Abstract
Modernity is often assumed to correlate with increased secularism, though scholarly literature challenges this idea, linking ideas about modern subjectivity to Protestant Reformation philosophies. Tracing the impact of Reformation ideologies across time and space is crucial to understanding modernity, especially in situations where some of the first “modern” colonial settlers were Protestant missionaries. A key concept for understanding modernity is “purification,” referring to attempts to solidify categorical boundaries, usually around culturally defined dualisms. Archaeological remains from mission sites and other colonial institutions around the Pacific reveal problems that emerge where cultural contacts produce hybrid phenomena, despite projects of reform aimed at purification.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adams, R. (1984). In the Land of Strangers: A Century of European Contact with Tanna, 1774–1874, The Australian National University, Canberra.
Adams, R. (1998). Framing the Native: Rev. James Hay Lawrie’s Vanuatu Photographs, 1891–1894, Vanuatu National Museum, Port Vila.
American Sunday School Union (1844). The Martyr Missionary of Erromanga; Or the Life of John Williams, who was Murdered and Eaten by the Savages in one of the South Sea Islands, American Sunday School Union, Philadelphia.
Armstrong, E. S. (1900). The History of the Melanesian Mission, E. P. Dutton, New York.
Bayman, J. M. (2009). Technological change and the archaeology of emergent colonialism in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 13: 127–157.
Beattie, J. W. (1909). Catalogue of a Series of Photographs Illustrating the Scenery and Peoples of the Islands in the South and Western Pacific, J.W. Beattie, Hobart.
Bedford, S. (2006). Pieces of the Vanuatu Puzzle: Archaeology of the North, South, and Center. Australian National University Press, Canberra.
Bonnemaison, J. (1994). The Tree and the Canoe: History and Ethnogeography of Tanna, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu.
Brigham, W. T. (1908). The Ancient Hawaiian House. Memoirs of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History Vol. II, No. 3, Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu.
Byrne, S., Clarke, A., Harrison, R., and Torrence, R. (2011). Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, Springer, New York.
Card, J. C. (2013). The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture, Center for Archaeological Investigations, Carbondale, IL.
Casella, E. (2007). The Archaeology of Institutional Confinement, University of Florida Press, Gainesville.
Chatan, R. (2003). The Governor’s vale levu: architecture and hybridity at Nasova House, Levuka, Fiji Islands. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 7: 267–292.
Copeland, J. (1878). Lecture on the New Hebrides Islands, the New Hebrides Natives, and the New Hebrides Mission, Mills, Dick, Dunedin.
Cusick, J. G. (1998). Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, Center for Archaeological Investigations, Carbondale, IL.
Daws, G. (1973). Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai, Univeristy of Hawaii Press, Honolulu.
Dickinson, W. R. (2014). Petrographic Report WRD 311: Petrographic Comparison of Sand Tempers in Prehistoric Potsherds from Ambae (Aoba) and Temper in Sherd SVMAP 118 from Erromango. Unpublished report.
Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger, Routledge, London.
Dumont D’Urville, J. S. C. (1832). Sur les îles du Grand Océan. Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 17: 1–21.
Dumont D’Urville, J. S. C. (2003). On the islands of the Great Ocean. Journal of Pacific History 38(2): 163–174.
Flexner, J. L. (2010). Archaeology of the Recent Past at Kalawao: Landscape, Place, and Power in a Hawaiian Leprosarium. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
Flexner, J. L. (2011a). Bottles, abandonment, and re-visitation in the Hansen’s disease settlement at Kalawao, Moloka‘i: implications for site formation processes and interpretation in surface middens. Hawaiian Archaeology 12: 108–124.
Flexner, J. L. (2011b). Foreign animals, Hawaiian practices: zooarchaeology in the leprosarium at Kalawao, Moloka‘i, Hawaii. Journal of Pacific Archaeology 2: 82–91.
Flexner, J. L. (2012). An institution that was a village: archaeology and social life in the Hansen’s Disease settlement at Kalawao, Moloka‘i, Hawaii. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16: 135–163.
Flexner, J. L. (2014a). Historical archaeology, contact, and colonialism in Oceania. Journal of Archaeological Research 22: 43–87.
Flexner, J. L. (2014b). The historical archaeology of states and non-states: anarchist perspectives from Hawai‘i and Vanuatu. Journal of Pacific Archaeology 5: 81–97.
Flexner, J. L. (2014c). Mapping local perspectives in the historical archaeology of Vanuatu mission landscapes. Asian Perspectives 53(1): 2–28.
Flexner, J. L. (2016a). An Archaeology of Early Christianity in Vanuatu: Kastom and Religious Change on Tanna and Erromango, 1839–1920. Australian National University Press, Canberra.
Flexner, J. L. (2016b). Ethnology collections as supplements and records: what museums contribute to historical archaeology of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu). World Archaeology 48(2): 196–209. doi:10.1080/00438243.2016.1195769.
Flexner, J. L. and Ball, A. C. (2016). Sherds of Paradise: domestic archaeology and ceramic artefacts from a Protestant Mission in the South Pacific. European Journal of Archaeology. doi:10.1080/14619571.2016.1147319.
Flexner, J. L. and Spriggs, M. (2015). Mission sites as indigenous heritage in Vanuatu. Journal of Social Archaeology 15(2): 184–209.
Flexner, J. L., Jones, M., and Evans, P. D. (2015). “Because it is a Holy House of God”: buildings archaeology, globalization, and community heritage in a Tanna Church. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 19: 262–288.
Flexner, J. L., Spriggs, M., Bedford, S., and Abong, M. (2016). Beginning historical archaeology in Vanuatu: Recent projects on the archaeology of Spanish, French and Anglophone colonialism. In Subias, S. M., Ruiz Martinez, C., and Berrocal-Cruz, M. (eds.), The Historical Archaeology of Early Modern Spanish Colonialism, Springer, New York, pp. 205–227.
Forsyth, M. (2009). A Bird that Flies with Two Wings: Kastom and State Justice Systems in Vanuatu, Australian National University Press, Canberra.
Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge, Pantheon, New York.
Foucault, M. (1988). Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Vintage Books, New York.
Foucault, M. (1994). The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, Vintage Books, New York.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage Books, New York.
Fowles, S. (2013). An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion, SAR Press, Santa Fe.
Gilbert, P. K. (2004). Mapping the Victorian Social Body, State University of New York Press, Albany.
Godden, G. A. (1991). Encyclopaedia of British Pottery and Porcelain Marks, Barrie and Jenkins, London.
Gordon, J. (1863). The Last Martyrs of Eromanga, being a Memoir of the Rev, George N. Gordon, and Ellen Catherine Powell, his Wife, MacNab and Shafer, Halifax.
Green, R. W. (1959). Protestantism and Capitalism: The Weber Thesis and its Critics, D.C. Heath, Boston.
Greene, L. W. (1985). Exile in Paradise: The Isolation of Hawai'i's Leprosy Victims and Development of Kalaupapa Settlement, 1865 to Present, Branch of Planning Alaska/Pacific Northwest/Western Team, Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Denver.
Harrison, R., Byrne, S., and Clarke, A. (2013). Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency, School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe.
Hilliard, D. (1978). God’s Gentlemen: A History of the Melanesian Mission 1849–1942, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia.
Hiroa, T. R. (1957). Arts and Crafts of Hawaii, Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu.
Inglis, K. A. (2004). "A Land Set Apart": Disease, Displacement, and Death at Makanalua, Moloka'i. Doctoral dissertation, University of Hawaii, Honolulu.
Inglis, K. A. (2013). Ma‘i Lepera: Disease and Displacement in Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu.
Jones, M. (2001). Melanesian mission building and stone garden walls. Register of historic places online. Heritage New Zealand/Pouhere Taonga. http://www.heritage.org.nz/the-register/details?id=111 (last accessed 5 June 2014).
Keane, W. (2007). Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Kirch, P. V. (2000). On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Lawson, B. (1994). Collected Curios: Missionary Tales from the South Seas, McGill University Press, Montreal.
Lawson, B. (2001). ‘Clothed and in their right mind’: women’s dress on Erromango, Vanuatu. Pacific Arts 23(24): 69–86.
Lawson, B. (2005). Collecting cultures: Canadian missionaries, Pacific Islanders, and museums. In Austin, A. J., and Scott, J. S. (eds.), Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, pp. 235–261.
Lübcke, A. (2009). The Photograph Albums of the New Zealand Presbyterian Mission to the New Hebrides. Master's thesis. University of Otago, Dunedin.
Lydon, J. (2006). Pacific encounters, or beyond the islands of history. In Hall, M., and Silliman, S. W. (eds.), Historical Archaeology, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 293–312.
Lydon, J. (2009). Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission, Altamira Press, Lanham, MD.
Lydon, J. and Ash, J. (2010). The archaeology of missions in Australasia: introduction. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 14: 1–14.
Middleton, A. (2003). Maori and European landscapes at Te Puna, Bay of Islands, New Zealand, 1805–1860. Archaeology in Oceania 38(2): 110–124.
Middleton, A. (2008). Te Puna - A New Zealand Mission Station: Historical Archaeology in New Zealand, Springer, New York.
Middleton, A. (2010). Missionization in New Zealand and Australia: a comparison. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 14: 170–187.
Miller, J. G. (1978). Live: A History of Church Planting in the New Hebrides, Book I: A History of Church Planting in the New Hebrides to 1880, Committees on Christian Education and Overseas Missions, General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Australia, Sydney.
Miller, J. G. (1981). Live: A History of Church Planting in the New Hebrides, Book II: The Growth of the Church to 1880, Committees on Christian Education and Overseas Missions, General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Australia, Sydney.
Miller, J. G. (1986). Live: A History of Church Planting in the New Hebrides, Book IV: 1881–1920, The Presbyterian Church of Vanuatu, Port Vila.
Mills, P. R. (2009). Folk housing in the middle of the Pacific: Architectural lime, creolized ideologies, and expressions of power in nineteenth-century Hawaii. In White, C. L. (ed.), The Materiality of Individuality, Springer, New York, pp. 75–91.
Moblo, P. (1997). Blessed Damien of Molokaʻi: the critical analysis of contemporary myth. Ethnohistory 44(4): 691–726.
Moblo, P. (1998). Institutionalising the leper: partisan politics and the evolution of stigma in post-monarchy Hawai‘i. Journal of the Polynesian Society 107(3): 229–262.
Moore, C. (2012). J.W. Beattie photographs. University of Queensland School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics. http://www.uq.edu.au/hprc/beattie (Last accessed 16 April 2014).
Morrison, M., McNaughton, D., and Keating, C. (2015). “Their God is their belly”: moravian missionaries at the Weipa Mission (1898–1932), Cape York Peninsula. Archaeology in Oceania 50: 85–104.
U.S. National Park Service (2015). “Father Damien.” Kalaupapa National Historical Park Webpage. Online: http://www.nps.gov/kala/learn/historyculture/damien.htm (last accessed 26 May 2015).
Osorio, J. K. K. (2002). Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu.
Paton, F. H. L. (1903). Lomai of Lenakel: A Hero of the New Hebrides. A Fresh Chapter in the Triumph of the Gospel, Hodder and Stoughton, London.
Paton, J. G. (1907). John G. Paton, Missionary to the New Hebrides, Fleming H. Revell, New York.
Poovey, M. (1995). Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Robertson, H. A. (1902). Erromanga: The Martyr Isle, Westminster, Toronto.
Ross, R. M. (1983). Melanesians at Mission Bay: A History of the Melanesian Mission in Auckland, New Zealand Historic Places Trust, Wellington.
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Shineberg, D. (1967). They Came for Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the South-West Pacific 1830–1865, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
Silliman, S. W. (2005). Culture contact or colonialism? Challenges in the archaeology of Native North America. American Antiquity 70: 55–74.
Silliman, S. W. (2015). A requiem for hybridity? The problem with hybrids, purées, and mules. Journal of Social Archaeology. doi:10.1177/1469605315574791.
Smith, A. M. (1997). Missionary as collector: The role of the Reverend Joseph Annand. Acadiensis XXVI(2):96–111.
Smith, A. M. (2005). ‘Curios’ from a strange land: The Oceania collections of the Reverend Joseph Annand. In Austin, A. J., and Scott, J. S. (eds.), Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, pp. 262–278.
Spriggs, M. (1997). The Island Melanesians, Blackwell, Oxford.
Stewart, R. (2000). Leper Priest of Moloka‘i, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu.
Storr, V. H. (2006). Weber’s spirit of capitalism and the Bahamas’ Junkanoo ethic. The Review of Austrian Economics 19(4): 189–209.
Thomas, N. (1991). Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Tomlinson, M. and McDougall, D. (2012). Christian Politics in Oceania, Berghahn, New York.
Torrence, R. and Clarke, A. (2000). The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-Cultural Engagements in Oceania, Routledge, London.
Vanuatu National Statistics Office (2009). National Census of Population and Housing: Summary Release, Ministry of Finance and Economic Management, Port Vila.
Walrond, C. (2012). Mission Bay, Auckland, 1890. In South Pacific peoples – early migration. Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/1274/mission-bay-auckland-1890 (last accessed 16 April 2014).
Watt, A. C. P. (1896). Twenty-Five Years’ Mission Life on Tanna, New Hebrides, J. and R. Parlane, Paisley.
Weber, M. (2002). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Penguin Classics, New York.
Williams, P. and Weber, M. (1978). Staffordshire: Romantic Transfer Patterns, Fountain House East, Jeffersontown.
Wolf, E. R. (1985). Europe and the People Without History, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Megan Springate and Kim Christensen for the invitation to submit this paper both as a conference presentation at the Society for Historical Archaeology meeting in Leicester in 2013, and for this issue of IJHA. Research in the leprosarium at Kalawao was supported by the U.S. National Park Service and the University of California Berkeley Stahl Research Endowment, the Lowie-Olsen Fund, and the Gilbert Undergraduate Fund. Research in Vanuatu was supported by the Washington and Lee University Lenfest Fund, and an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE130101703) hosted at the Australian National University. The project is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. I am forever grateful to local communities in Hawai‘i and Vanuatu who have been great collaborators and friends in these projects.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Flexner, J.L. Reform and Purification in the Historical Archaeology of the South Pacific, 1840-1900. Int J Histor Archaeol 21, 827–847 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-017-0398-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-017-0398-1