Nicholas Thomas

Nicholas Thomas’s principal purposes in this study are to show, first, that the peoples of the Pacific were neither incurious about the world beyond their islands, nor lacking in the emotional or imaginative means to apprehend cultures different from their own. Even before the coming of European maritime discoverers, they were accustomed to undertaking lengthy voyages and sometimes migrations from one part of the great ocean to another, practices which they extended when contact with the Europeans gave them the means of doing so. And second, that as a consequence of their travelling and becoming acquainted with other cultures, they altered their outlooks and social and political practices to meet new challenges and take advantage of new opportunities. In justification of these purposes, Thomas stresses the need to get away from older, Eurocentric, historical and ethnographic perspectives; and to understand that the Islanders were people both able and willing to assert themselves and, to some extent at least, to determine their own destinies.

Only a few decades ago, in the developed countries of the West, tattoos were a relatively uncommon sight, and were generally associated with marginalised groups: soldiers, sailors, gangs and criminals. Since the 1980s, tattoos have become a mainstream form of bodily adornment for the young and socially edgy. This tattooing renaissance has both driven and been influenced by an increased interest in ‘traditional’ tattoo designs from the Pacific. Within Pacific societies themselves, traditional tattooing is seen as an assertion of cultural endurance and value. On the international scene, where tattoos are aligned with individualised desires, Pacific tattooing practices are prized for their strong patterns and ‘neo-tribal’ qualities.

Nick Thomas is arguably the outstanding academic of international repute at present working in the humanities and social sciences in Australia, as attested by his receipt of the 1998 Royal Anthropological Institute’s Rivers Memorial Medal for exceptional achievement of publications’. He is certainly prolific: Possessions is his eighth single-authored scholarly book in thirteen years. Thomas’ work is eclectic in discipline, interests and style. His themes range from Pacific history to anthropological theory, to postcolonial cultural history and critique, to art. The ambiguous intersections of local and colonial histories and cultures are a persistent concern, with increasing focus on material objects and the visual. He is equally adept with academic arcana as with a prose style directed to that publisher’s ideal, the educated non-specialist.