Voyagers, Missionaries, and Knowledge That Is Not Public

The written record for this region begins with outsiders and begins late. European voyagers from the eighteenth century, then missionaries who stayed, produced the first sustained descriptions of Pacific and Australian religious life, and the missionary accounts are frequently the fullest because their authors lived alongside the people they described for decades. They were also there to change what they described, and they wrote for supporters at home.

Two words in general use came out of these encounters. Taboo entered English from Polynesian tapu, and mana from the same region, and both were then generalised into anthropological theory in ways their original speakers would not recognise.

Australia raises a distinct issue that governs how this atlas handles the region. A great deal of Aboriginal religious knowledge is restricted by the traditions themselves: held by particular people, disclosed at particular stages, and in many cases not to be seen or spoken of by the uninitiated or by the other sex. Much of it was nevertheless recorded and published by anthropologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Australian institutions now hold substantial archives under access conditions set by the relevant communities, and republishing restricted material is neither lawful nor decent.

So the atlas names closed knowledge as closed. Where a tradition has itself put something into the public record, that is what is used.