Hambruch's Colonial Narrative:

Abstract

As part of the Hamburg Ethnographic Museum's South Seas Expedition of 1908–10, Paul Hambruch did intensive ethnographic work on Pohnpei. His three volumes appeared in the 1930s and have generally been well respected by subsequent generations of anthropologists. Careful examination of Hambruch's writing, however, discloses that he was influenced by German racial and ‘Kulturkreis’ theory to a heretofore unrecognised extent. His narrative of Pohnpeian socio-political life, colonial history and the ill-starred rebellion of the Sokehs people against German rule are all reconsidered in light of his theoretical predispositions and the contexts in which he worked.

Acknowledgements

I thank the University of Hawai‘i's Center for Pacific Island Studies for making its translation of the Hambruch volumes, undertaken by Ruth Runeborg and Elizabeth Murphy, available to me. I had previously made use of a translation done by military intelligence during World War II for the US Navy's Civil Affairs branch, and archived at the Human Relations Areas Files in New Haven. I thank my colleague Prof. Katherine Pence for directing me to a number of invaluable sources on imperial German society, culture, and colonialism, and I am grateful to Profs. Woodruff Smith and Marcia Pally for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Notes

¹ The work of the early German ethnographers, particularly that of the Hamburg expedition, is generally held in high regard. To cite but two recent examples, Goodenough, in his massive treatment of Chuukese ‘religious tradition’, acknowledges that he has ‘drawn heavily’ on this German ethnography, and Metzgar's article on Lamotrek sacred space, makes uncritical use of six of these sources. Ward Goodenough, Under Heaven’s Brow (Philadelphia 2002), xi; Eric Metzgar, ‘Sacred space taboo place’, Micronesian Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 3 (2004), 3–18. In the original abstract of this paper, I wrote that ‘for anthropologists working in Micronesia, the gold standard of ethnography has always been the volumes produced by the Hamburg Museum für Volkerkunde's Ergebnisse der Südsee-Expedition 1908–1910’.

² Paul Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1: Allgemeiner Teil: Geschichte, Geographie, Sprache, Eingeborenen, II.B.7 of Ergebnisse der Südsee-Expedition 1908–1910 (Hamburg 1932); Paul Hambruch and Anneliese Eilers, Ponape, vol. 2: Gesellschaft und Geistige Kultur, Wirtschaft und Stoffliche Kultur, II.B.7 of Ergebnisse der Südsee-Expedition 1908–1910 (Hamburg 1936); Paul Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 3: Die Ruinen. Ponapegeschichten, II.B.7 of Ergebnisse der Südsee-Expedition 1908–1910 (Hamburg 1936). Hambruch died shortly after publication of the first volume. The second and third volumes were edited by the Hamburg ethnologist Anneliese Eilers, who wrote that she took over completely finished materials which she then reorganised (Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 3, 1). It is possible that some of the confusions in the coverage of Pohnpeian social organisation derive from this editorial intervention, but not likely. Fischer (1981) and Berg (1988) provide accounts of the expedition, and Penny (2002) depicts the Hamburg Museum's scholarly and political contexts. Hans Fischer, Die Hamburger Südsee Expedition (Frankfurt 1981); M.L. Berg, ‘The wandering life among unreliable Islanders’, Journal of Pacific History, 23 (1988), 95–105; H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture (Chapel Hill 2002). Buschmann reports on the Expedition's work on Tobi atoll, including a graphic description of some of Hambruch's experiences there. Rainer Buschmann, ‘Tobi Captured’, Isla, A Journal of Micronesian Studies, 4 (1996), 317–40. Zimmerman (2001) offers important insights into how members of the Expedition in its early Melanesian stages learned about the possibilities of longer term ethnographic research, although he seems to have been unaware that two of them then went on to undertake just such projects on Yap (Muller) and Pohnpei in Micronesia. Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Anti-Humanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago 2001), 235–8.

³ Woodruff Smith, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany 1840–1920 (Oxford 1991); Robert Proctor, ‘From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German anthropological tradition’, in G.W. Stocking (ed.), Bones, Bodies, Behavior, History of Anthropology, vol. 5 (Madison 1988), 138–79; Benoit Massim, ‘From Virchow to Fischer’, in G.W. Stocking (ed.), Volksgeist as Method and Ethic, History of Anthropology, vol. 8 (Madison 1996), 79–154; Zimmerman, Anthropology and Anti-Humanism.

⁴ James O’Connell, A Residence of Eleven Years in New Holland and the Caroline Islands, ed. S. Riesenberg (Honolulu 1972 [1836]), 124–5.

⁵ J.-S.-C. Dumont d’Urville, ‘Sur les îles du Grand Océan’, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 17 (1832), 1–21; Nicholas Thomas, ‘The force of ethnology: origins and significance of the Melanesia/Polynesia division’, Current Anthropology, 30 (1989), 27–34; Geoffrey Clark, ‘Dumont d’Urville's Oceania’, Journal of Pacific History, 38 (2003), 155–61; Paul Rainbird, ‘Taking the Tapu: defining Micronesia by absence’, Journal of Pacific History, 38 (2003), 237–50.

⁶ For example, Andrew Cheyne, The Trading Voyages of Andrew Cheyne 1841–1844, ed. D. Shineberg (Honolulu 1971).

⁷ O’Connell, A Residence of Eleven Years, viii–ix.

⁸ In Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 2, vii.

⁹ O’Connell, A Residence of Eleven Years, 5, 18–20.

¹⁰ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, 6.

¹¹ O’Connell had been interviewed by the American ethnologist Horatio Hale and may well have picked up this phrasing from him.

¹² O’Connell, A Residence of Eleven Years, 121–5.

¹³ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 2, 6.

¹⁴ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 2, 366.

¹⁵ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 2, 8.

¹⁶ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, 366.

¹⁷ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, 367. On the same page, Hambruch noted that unsettled conditions prevented him from taking physical measurements. Buschmann describes in detail the difficulties Hambruch encountered in his attempts to make anthropological measurements of Tobi's people — he ultimately resorted to forcefully confining them aboard ship while he did so. Buschmann, ‘Tobi Captured’, 330–1.

¹⁸ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, 370. Hambruch was in fact quite aware of the subjective element entailed in interpreting physical features. In contrasting his own evaluations of photos taken of Pohnpeians in the 1870s with those of the photographer who took them, Jan Kubary, Hambruch acknowledged that the physical features were not at all what Kubary claimed them to be. Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, 370–1.

¹⁹ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, 374, O’Connell's and Hambruch's accounts also include lengthy considerations of supposed differences within the ‘ruling class,’ between what are portrayed as groups known as mwonsapw and serihso. These terms however, refer to people holding certain titles and not to any sort of groups or classes.

²⁰ Friedrich Ratzel, Anthropogeographie (Stuttgart 1899).

²¹ Lewis Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought, 2nd edn (New York 1977), 254–5.

²² Gordon Craig, The Germans (New York 1991), 175–6.

²³ David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century (New York 1998), 434.

²⁴ Smith, Politics and the Sciences, 155–6.

²⁵ Fritz Graebner, ‘Kulturkreise und Kulturschichten in Ozeanien’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 37 (1905), 28–53. Kulturkreis theory, which has to do with the general concept and specific histories of culture areas, grew out of theories of diffusion. Although this theoretical perspective was ultimately co-opted to serve German expansion and colonialism, its origins actually lie in the ethnology of R. Virchow (1875) and A. Bastian (1860, 1893), who specifically deployed the culture area approach in order to combat racially based evolutionary theories of humankind, and who also opposed certain aspects of German imperialism. Rudolf Virchow, ‘Anthropologie und prähistorische Forschungen’, in G. von Neumayer (ed.), Anleitung gen der wissenschaftlichen Beobachtungen auf Reisen (Berlin 1875), 571–90; Adolf Bastian, Mensch in der Geschichte (Leipzig 1860), Controversen in der Ethnologie (Berlin 1893); Smith, Politics and the Sciences; Zimmerman Anthropology and Anti-Humanism.

²⁶ Penny, Objects of Culture, 110–14.

²⁷ Smith, Politics and the Sciences, 159.

²⁸ Virchow, ‘Anthropologie und prähistorische Forschungen’; Bastian, Controversen in der Ethnologie; Georg Thilenius, ‘Paul Hambruch’, in Hambruch Ponape vol. 2, vi–vii.; Massim, ‘From Virchow to Fischer’, 89–90.

²⁹ Massim, ‘From Virchow to Fischer’, 126–42; Proctor, ‘From Anthropologie’, 148–52.

³⁰ Proctor, ‘From Anthropologie’, 161.

³¹ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, 324. I would guess that Hambruch likened this to adding a ‘von’ to his surname. As Macrae observes, German upper middle classes ‘loved and feared a system in which one might oneself receive a patent of nobility’. Donald Macrae, Max Weber (New York 1974), 37.

³² Glenn Petersen, One Man Cannot Rule a Thousand: fission in a Ponapean chiefdom (Ann Arbor 1982); ‘Kanengamah and Pohnpei's Politics of Concealment’, American Anthropologist, 95 (1993), 334–52. There are, to be sure, alternative interpretations of the power and authority of Pohnpeian chiefs. Saul Riesenberg, The Native Polity of Ponape (Washington 1968); David Hanlon, Upon a Stone Altar (Honolulu 1988); ‘Pohnpei’, in T. Hays (ed.), Encyclopedia of World Cultures, vol. 11: Oceania (Boston 1991), 267–70.

³³ Francis X. Hezel, Strangers in Their Own Land (Honolulu 1995), 3–44.

³⁴ Paul Ehrlich, ‘Henry Nanpei’, in D. Scarr (ed.), More Pacific Islands Portraits (Canberra 1979), 131–54; Peter Hempenstall, Pacific Islanders under German Rule (Canberra 1978).

³⁵ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, v.

³⁶ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, 376.

³⁷ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 2, 279.

³⁸ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 3, 61.

³⁹ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, 205.

⁴⁰ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, 285.

⁴¹ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, 356–79.

⁴² Kapitänleutnant Gartzke, Aufstand in Ponape und seine Niederwerfung. Part 6 of Marine-Rundschau (Berlin 1911); Paul Ehrlich, ‘The clothes of men’, PhD, State University of New York (Stony Brook 1978); Hempenstall, Pacific Islanders; Hezel, Strangers, 94–145; Luelen Bernart, The Book of Luelen, trans. and ed. by J. Fischer, S. Riesenberg, and M. Whiting, Pacific History Series, no. 8, (Honolulu 1977), 143–6.

⁴³ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, v. Woodruff Smith observes that ‘one way of explaining what ethnologists and other observers were doing in a colonial setting is to say that they were looking for, or essentially creating in their own minds, imperial allies: “traditional” aristocracies through whom the imperial power could rule if they were properly subordinated’. On Pohnpei, however, ‘the system that could be treated in this way is represented by Hambruch as having died, so no allies’. It may well be that in his work at the Hamburg Colonial Institute Hambruch became especially aware of what became known as ‘indirect rule’ in Britain's colonies and that his sensitivity to the perceived collapse of traditional Pohnpeian hierarchy was heightened by comparisons with British initiatives. But it is also the case that German colonial officials on Pohnpei believed it was precisely the continuing influence of the chiefs that was hindering their schemes for economic development — it is quite clear that they worked in some ways to break the chiefs’ authority. Woodruff Smith, Personal communication, 2005.

⁴⁴ Ehrlich, ‘The clothes of men’, 66.

⁴⁵ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, 206.

⁴⁶ Hambruch, Ponape, vol. 1, 207.

⁴⁷ Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham 2001), 179.

⁴⁸ E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919–1939 (New York 2001 [1939]); W.O. Henderson, The German Colonial Empire, 1884–1919 (London 1993), 131–3; Wildenthal, German Women, 179–80.

⁴⁹ Henderson, The German Colonial Empire, 132.

⁵⁰ Thilenius, ‘Paul Hambruch’, vi.

⁵¹ Suzanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies (Durham 1997), 7.

⁵² Paul Hambruch, ‘Europa und die Aufteilung der Südsee: Ein geschichtlicher Rückblick’, Südsee-Bote, 2 (1918), 2–6.

⁵³ Rainer Buschmann, ‘The ethnographic frontier in German post-colonial visions, 1914–1935’, Ms., 2006.

⁵⁴ Smith, Politics and the Sciences, 160, his emphasis.