Dissertation by Adrian Young
In 1789, Fletcher Christian led 18 sailors in a mutiny on HMAV Bounty. They set Captain William B... more In 1789, Fletcher Christian led 18 sailors in a mutiny on HMAV Bounty. They set Captain William Bligh and his loyal crew adrift, took twelve Tahitian women and six Tahitian men captive, and eventually settled on Pitcairn Island, a remote volcanic isle in the Southern Pacific. Their descendants still live both there and on Norfolk Island, to which many of them migrated in 1856. My dissertation follows the making of these islands into sites for the production of knowledge about race, language, national identity, and colonial governance. Writers and researchers came to construe the islanders as near-perfect research subjects, describing their home islands as “accidental experiments” and “natural laboratories.” However, that metaphor elided the intentional and careful construction of both islands as exemplary, insular, and experimental spaces. During the nineteenth century, moralists, missionaries and evangelical authors made the islands into object lessons in Victorian and Anglican virtue. The migration to Norfolk Island in 1856 was authored by colonial administrators as a morally freighted “experiment” in colonial settlement and racial destiny—an experiment that bureaucrats later termed a dysgenic failure after a series of on-the-ground investigations. Stepping into field spaces engendered by that long history of observation and scrutiny, twentieth-century social scientists measured, interviewed, and recorded Pitcairn Islanders in order to define the boundaries of race and language. The dissertation unpacks their field practices to relocate the making of modern biological anthropology and creole language studies to situated encounters in the southern Pacific.
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Publications by Adrian Young
Journal of the Polynesian Society, 2021
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History and Anthropology, 2020
This paper examines American physical anthropologist Harry
Shapiro’s anthropometric fieldwork on ... more This paper examines American physical anthropologist Harry
Shapiro’s anthropometric fieldwork on Pitcairn Island in 1934–
1935 to argue for hospitality as a vital subject of and analytic
framework for histories of anthropological fieldwork. Attention to
hospitality as a historically situated mode by which locals
engaged their guests makes visible the larger structures and
contexts in which fieldwork took place. Specific hospitable forms
emerged on Pitcairn Island as the result of iterative encounter
with outside investigators, including sailors and agents of the
colonial state. When Shapiro arrived as part of an American
Museum of Natural History expedition in 1934, his investigation
was accommodated and managed through an already elaborated
script, shepherding him through a process of arrival, lodging,
sightseeing, and sentimentalized departure. That script made
possible the collection of anthropometric measurements and the
gathering of genealogical data understood as forms of ‘gossip’.
However, hospitality on Pitcairn also emerged as a practice for
negotiating incommensurability and alterity, especially as
investigator and subject understood in different ways the
meanings and relative secrecy of the knowledge they coproduced.
Ultimately, Shapiro’s ambivalent approach to the status
of race as a scientific category was shaped by his encounter with
Pitcairn’s local hospitable forms.
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The Bounty from the Beach, 2018
"In this essay, I explore how the Bounty mythos has built and sustained its captivating power ove... more "In this essay, I explore how the Bounty mythos has built and sustained its captivating power over visitors and readers around the world, using those objects gifted, traded and stolen from Pitcairn across the last two centuries both as my archive and as the principal protagonists of my narrative. At the same time, I want to chart the way that exchanges between Islanders and ‘strangers’ evolved over the course of two centuries. From the moment of the outside world’s rediscovery of Pitcairn Island in 1808, pieces of the Bounty wreck and objects crafted by the island’s people changed hands, both as items of trade and tokens of affection. This chapter will follow the perambulations of these relics around the globe, locating in their paths and traces the connections from which the knowledge of a distant place was born and the memory of a mythologised moment was maintained. Through the history of those objects, it will also take some measure of the effect the exchange of material culture has had not only on the place of the Pacific in the Anglophone imaginary, but on Pitcairn’s people, who not only traded in Bounty relics but were sometimes transformed by that trading into Bounty relics themselves."
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Cabinet Magazine, 2013
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Reviews by Adrian Young
The Journal of Pacific History, 2020
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Papers by Adrian Young
The Bounty from the Beach: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Disciplinary Essays, 2018
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Journal of Pacific History, Apr 7, 2022
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Dissertation by Adrian Young
Publications by Adrian Young
Shapiro’s anthropometric fieldwork on Pitcairn Island in 1934–
1935 to argue for hospitality as a vital subject of and analytic
framework for histories of anthropological fieldwork. Attention to
hospitality as a historically situated mode by which locals
engaged their guests makes visible the larger structures and
contexts in which fieldwork took place. Specific hospitable forms
emerged on Pitcairn Island as the result of iterative encounter
with outside investigators, including sailors and agents of the
colonial state. When Shapiro arrived as part of an American
Museum of Natural History expedition in 1934, his investigation
was accommodated and managed through an already elaborated
script, shepherding him through a process of arrival, lodging,
sightseeing, and sentimentalized departure. That script made
possible the collection of anthropometric measurements and the
gathering of genealogical data understood as forms of ‘gossip’.
However, hospitality on Pitcairn also emerged as a practice for
negotiating incommensurability and alterity, especially as
investigator and subject understood in different ways the
meanings and relative secrecy of the knowledge they coproduced.
Ultimately, Shapiro’s ambivalent approach to the status
of race as a scientific category was shaped by his encounter with
Pitcairn’s local hospitable forms.
Reviews by Adrian Young
Papers by Adrian Young
Shapiro’s anthropometric fieldwork on Pitcairn Island in 1934–
1935 to argue for hospitality as a vital subject of and analytic
framework for histories of anthropological fieldwork. Attention to
hospitality as a historically situated mode by which locals
engaged their guests makes visible the larger structures and
contexts in which fieldwork took place. Specific hospitable forms
emerged on Pitcairn Island as the result of iterative encounter
with outside investigators, including sailors and agents of the
colonial state. When Shapiro arrived as part of an American
Museum of Natural History expedition in 1934, his investigation
was accommodated and managed through an already elaborated
script, shepherding him through a process of arrival, lodging,
sightseeing, and sentimentalized departure. That script made
possible the collection of anthropometric measurements and the
gathering of genealogical data understood as forms of ‘gossip’.
However, hospitality on Pitcairn also emerged as a practice for
negotiating incommensurability and alterity, especially as
investigator and subject understood in different ways the
meanings and relative secrecy of the knowledge they coproduced.
Ultimately, Shapiro’s ambivalent approach to the status
of race as a scientific category was shaped by his encounter with
Pitcairn’s local hospitable forms.