge and native corroboration, that men regularly used violence

to enforce obedience on their wives (see Table 2a).

I do not question the veracity of specific missionary claims of indigenous violence

against women – Geddie was not a liar. But their asserted typicality is problematic given

the heavy missionary investment in a before/after rhetoric of conversion. There are a few

muffled (male) dissenting voices which sometimes resonate with anomalies in the

missionary texts themselves. In a jointly-authored conference paper, Tepahae denied the

missionary assertion that female infanticide was commonly practiced and maintained that
 17

women, valued as mothers, "had similar status as men."58 In interviews with me, he

distilled images of women from custom stories which endorsed the claim of value

attributed to them but belied that of similar status: a woman is like a wild yam – "you

plant just one fruit and you get many;" a woman is like a jellyfish – soft, apparently

nothing, but "she can bear chiefs, big men or whoever." Tepahae said that his stories are

silent on wife-beating and insisted that "there was a strong prohibition against killing

women in warfare."59 For Geddie, however, it was merely a "peculiarity" and "almost

more than we could have looked for among savages" that "in fighting times they never
interfere with the women and children."60 The anonymous trader did not describe

indigenous women as victims of male violence but represented widow strangling as a

mainly female affair and – from a different but no less interested perspective – depicted

women as "libertines" who ripped off innocent sailors to their own and their "Lover"'s

benefit.61

On the basis of this congeries of texts, I cannot say how typical indigenous male

violence against women was on Aneityum. I share the conventional ethnological intuition

that it was a male-dominated world despite Tepahae's comment that his stories "never

describe women as having a different status [from men] or as worth nothing" and the two

instances he knew in which women occupied the position of natimarid, "high chief."62

Inglis thought he had the key: "With them men are everything, women are nothing....

[Unlike in Britain] there is no woman ... that is eligible to be a witch!"63 Yet in Tepahae's

custom stories, women often practiced magic and performed rituals to empower warriors,

expel "devils," prepare men for burial, make taro grow, punish erring chiefs, and kill

people.64 Here, Tepahae's considered critical reflection is more convincing than Inglis's

casual deprecation of a culture he despised and was committed to obliterating.

It seems very likely that marital and sexual violence generally was not unusual on
the island at this period but that men did much more of it than women and inflicted far

worse injuries. However, I challenge the ubiquitous missionary trope which classed
 18

heathen Aneityumese women as "hapless" victims whom only the "glorious gospel"

could transform into "human beings" – into "agents" in the Christian sense.65

Accordingly, Geddie's authoritative depiction of women as battered wives in Table 2a

interests me partly because of its textual linkage with a striking countersign of female

agency: the almost parenthetical remark that "some of the women are taking advantage of

the altered state of things." What he meant emerges in a much later version of the same

journal entry (Table 2b): women were exploiting the moral hobbling of their husbands by

Christianity to strike back, at times literally. The anecdote is an ethnographic imprint of

shifting regimes of control or discipline which variously sustained or contained the

gendered exercise of agency by both sexes, differently, given the single constant of men's

greater physical strength. Female agency – with a vengeance – was not to the taste of a

disapproving, misogynist missionary. Geddie's shifts in voice and emphasis between the

passages in Tables 2a and 2b are further indices of an alteration in missionary priorities

provoked in part by women's actions: from saving "poor creatures" from the uncontrolled

violence of Satanically-driven men to reinforcing the authority of disciplined Christian

men over unruly, ambiguous, and therefore dangerous women.

 19

(a) Contemporary Journal [1851] (b) Reworked Journal [1860s]

"When we landed on the island, females were "There have been complaints of late from
regarded as brutes, and treated as such. If a husbands about their wives. In some
woman dared to disobey the word of her instances they have gone so far as to beat
husband, or rather, master, a good clubbing their husbands [anecdote]. When we landed
was the consequence [ethnography]. I know on the island the poor women were in a most
of two instances in which women have been degraded and pitiable state. They were in
murdered in this way, and the natives say it every sense of the word slaves, and were
has been a common occurrence on this island. often treated in the most cruel manner. Their
On one occasion, I picked up a woman on unfeeling husbands beat them with clubs on
the shore, who had been beaten by her the slightest pretence, and sometimes killed
husband so severely with a club, that he them. As so deeply degraded were the poor
left her for dead. With the assistance of women, that the death of a woman, seemed
some natives, I brought her home, and to excite little or no emotion among her
attended her for several weeks. Her skull nearest relatives, when caused by the cruel
was awfully fractured, portions of the treatment of her husband [ethnography]. The
brain came away, and her body was tables are now turning. Those men who
otherwise dreadfully mangled. She embrace christianity must give up their
recovered, but will carry the marks of her barbarous practises and treat their wives
wounds to the grave. But when a man joins with humanity and kindness. Some of the
us, he is required to treat his wife as his women begin to take advantage of the
equal. Some of the women are taking altered state of things and to retaliate on
advantage of the altered state of things their husbands. There have been some
[anecdote]. The husbands come to me, and I unhappy family quarrels [anecdote]. it is
have sometimes to interfere in domestic unpleasant for us to interfere in domestic
matters, which is not pleasant. But the poor affairs. But society is just forming among
natives are like children, and I find them very these people and they expect us to direct
tractable [homily]."66 them [homily]."67
Table 2: Women as victims and agents in contemporary and later versions of
Geddie's journal entry of 23 December 1851

Prostitution?

The remaining zones of my quest for textual traces of indigenous Aneityumese

female agency – "prostitution," immolation, and suicide – variously engage the fraught
 20

ethical terrain of women's allegedly voluntary participation in such actions,68 and

foreground the tensions between the competing moral claims of humanism and cultural

relativism. The theme of sexual relations between indigenous women and European men

is a textual battleground for rival schools of European male objectification of women, one

of which strategically deployed a vocabulary of voluntarism. Missionary sensibilities

were consistently violated by this sexual traffic, especially Geddie's, whose prudery was

extreme even for a missionary and fed a more than usually vituperative repertoire of

euphemism for disapproved sex: a single passage includes "licentiousness," "ruin,"

"abominable" conduct, "vilest purposes," "concubines," "wicked pursuers," "depravity."

There was no room for female agency in this litany which objectified women as doubly

victimized by white lust and black cupidity: kidnapped by traders (exemplary incident

inserted), or "bought from their husbands and parents to become the concubines of the

white men," or sold by chiefs "without the knowledge or consent of their husbands."69

I neither contest nor confirm whether such things actually occurred though I have

no reason to disbelieve Geddie; Tepahae recounted one story in which a wife provided

sexual services for a visitor at her husband's request.70 My concern is with the moral

blinkers of a narrative which represents women's sexual relations with outsiders only in

terms of metaphors of kidnap and slavery. Other, visiting missionaries painted a more

mixed, ambiguous picture, placing local males in competition rather than complicit with

foreigners and allowing a modicum of female choice, though only in rejecting, not

accepting enticement "into sin:" "though many of them, no doubt, suffer great injury from

the example and seductive influence of their foreign neighbours, there are those who shun

them, and flee to the Missionaries and teachers, that they may escape the snares laid by

them to draw them into sin. This is especially the case with some of the poor females, and

the other sex complain bitterly of the shameful attempts of the foreigners to draw their
wives into sin."71 A different optic on "snares" might here read hints that some "poor

females" operated to their own agendas. Such an interpretation suits my inclination to

 21

strategic readings of all human actions though I am reluctant to align myself with the

politics of representation of those other interested players in the stakes of controlling

indigenous women, the European traders denounced by Geddie as ruthless defenders of

their sexual terrain against his wife's and his own "interfering."72

The sole extant trader text that I know of initially represented the sexual traffic in

terms of a discourse of libertarian agency, as an arena of female interest, desires, and

choice: "When i first lived on there Island i allways thought .. that the females fondness

for the European man .. was afection and a Dispositon on there part for Information but
alas my thoughts of latter days tells me how mistaken my Ideas where .. the one only

Cause in my beleif for this Conduct .. was a love of gains." But the author qualified his

own image of female sexual autonomy with an implication of manipulation by local men

– "pimping?" – which could recast "Libertanism" as "prostitution:" "for the female would

be tampered [tempted?] by her freind with what would be voluntary given her what she

would beg .. and what she would purlong [purloin] .. would all go to her freinds would be

in there way a Fortune Or Even a Lover."73 A more ethnographic take on this cryptic

passage might read an analogy between an Aneityumese women's conscientious,

prestigious responsibility for subsistence activities and the use of sex as a means to

acquire "a Fortune" for her "freinds" or "Lover." Agency is thereby reconfigured as

located ambiguously within shifting fields of cultural and strategic possibilities and

limitations, in which the same actions can be attributed signifiers with drastically

opposed signifieds in rival discourses. Contrast the following passage by Geddie, who

mapped a similar circumstantial terrain to that of the trader in very different terms: "It has

been the custom of the sandel wood traders to purchase females from their friends for

licentious purposes. Almost every white man among them has his woman. These they

consider their special property and sell them to one another. I am well acquainted with a
native woman on this island who was sold at auction and purchased by a Tahitian with

whom she still lives. All the sandel wood vessels that I know are floating brothels."74
 22

To acknowledge multiple possibilities is not to abdicate moral engagement but to

call for negotiation of a committed middle ground. I am repelled by a notion of

untrammeled choice which entails women's unwitting exposure to diseases which can

render infertile and kill disgustingly. Yet I am also repelled by Geddie's doctrinaire

objectification of women in seeming collusion with local "chiefs." The last-cited passage

anticipated his account of the enactment of Aneityum's "first statute law" in 1854 by "a

meeting of the chiefs" who aimed "to abolish for ever the revolting practise of selling

native women to white men." It was no doubt, as Geddie wrote, "creditable to the chiefs
... that their first laws should be for the protection of women and the suppression of a vile

slavery" but neither he nor the "chiefs" were disinterested players in the affair.75

Autosacrifice?

The moral paradox of voluntarism is sharpest in relation to the strangling of

women on the death of their husband or less often their son and the reiterated claim in

colonial texts that women were often "bent upon being put to death" – strangulation

blurring thus into suicide. Such persons were called naputu in Anejom, the language of

Aneityum. For missionary authors, nothing so betokened the "strange power which

systems of heathen superstition exert over their votaries!"76 It is easier to caricature a now

alien evangelical discourse than to grapple with the past human desires and suffering it

encoded or the very practical moral and physical dilemmas its authors confronted. By late

1850, Geddie claimed successful intervention in two cases of attempted strangulation. In

the first, a widow was forcibly "saved" by a leading member of the Christian party who

was said to have intimidated "the stranglers" with the threat, "'If you kill the woman we

will kill you,'" and then physically thwarted her heartrending plea "to be allowed to go to

the bush and strangle herself."77 The second case had no such moral ambiguities but does

hint at a marital affection which missionaries consistently denied to heathens. A man

begged Geddie to "save his wife" as "his son was dying, and the mother's relations had
 23

come to strangle her." Told by Geddie "that they would have to answer to God for the

woman's life, at the last tribunal" – no small threat to people whose spirits routinely

punished disapproved human behavior – the "strangling party" abandoned their design.

"The boy died, but," said Geddie with satisfaction, "the mother was saved."78

These episodes inspired the following summary in which Geddie's conventional

missionary rhetoric of anticipated conversion, with its key trope of heathen subservience

to the Satanic dictates of custom, jostles with an acknowledgement of contingency,

variety, and circumscribed agency in women's attitudes to "the horrid practice:"

You will be surprised to hear that many of the poor degraded women are themselves the most opposed to

the abolition of the horrid practice. Some of the old women especially are much enraged at me on account

of the stand which I have taken against it.– When they are now told that if they survive their husbands they

will not be put to death they cannot control their anger. Some who used to be friendly before will not speak

to me now when they meet me. But this feeling is not universal. Many women also hail christianity as the
79
means of their deliverance from temporal as well as spiritual degradation and misery.

I too take the evident eagerness of many women to become Christian as perhaps

involving a strategic choice to avoid becoming a naputu. "The prospects which

christianity holds out beyond the grave" for reunion with loved ones – a key attraction of

Christianity in Aneityum – were perhaps especially enticing to such women. In

indigenous conception, by contrast, only those who went simultaneously to the place of

the spirits stayed together there, hence the need for a widow to be made a naputu at the

time of her husband's death.80

One woman who did join the Christian party was reportedly so badly treated by

her "heathen" husband that she "attempted to strangle herself" but was "happily rescued

before life was extinct." This passage bristles with ambiguity: on the one hand, the

woman was doubly objectified by male brutality and rescue against her will; on the other,
since suicide in Evangelical etiology involved agency and choice, she was an actor
 24

callously deplored for "her darkness and her wickedness" – "we were shocked at the

conduct of the unhappy woman. May God enable her in future to bear her trials with

more piety."81 I am deeply ambivalent about classing suicide as a form of agency but

accept the possibility that indigenous conceptions of death or the afterlife might make

suicide an aggressive strategy for revenge and redress by the relatively powerless rather

than, or as well as, a reflex of despair. Such has been reported ethnographically elsewhere

in Melanesia and is conceivable in modern psychological terms, though regarded as

pathological.82 Wives, claimed Geddie, "often terminate their sufferings in this world by
laying violent hands on themselves." That suicide was conceived as a drastic form of

desertion – a strategy to punish violent husbands rendered effective by the scarcity and

value of women – was perhaps implied in the one other, successful attempt reported in

the mission texts. In this case the husband thus abandoned by his "cruelly treated" wife

purportedly "sought to honour" – or appease? – "her in death. A young man and a little

girl were put to death as a nabutu on the occasion."83

This indication that the sacrifice of human beings on the death of another person

was not confined to widows was acknowledged by Geddie: "Mothers are often strangled

when a son dies … two women … [were] strangled when a child of some rank died". It is

confirmed in Inglis's definition of naputu as "a person killed on the death of another."

Murray said it meant "offering, or sacrifice."84 Naputu is the substantive of the active

verb aputu, translated by Inglis as "to kill or strangle a man's wife when he dies, to follow

her husband." Tepahae glossed naputu similarly: when a man died "the woman's side ...

must kill his wife" or be "shamed" and the wife "must follow him."85

Missionaries, because they wanted to live and work with and change

Aneityumese, spent a lot of words trying to invest strangulation with meaning in

immediate human terms, apart from the, to them, self-evident explanation of Satanic
control. Murray said that "destruction of life and property was the usual mode of

expressing sorrow and honouring the departed, when persons of consequence died," and
 25

that "the thing must be done ... else the whole family ... would incur lasting disgrace."86

Most commentators agreed that the "avowed reason" for strangling was so that the

husband or son should not go alone and untended to the "land of the dead."87 Inglis's

second meaning of the verb aputu, "to follow her husband," makes the widow an actor,

semantically at least. This was allowed by a few contemporary observers in the shape of

consolation, if not titillation, that a "loving" wife should perform an ultimate "act of

devotion" to her husband.88 James Lawrie, a missionary in Aneityum in the 1880s,

condensed the ambiguous agency of women as naputu into a laconic ethnographic

sentence that linked the push of shame with the pull of affection: "The widows wished

this, as they would, if allowed to live, have been disgraced and chided by the dead man's

friends; also the belief that they would live together hereafter."89 There are anecdotal

traces of agency, both female and male, scattered through the custom stories recounted to

me by Tepahae. Yet my efforts to inject the theme of female agency into discussions

about naputu were skirted by him as irrelevant to stories on that subject, though he

affirmed parenthetically the theoretical possibility that a woman might actively seek to be

a naputu out of affection and grief or to advance the interests of her family.90

Configured as an act of female duty or devotion, however "deluded,"91 or reduced

to a heathen reflex, strangulation could be conceptually and emotionally encompassed by

a nineteenth-century Christian discourse and made subject to control or discipline.

Infused with a hint of women's agency or sexual desire, as in the following diatribe by

Geddie, it evidently threatened to burst the confines of the hegemonic discourse:

some of the heathen continue obstinate still. A heathen woman, the mother of one of my school boys, long

opposed us on the ground that if her husband died she would not be strangled. Her husband did die, and her

life was saved by force. She now holds out on the ground that if she embraces the gospel she will go to

heaven after death and thus be seperated for ever from her husband who she supposes to be in hell. She is a
 26

bad woman however and much of what she says is false. Her carnal mind is enmity against God and this is
92
the true cause of her opposition to the gospel.

I have quoted this passage elsewhere as exemplar of creative indigenous appropriation of

Christian categories and concepts. But I struggle to deploy it in a discussion of agency,

control, and discipline. How, as an anti-objectivist historian, a human rights advocate, a

feminist, a cautious cultural relativist, do I grapple with the frightening paradoxes of

rescue, "by force," of women who were said to want to die on another's death,

presumably at least in part because to be a widow was inconceivable or unendurable?

Because I am a cultural relativist and respect Tepahae's customary and historical

expertise, I leave him the last word though it raises other, no less thorny ethical questions.

He listed three reasons for making naputu, two already mentioned: belief in the need for

two people to die together so as to be together in the land of the spirits; and the shame

which would accrue to the woman's family if the deed were not done. Similar grounds

were cited by ethnographers for the practice of widow killing elsewhere in Melanesia. In

pre-Christian Fiji, the term loloku referred particularly to the strangling of the widows,

sometimes the mother, and the closest friend of a high-ranking man in order to avoid his

"going into the world of spirits unattended." The perpetrators were family members or

children of the strangled person. The missionary-ethnographer Thomas Williams thought

they were motivated "more by self-interest than affection" and "by fear of the survivors

rather than respect for the dead.93 Among the Sengseng and Kaulong of northwest New

Britain, Papua New Guinea, a woman expected that on the death of her husband she

would be strangled by "her own close male kin," usually her brothers who were under

obligation both to their sister and to their affines to do the deed. The practice was linked

with extreme sexual puritanism and insistence on the "permanence of marriage" even

after death, meaning that a widow had to join her dead husband "in the afterlife." With
the suppression of the practice by colonial authorities, Kaulong men sometimes feared
 27

that their widowed sister would commit suicide and hastened to "pay her husband's kin

for their sister's shame resulting from the implication that she will remain sexually active

after her husband's death;" men generally "expressed relief" at being released by an

external power from the "emotionally shattering" obligation to kill their sisters or

mothers.94 A similar rationale and similar perpetrators were also cited with respect to the

people of Kaliai in northwest New Britain: sometimes the elderly widow of a big man

was ritually killed "at her request, by her own kin so that she might live in the spirit world

with her husband" and avoid future dependence on or neglect by her children.95
Tehahae's third reason for naputu, especially problematic from a human rights

standpoint because of its materialist connotations, was "in order to pay for a piece of the

husband's ground, over which the widow's family thereby acquired full rights." The plot

of land where Tepahae lived in 1997 was obtained thus by his wife's family but he

considered the fact that he knew of few other such plots to be a strong argument against

the customary prevalence of naputu.96 Likewise in Fiji, "another motive" for loloku

according to Williams was the desire of "the friends and children of the woman ... to

secure landed property belonging to the husband, to obtain which they are ready to

sacrifice a daughter, a sister, or a mother."97 Martha Macintyre reported in similar vein

that in the precolonial Lihir Islands, now in New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea,

the sacrifice of a woman on the death of her husband could effect the transfer of land

from his clan to hers. Macintyre cited the modern testimony of an old, uneducated

woman who "spoke of past practices as treating women as if they were pigs who could

not speak or choose to die of old age."98 Macintyre said that the only named plots in Lihir

are those named for women by whose immolation they were acquired.99

Tepahae's third interpretation reconfigures the Aneityumese widow's "sacrifice"

as something other or more than an act of duty or devotion to her husband or customary
enslavement. Depending on the agency accorded or denied her, I see two possible

readings, not mutually exclusive: that the act was her gift to her own kin; or that it was a
 28

forfeiture of human life by those kin for material gain. In practice, always multiplex and

muddled, either or both were likely.

Conclusion
Missionary narratives were built out of canonical key events – Murray's

"specimens" – which their authors systematically arranged to chart the progressive

workings of Providence in the world via human instrumentality. I share little or nothing

of their epistemology, their etiology, their teleology, or their faith, but their "specimens,"

together with the ethnographic trifles and indigenous countersigns which litter their texts
and are disclosed by an archaeological investigation, are susceptible to genealogical

critique, appropriation, and exploitation in the interests of other narratives written from

other premises for other purposes. In this project, knowledge about prevailing imperial

discourses and the individual personalities of authors provides templates for positioning

colonial stories of observation, encounter, and experience so as to identify and decode the

traces of indigenous agency which were sedimented in and often profoundly, if

surreptitiously, shaped colonial representations. Past Aneityumese women and men made

subtle imprints in the content and meanings of missionary tropes and representations as

well as in the strategies missionaries adopted to convert and civilize the heathen and

construct a narrative about it.

 29

Notes

* I am deeply grateful to the late Philip Tepahae of Uje village in Aneityum for

generous hospitality, for taking me to see historical sites, and for patiently recording

many hours of kastom stories and historical discussion in Bislama.

1. Aneityum is the southernmost island in the former New Hebrides which became a

Franco-British colony in 1906 and the independent republic of Vanuatu in 1980.

2. See Bronwen Douglas, "Encounters with the Enemy? Academic Readings of

Missionary Narratives on Melanesians," Comparative Studies in Society and History

43 (2001): 37-64. For congruent postcolonial and feminist historical strategies, see

also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and

Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000); Ranajit Guha, Dominance without

Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Lata Mani,

Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, 1998); Ann

Laura Stoler, "'In Cold Blood': Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial

Narratives," Representations 37 (1992): 151-88.

3. See Bronwen Douglas, "Christian Citizens: Women and Negotiations of Modernity in

Vanuatu," Contemporary Pacific 14 (2002): 1-38.

4. Aneityum was the first island in the New Hebrides to be regularly visited and settled

by outsiders: sporadically by traders and whalers and permanently from 1841-88 by

Polynesian, Canadian, and Scottish missionary families. By 1854 most Aneityumese

professed Christianity and by 1860 almost all did so; see Bronwen Douglas, Across

the Great Divide: Journeys in History and Anthropology (Amsterdam, 1998), 233-44.

They were the only Melanesians outside Fiji to convert en masse to Evangelical
Christianity until the late nineteenth century and popular mission histories devoted
 30

substantial sections to the edifying drama of Aneityumese conversion; see A.W.

Murray, Missions in Western Polynesia (London, 1863), 17-132; Robert Steel, The

New Hebrides and Christian Missions (London, 1880), 93-128.

5. In a lecture to the Collège de France on 7 January 1976, Michel Foucault defined

"archaeology" as "the appropriate methodology" for the "analysis of local

discursivities" and "genealogy" as "the tactics whereby ... the subjected knowledges

which were thus released would be brought into play;" quoted in Ann Laura Stoler,
Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial

Order of Things (Durham, NC, 1995), 60.

6. John Inglis, A Dictionary of the Aneityumese Language (London, 1882), 96.

7. Mani, Contentious Traditions, 159.

8. John Geddie, "Journal," 23 Dec. 1851, in R.S. Miller, Misi Gete: John Geddie,

Pioneer Missionary to the New Hebrides (Launceston, TAS, 1975), 113.

9. John Inglis, "Extracts from Report of a Missionary Tour in the New Hebrides &c., on

Board H.M.S. Havannah, in 1850," Scottish Presbyterian [SP] 65 (1852): 561.

10. Inglis to ?, 7 Apr. 1851, SP 60 (1851): 375; John Inglis, In the New Hebrides:

Reminiscences of Missionary Life and Work, Especially on the Island of Aneityum,

from 1850 till 1877 (London 1887), 5, 87, 100.

11. C. Geddie to ladies of Pictou, [Oct. 1848], in Letters of Charlotte Geddie and

Charlotte Geddie Harrington (Truro, Nova Scotia, 1908), 23; C. Geddie to Friends, 16

Sep. 1851, Missionary Register of the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia [MR] 3

(1852): 85; C. Geddie to Mrs James Waddell, 16 Sep. 1851, in Letters, 25.
 31

12. Geddie, "Journal," 2 Jan., 23 Dec. 1851, MR 3 (1852): 134, 188; Geddie, "Journal," 1

Mar. 1851, in Miller, Misi Gete, 83; Geddie to Board of Foreign Missions [BFM], 22

Jul. 1852, MR 4 (1853): 4; Geddie to Bayne, 2 Aug. 1854, MR 6 (1855): 22.

13. John Geddie, "The Inhabitants of Aneityum," MR 3: 7-9, 19-22, 36-7, 83-4.

14. Bronwen Douglas, "Provocative Readings in Intransigent Archives: Finding

Melanesian Women," Oceania 70 (1999): 111-29.

15. Margaret Jolly, "'To Save the Girls for Brighter and Better Lives': Presbyterian

Missions and Women in the South of Vanuatu, 1848-1870," Journal of Pacific History

26 (1991), 31-40.

16. Geddie to BFM, 2, 3 Oct. 1850, MR 2 (1851): 89, 100.

17. A.W. Murray and Charles Hardie, "Extracts from the Journal of the Rev. Messrs.

Murray and Hardie, of a Voyage in the 'John Williams' to the New Hebrides and New

Caledonia Groups, in September and October, 1849," MR 1 (1850): 164; Geddie to

BFM, 3 Oct. 1850, MR 2 (1851): 101.

18. Powell to ?, 3 Aug. 1849, MR 1 (1850): 165, orig. emphasis; Anon., "History of the

Paciffic" (n.d.), MS, Cambridge University Library, 11-12; both are quoted below.

19. Selwyn to his father, 15 Sep. 1849, in "Letters from the Bishop of New Zealand, and

Others," TS, Library of the Auckland Institute and Museum, vol. 1, 227, orig.

emphasis. George Augustus Selwyn, the Anglican Bishop of New Zealand who

founded the Melanesian Mission, engaged in regular peripatetic missionary activity in

the Western Pacific region from 1848.

20. Geddie, "Journal," 28 Aug. 1849, in Miller, Misi Gete, 56.

 32

21. Murray and Hardie, "Extracts," 164. A.W. Murray and Charles Hardie were LMS

missionaries on an annual tour of inspection of Evangelical missions in "Western

Polynesia," the region now known as Island Melanesia.

22. Geddie, "Journal," 8, 28 Sep. 1849, in Miller, Misi Gete, 57-8.

23. Geddie, "Journal," 1 Jan. 1851, MR 3 (1852): 134; Murray, Missions, 98

24. The extant manuscript of Geddie's "Journal," now in the National Library of

Australia, was neatly written in his hand on paper watermarked "1864." It was

published as his purportedly original journal by R.S. Miller in 1975 but is generally

abridged and more objective and reflective in tone than his contemporary accounts

published in mission periodicals, including journal fragments.

25. See Geddie, "Journal," 15 Jan. 1850-1 Jan. 1852, 1 Oct., 28 Nov. 1851, in Miller, Misi

Gete, 63-113, 75, 108; Murray, Missions, ch. 4, 75, 76, orig. emphasis.

26. See Geddie to ?, 11 Nov. 1851; Geddie to BFM, 1 Jan. 1852, MR 3 (1852): 100-1,

116; Geddie, "Journal," in Miller, Misi Gete, 64-5, 86, 114, 121; Murray, Missions, 45,

96, 131, orig. emphasis.

27. Murray, Missions, 68.

28. Geddie, "Journal," 28 Dec. 1849, in Miller, Misi Gete, 61; Geddie, "Journal," 3 Dec.

1851, MR 3 (1852): 186.

29. Geddie, "Journal," 13 June 1852, 7 June 1853, 20 Nov. 1854, 17 Mar. 1857, in Miller,

Misi Gete, 133, 156, 191, 230; John MacGillivray, "Voyage of H.M.S. Herald Under

the Command of Capt. H. Mangles Denham R.N. Being Private Journal Kept by John

MacGillivray Naturalist" (1853-5), MS, Admiralty Library, London, vol. 1, 92V; see
 33

also Murray, Missions, 45-7; A.W. Murray and J.P. Sunderland, "Extracts from the

Journal of Rev. Messrs. Murray and Sunderland," MR 4 (1852): 85.

30. Geddie, "Journal," 20 Nov. 1849, in Miller, Misi Gete, 59-60 (also in George

Patterson, Missionary Life among the Cannibals, Being the Life of the Rev. John

Geddie, D.D., First Missionary to the New Hebrides [Toronto, 1882], 221); Geddie,

"Journal," 15 Jan. 1850, in Miller, Misi Gete, 64-5 (also in Geddie to BFM, 3 Oct.

1850, MR 2 [1851]: 101); Geddie, "Journal," 15 Aug. 1851, MR 3 (1852): 167 (also in
Miller, Misi Gete, 96-7); C. Geddie to Friends, 16 Sep. 1851, MR 3 (1852): 85;

Murray, Missions, 45-7 (also in Geddie, "Journal," 7 June 1852, MR 5 [1854]: 21; 13

June 1852, in Miller, Misi Gete, 133).

31. Anon., "History," 11-12; J[ohn] M[acGillivray], "Scraps from Journals in the South-

West Pacific," Empire (Sydney), 28 April 1864; Selwyn to his father, 15 Sep. 1849, in

"Letters," vol. 1, 227-8; Philip Tepahae and John Lynch, "Kinship and Marriage in

Aneityum," unpublished paper presented to the conference on Violence and the

Family in Vanuatu, Port Vila, Vanuatu, 2-5 August 1994; taped interviews with Philip

Tepahae, Aneityum, Vanuatu, 11, 14, 19 Aug. 1997 (tapes and transcripts in author's

possession).

32. Powell to ?, 3 Aug. 1849, MR 1 (1850): 165, orig. emphasis.

33. See Lata Mani, "Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eyewitness Accounts of

Widow Burning," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and

Paula Treichler (New York, 1991), 392-408; Mani, Contentious Traditions, 161;

[Mary Wallis], Life in Feejee, or, Five Years Among the Cannibals (Boston, 1851),

67-9; Thomas Williams and James Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, ed. George Stringer
Rowe (New York, 1859 [1858]), 148-55.
 34

34. Murray, Missions, 45, my emphasis.

35. Geddie to BFM, 3 Oct. 1850, MR 2 (1851): 102. See also contemporary secular

accounts of the "instrument of death" by the anonymous trader and by Philip Vigors,

an English visitor; Anon., "History," 11-12; Philip D. Vigors, "Private Journal of a

Four Months Cruise Through Some of the 'South Sea Islands,' and New Zealand in

H.M.S. 'Havannah'" (1850), TS, Library of the Auckland Institute and Museum, 75-6.

36. Murray, Missions, 42-3, orig. emphasis.

37. Anon., "History," 11-12.

38. Powell to ?, 3 Aug. 1849, MR 1 (1850): 165; Murray and Hardie, "Extracts," 164.

39. MacGillivray asserted, evidently on Geddie's authority, that "11 widows were

strangled" in the first year; MacGillivray, "Voyage," vol. 1, 92V.

40. Interviews with Tepahae, 11, 19 August 1997.

41. C. Geddie to her parents, 18 Oct. 1853, in Letters, 35; see Helen Gardner, "Reading

Widow Strangling Narratives from Vanuatu and Fiji," in Messy Entanglements: The

Papers of the 10th Pacific History Association Conference, Tarawa, Kiribati, ed.

Alaima Talu and Max Quanchi (Brisbane, QLD, 1995), 122-3 .

42. Geddie, "Journal," 1 Oct. 1850, 12 Mar. 1851, in Miller, Misi Gete, 75, 86.

43. The entangled encompassment of female by male and savage by civilized epitomizes

the conventional, hierarchizing logic of Western binaries.

44. Geddie to BFM, 2 Oct. 1850, MR 2 (1851): 88.

45. Ranajit Guha, "The Prose of Counter Insurgency," Subaltern Studies 2 (1983): 13; see

also Douglas, Across the Great Divide, 159-91.

 35

46. "Satan has indeed been raging terribly on my side of the island this year," wrote Inglis

in 1876 to preface a lament about the high number of suspensions of female church

members for adultery; John Inglis, "Christian Work in Aneityum: Report Read at

Annual Meeting of the New Hebrides Mission Synod, Held at Nguna, June 12th

1876," Reformed Presbyterian Magazine (Dec. 1876): 418-19.

47. Geddie, "Inhabitants," 20-1, my emphasis.

48. Inglis, "Extracts," 556; Inglis to Bates, 12 Aug. 1853, SP 92 (1854): 643-4; Inglis, In

the New Hebrides, 271; John Inglis, Bible Illustrations from the New Hebrides with

Notices of the Progress of the Mission (London, 1890), 284.

49. The first missionary census taken in 1854 counted 600 fewer women than men in a

total population of about 4,000; Geddie to Bayne, 2 Aug. 1854; Geddie to BFM, 3

Oct. 1854, MR 6 (1855): 22, 125. In 1876, Inglis reported that "there are only sixty-

three females for every hundred males, and only thirty-four unmarried females for

every hundred unmarried males;" Inglis, "Christian Work," 419.

50. Geddie to BFM, 3 Oct. 1854, MR 6 (1855): 125; Inglis, Bible Illustrations, 163.

51. Inglis, Bible Illustrations, 162-3, my emphasis.

52. Geddie, "Journal," 4 Apr. 1853, 7, 10 July 1854, in Miller, Misi Gete, 154, 184-5;

Inglis, "Christian Work," 418-19.

53. Geddie to BFM, 3 Oct. 1854, MR 6 (1855): 125; Inglis, Bible Illustrations, 168.

54. Inglis, "Christian Work," 419; Inglis, Bible Illustrations, 162, 168.

55. Geddie, "Journal," 28 Dec. 1849, in Miller, Misi Gete, 61; Geddie, "Journal," 2 Jan.

1851, MR 3 (1852): 134.

 36

56. Jolly, "'To Save the Girls,'" 42; Patterson, Missionary Life, 307; Matthew Spriggs,

"Vegetable Kingdoms: Taro Irrigation and Pacific Prehistory," unpublished PhD

thesis, Australian National University (Canberra, 1981), 62-3.

57. Geddie, "Journal," 23 Dec. 1851, MR 3 (1852): 188.

58. Tepahae and Lynch, "Kinship and Marriage," 12-13.

59. Interviews with Tepahae, 11, 15 Aug. 1997.

60. Geddie to BFM, 3 Oct. 1850, MR 2 (1851): 102; Geddie, "Journal," 28 Nov. 1851, in

Miller, Misi Gete, 108.

61. Anon., "History," 9, 13-14.

62. Interviews with Tepahae, 11, 15 Aug. 1997. James Lawrie, a Free Church of Scotland

missionary in Aneityum in the 1880s, also allowed that "on rare occasions" there were

"female chiefs;" see James H. Lawrie, "Aneityum, New Hebrides," in Report of the

Fourth Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science Held

at Hobart, Tasmania, in January, 1892, ed. A. Morton (Sydney, 1892), 710.

63. Inglis, Bible Illustrations, 34.

64. Interviews with Tepahae, 11, 15 Aug. 1997; Philip Tepahae, "Stori blong Kawuna,"

audiotape, Aneityum, Vanuatu, 19 Aug. 1997.

65. C. Geddie to ladies of Pictou, [Oct. 1848]; C. Geddie to her parents, 18 Oct. 1853, in

Letters, 23, 35.

66. Geddie, "Journal," 23 Dec. 1851, MR 3 (1852): 188, my emphasis

67. Geddie, "Journal," 23 Dec. 1851, in Miller, Misi Gete, 113, my emphasis.

68. See Mani, "Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts;" Mani, Contentious Traditions, 168-80.
 37

69. Geddie, "Journal," 20 Oct. 1849, in Miller, Misi Gete, 59.

70. Interview with Tepahae, 11 Aug. 1997.

71. Murray and Hardie, "Extracts," 164.

72. Geddie, "Journal," 12 Mar. 1851, in Miller, Misi Gete, 86.

73. Anon., "History," 13-14.

74. Geddie, "Journal," 4 July 1854, in Miller, Misi Gete, 184.

75. Geddie, "Journal," 10 July 1854, in Miller, Misi Gete, 185.

76. Murray, Missions, 43.

77. Geddie, "Journal," 15 Jan. 1850, in Miller, Misi Gete, 64-5; Geddie to BFM, 3 Oct.

1850, MR 2 (1851): 101.

78. Geddie to BFM, 3 Oct. 1850, MR 2 (1851): 101; Douglas, Across the Great Divide,

233-44.

79. Geddie to BFM, 3 Oct. 1850, MR 2 (1851): 102.

80. Geddie, "Journal," 29 Mar. 1851, in Miller, Misi Gete, 88; interview with Tepahae, 11

Aug. 1997; Douglas, Across the Great Divide, 239-40.

81. Geddie to BFM, 3 Oct. 1850, MR 2 (1851): 102; Geddie, "Journal," 2 Jan. 1851, in

Miller, Misi Gete, 80.

82. See Dorothy Ayers Counts, "Fighting Back is Not the Way: Suicide and the Women

of Kaliai," American Ethnologist 7 (1980): 332-51; Dorothy Ayers Counts, "Revenge

Suicide by Lusi Women: An Expression of Power," in Rethinking Women's Roles:

Perspectives from the Pacific, ed. Denise O'Brien and Sharon W. Tiffany (Berkeley,
 38

1984), 71-93; Maurice Leenhardt, Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian

World, tr. Basia Miller Gulati (Chicago, 1979 [1947]), 36-40.

83. Geddie, "Journal," 2 Jan. 1851, MR 3 (1852): 134; Geddie, "Journal," 28 Dec. 1849,

in Miller, Misi Gete, 61.

84. Geddie to BFM, 3 Oct. 1850, MR 2 (1851): 101; Inglis, Dictionary, 96, my emphasis;

Murray, Missions, 52.

85. Inglis, Dictionary, 61; interview with Tepahae, 11 Aug. 1997. Today, naputu means

"feast after funeral;" see John Lynch and Philip Tepahae, Anejom Dictionary:

Diksonari Blong Anejom: Nitasviitai a Nijitas Antas Anejom (Canberra, 2001), 182.

86. Murray, Missions, 41, 43, orig. emphasis.

87. Inglis, In the New Hebrides, 31; Murray, Missions, 47; see also Anon., "History," 13;

Geddie, "Inhabitants," 21; Inglis, Bible Illustrations, 287; M[acGillivray], "Scraps;"

Murray and Sunderland, "Extracts," 85.

88. Anon., "History," 13; Selwyn to his father, 15 Sep. 1849, in "Letters," vol. 1, 227-8.

89. Lawrie, "Aneityum," 709-10.

90. Interview with Tepahae, 11 Aug. 1997.

91. Murray, Missions, 43.

92. Geddie, "Journal," 26 Aug. 1852, in Miller, Misi Gete, 140.

93. Williams and Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, 148, 157.

94. Ann Chowning, "Culture and Biology among the Sengseng of New Britain," Journal

of the Polynesian Society 89 (1980): 15-18; taped interview with Ann Chowning,
Honiara, Solomon Islands, 27 June 1998; Jane Goodale, To Sing with Pigs is Human:

The Concept of Person in Papua New Guinea (Seattle, WA, 1995), 23, 176-7.
 39

95. Counts, "Fighting Back is Not the Way," 342-3; Counts, "Revenge Suicide," 81.

96. Interview with Tepahae, 11 Aug. 1997; Tepahae and Lynch, "Kinship and Marriage,"

12.

97. Williams and Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, 157-8.

98. Martha Macintyre, "'Hear Us, Women of Papua New Guinea!' Melanesian Women

and Human Rights," in Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia-Pacific Perspectives,
ed. Anne-Marie Hilston, Martha Macintyre, Vera Mackie, and Maila Stevens (London,

2000), 165.

99. Personal communication.