Evolution and Natural History in the Pacific: Darwin's Laboratory.

White, J. Peter

Book titles are not always illuminating, but this one is. The title page (and dust jacket) put the first part of the title in small print and Darwin's Laboratory in 24 point. The implication of the latter is that the book is primarily about Darwin, but such is not the case. The real title is in the small print: with the addition of a time span - Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - it would be perfect.

This is a book about the interpretations and uses made of evolutionary theory, not necessarily strictly Darwinian, by a range of natural and social scientists, as well as sundry intellectuals and racists in countries around the Pacific. It is divided into four sections: Nature's Diversity and the Research Site of the Pacific (5 chapters), Exchange Networks and the Organization of Research (3), Natives, Colonials and Anthropologists (4) and Social Darwinisms (4).

Readers of Oceania will presumably find the second half of greater interest, but Kay's chapter in the first section, on Darwin's Biogeography should not be overlooked by anyone interested in understanding our views of the Pacific environment.

The third section opens with a chapter by Neil Gunson, who shows how wide was the range of observations, especially ethnographic, made by missionaries and who stresses that many were not hostile to Darwin's ideas. A similar theme is repeated in Sohmer's study of the Melanesian Mission, most of whose members recognised that because Melanesian languages were as complex as 'civilised' ones, its speakers could not just be dismissed as 'savages'.

The war between science and religion was very limited among Europeans in the Nineteenth Century Pacific. Kuklick's chapter on the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait is subtitled 'From Research in the Torres Strait to an Ecology of Human Behaviour' and argues that its methodology and findings had major impacts on both anthropology and psychology, by showing human capabilities as tested by psychological equipment were similar, but were always mediated by cultural conditioning of sensory skills.

In Part 4, on Social Darwinisms, we move into wider social contexts. Butcher argues that there was little difference between Darwinism and Social Darwinism in the real world of Australian race relations and Darwin's attitude to the Aborigines was little different from that of the settlers - just a bit more morally gift-wrapped. Stenhouse argues a similar position for New Zealand, though without Darwin's actual presence to back him up. Japan and Hawaii feature in an article by Laurent.

In the Introduction the editors discuss the contrast between 'Atlantic' science - laboratory based and thus controllable - and the importance of the Pacific world as an 'outdoors' experimental world against which European science could test its ideas. Although this is an idea with many long-term resonances for anthropology, it seems to me to be more usefully applied in relation to the natural than the human world, and certainly has little relevance to the Social Darwinism chapters. Further, it is interesting to see that modern anthropological and archaeological scholarship is increasingly suggesting that far from being a series of isolates, the Pacific discovered by Cook - let alone by Darwin - was already part of the Second Millennium world system, so that the contrast drawn by the editors, and nineteenth century researchers, seems a little overdrawn.

J. PETER WHITE University of Sydney