Prof. Bruce Harvey
The South Seas: In Fiction, Film, and Culture

 

Study Passages/Questions for G. Dening, Mr Bligh's Bad Language

PAGE 41: "[Millward's penitent speech before he was hanged] was the pure libation of a victim.  His born-again innocence made the sacrifice seem right. His sacrificers were well satisfied."

--note Dening's effort to link politics/rituals of British 'civilized' culture to 'primitive' native culture.  Why?

PAGE 48: "Obeisance to sovereignty is the acknowledgement of both the limit on self and the openness of self to the invasion of power.  Yet this thing outside of self needs many plays to make it present and real."

 

--translate this, please.

 

PAGE 189: "The European strangers were entertained by a sense of their own civilized superiority over savage natives by nothing so much as their discovery that the Tahitians made human sacrifice.  Although the strangers themselves sacrificed human lives--naturally, ordinarily, frequently--to the abstractions of realpolitik--the law, the Crown--to their God they offered symbols of a body and blood in bread and wine, or they devised other metaphors of atonement.  Nothing scandalized them so much in Tahiti as the fact that natives seemed to do things the other way around. Natives seemed to have real gods and make-believe polity."

 

--Yes, indeed, translate for me!!!

 

PAGE 200: "If a flag for the Europeans might stand for something else--for a nation, for legitimate power—and if gestures around a flag might stir moods and sentiments of loyalty and pride, then so might a plantain branch [and associated rituals] rouse as strong sensibilities for the Tahitians...READ WHOLE PASSAGE ... It was the ambience of ritual action that created an environment in which the symbols worked. This was not easily experienced by strangers.  [Bligh and crew could translate] the outward formalities of the other's [Tahitian's] signals but not their meaning."

 

--Translate the previous quote, please; or ponder my own following meditation: even if we intellectually might understand (as an anthropologist might understand) a radically different culture, we do not affectively feel the power of that culture's rituals, symbols, etc.  From the outside, a different culture always looks a bit goofy: when we see patterns of expression but cannot feel those expressions, as it were.  If there is a real limitation to our anthropological undertakings, what is the point of anthropology?  What is the best way of "feeling"/"really thinking" like what theorists refer to as the anthropological "other"?  Is it possible to simultaneously be fully within a culture and objectively understand it? This is an anthropological problem and a larger epistemological/philosophical problem: how can we “be” something and also understand what we “are”?

 

PAGE 204:  "These ceremonies in Tahiti have the familiar quality that we experience in our weariness with the ritualistic.  They seem meaningless, empty actions, performances distanced from the realities of living, forms without structures. Ritual robes become fancy dress, symbols become mere decoration.  It is a syncretism of a make-believe past and a fatuous present. We are familiar with it: Hawaiian dancers in Kodak shows at Waikiki, Mickey Mouse as King of Disneyland, Dale Carnegie as Sincere Man, the blank face of Homo touristicus, Advertising Man, Plastic Man.  Our world seems puffed up with emptiness.  Who can make sense of signs that do not signify, of symbols that crush with their weightlessness, of sacraments that leave no mark?"

 

--translate again, please.  What is the sentiment of seeming nostalgia (for what?) all about here?