Learning to see in Melanesia: Four lectures given in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, 1993–2008

It has been something of a surprise for Europeans to realize that their advent in the Pacific was something less than a surprise. A number of accounts give the sense that their coming had been expected; that they were previously known beings “returned” or manifest in new form. Such ideas certainly fueled the millenarianism of cargo cults in Papua New Guinea. A further return was indicated in the future. So the one event encapsulated both past and future; indeed the two were conflated in so far as the second coming would bring not the generations unborn but generations already deceased, in the form of ancestors. Or if not the ancestors themselves, than their “cargo.” What triggered this recovery of the past in the future was the actual advent itself: the appearance of Europeans, and the stories that circulated about them. In this chapter, I argue that at least as far as much of Melanesia is concerned, and especially Papua New Guinea, Europeans initially presented a particular kind of image. Images that contain within them both past and future time do not have to be placed into a historical context, for they embody history themselves. It follows that people do not therefore have to explain such images by reference to events outside them: the images contain events.