Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Performances by Greg Dening

by
July 1996, no. 182

Performances by Greg Dening

MUP, $29.95 pb, 296 pp

Performances by Greg Dening

by
July 1996, no. 182

Greg Dening was trained for the Catholic priesthood. He became an outstanding historian of the Pacific, although perhaps better described as an anthropologist-historian, in company with Clifford Geertz, Marshall Sahlins, Nathalie Zemon Davis, and his colleague Rhys Isaac, to whom this book is warmly dedicated. Yet echoes of his initial calling linger in his work, certainly as evidenced in this collection of essays.

Dening is a proselytiser for a history which is recovered through the imagination, rather than a reliance on the surviving, selective texts which almost entirely empty the past of its meaning and are themselves continually transformed by the process of reading and interpretation. He says we cannot describe the past independently of our knowing it, any more than we can the present, and this kind of knowledge is the realm of the imagination. ‘Histories are fictions,’ he boldly asserts, ‘something made of the past – but fictions whose forms are metonymies of the present’. The American philosopher, Richard Rorty, is regularly invoked to illuminate his point. Human solidarity, Rorty writes,

is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers … This process of coming to see others as being ‘one of us’ rather than as ‘them’ is a matter of detailed description of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography …

Cassandra Pybus reviews 'Performances' by Greg Dening

Performances

by Greg Dening

MUP, $29.95 pb, 296 pp

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.