‘Not perfect, but the best’

Despite imperfections, the information and materials on indigenous cultures in Micronesia and Melanesia collected from 1908 to 1910 by the Sudsee—or the South Sea Expedition—remain the best resource that exist on the subject.

This is what visiting scholar Dr. Dirk HR Spennemann underlined during his presentation Tuesday night at the American Memorial Park.

“It’s still the best resource we got. It’s not the bible, not the wonderful, mythical panacea of everything. It is documents shaped by human frailty,” said the Cultural Heritage Management associate professor at the Charles Sturt University in Australia.

Spennemann said the ethnographic studies completed by the Sudsee Expedition, which was commissioned by the Hamburg Museum of Ethnography to add to its research and collection, covered some 45 islands, including Samoa, Palau, and the Caroline Islands, which served as the homeland for the Carolinian community in the CNMI.

Field work on the Micronesian islands took nine months to conduct, he said.

The Sudsee Expedition was conducted by a group of “first generation graduates from the newly created type of ethnography,” including Paul Hambruch, Ernst Sarfert, Augustin Kramer and his wife, Elisabeth Kramer-Bannow.

Spennemann said the expedition aimed “to observe and record the final phases of an old, indigenous culture as long as it still had vitality and retained many remnants of old times that were little changed.”

“The expedition happened at a time when the first ethnographers came off the universities,” he explained. “Ethnography was a new discipline. It was not something which had been there for a long time… it wasn’t formally taught yet as a course.”

According to Spennemann, one important reason why the materials on indigenous cultures were collected was for fear that these cultures will “die out or at least the cultures were going to change so much that it won’t be recognizable.”

The visiting historian noted that the Northern Mariana Islands were “simply not considered to be worth coming to” for the expedition team due to the colonization of the islands by the Spaniards.

“The whole concept of the expedition was to record traditional cultures… There was already Spanish colonization in Marianas so there wasn’t much tradition in Chamorro culture in the mind of German academics,” he told reporters after his presentation.

The expedition team collected a total of 23 published volumes, with two of these volumes currently being translated by Spennemann as a project for the NMI Council for the Humanities.

Of all the scientists involved in the research, Spennemann said that Augustin Kramer’s work “is certainly the richest” because of his wife’s involvement, who was “a very good observer” and was able to put a female touch on the research.

“Women tend to, traditionally, tend to emphasize process over product… I think that women would be in general, at the time certainly, would be the better anthropologists,” he added.