Working Session: Constructing Human Difference in Oceania, 1500-1900
Organizers: Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard; Session Chairs: Bronwen Douglas and Paul Turnbull

Because this was planned as a one-off session and most of the participants are engaged in ongoing collaboration on its theme, we opted not to pre-circulate papers or to have a discussant. Each of the participants, therefore, read a 20-minute paper followed by 10 minutes discussion--excellent time discipline was shown by all. Unfortunately, Chris Ballard was forced to drop out at the last minute due to family illness but Paul Turnbull admirably filled the gap as co-chair with Bronwen Douglas, to her considerable relief. Ten papers were presented, including one in absentia, addressing varied aspects of the theme of the relationships between unstable metropolitan racial theories and field materials generated in personal exchanges between Europeans and indigenous people in Oceania. The quality of both papers and discussion was gratifyingly high. A large audience attended the morning papers and a somewhat smaller but no less vocal group heard the afternoon ones. Our thanks to presenters and audiences alike. The topics addressed ranged widely over the session theme: the domestic origin of tropes applied to Oceanian people by sixteenth-century Portuguese and Spanish voyagers; French ideas of race, climate, and human difference and nineteenth-century naval field naturalists in Oceania; French racial cartography in Oceania; a pioneer Russian fieldworker in New Guinea and racial theory in Russia; constructions of tribal people in Peninsular Malaya by British and Malay colonizers; German anthropologists and the import of field experience in New Guinea and Samoa; a missionary's contribution to kinship theory and evolutionist anthropology; the nexus of museums, medical officers and protectors, and frontier violence in the collection of Aboriginal bodily remains in northern Australia; and New Zealand colonial racial classifications in Samoa. The organizers have decided not to proceed with publication at this point. However, several of the papers will be channeled into an intensive writers' workshop they are holding in October, in the expectation that it will lead to the offer of an edited special issue to the Journal of Pacific History.