Apart from signalling historical particularity and embodiment, our use of the term 'foreign bodies' is deliberately ambiguous and ironic. As foreign bodies in Oceanian contexts, European and other travellers, missionaries, or colonizers were received unpredictably, sometimes with joy and hospitality but also with indifference, ambivalence, fear, rejection, or hostility. Indigenous reception helped shape the attitudes, reactions, and representations of visitors who in turn impinged to a greater or lesser extent on local patterns of action, relationship, and understanding. As foreign bodies in European representations, comparisons, classifications, and collections, indigenous Oceanian people were usually objectified and measured as specimens. Ultimately encompassed by colonial empires, indigenous bodies became colonial subjects and were often alienated from their own places — rendered foreign — especially in settler colonies.

It is nonetheless important to resist the distanced binary perspective which represents imperial and colonial encounters as the asymmetric opposition of discrete homogeneous communities, one local and subordinate, the other foreign and dominant.^[38] Close attention to particular past situations, always messy and multiplex, reveals overlapping alliances between local people and foreigners whose respective social and cultural groupings intersected ambiguously and fractured internally along lines of gender, age, vocation, place, interest, and rank, class, or status. Moreover, the foreigners in such encounters were often not Europeans but other Oceanian people — travellers, labourers, missionaries, native police, health workers, other colonial appointees, and so forth. One product of indigenous liaisons with foreigners was the engendering of significant populations of mixed ancestry, further complicating the quixotic colonial quest for racial purity (see Chapters One and Eight).

Notwithstanding these caveats, this volume is not per se a history of encounters in Oceania but a history of the idea of race with specific reference to that region. Our major concern, with varying relative emphasis, is the entanglement of discourse and experience with respect to race. Experience was grounded in encounters, where racial ideas and representations were enacted, reworked, or forged, but the level of generality at which the collection is necessarily pitched means that particular embodied encounters figure only fleetingly as examples.^[39] Our core themes are variety, flux, ambiguity, contestation, and recursion in the concept of race as well as in the exemplary representations and appropriations of indigenous Oceanian people and their bodies made by savants and scientists, field naturalists and collectors, colonial officials and humanitarians, settlers and missionaries. Our wide thematic net thus traces the threads of scientific conceptions of race into political, philanthropic, and public domains. We position race not only in relation to biological and anthropological discourses but also colonial and government policies, popular stereotypes, and equivocal humanitarian engagements with the idea of race and its science. We foreground ideological fractures and national, class, and personal variations which rendered European racial ideas and representations anything but homogeneous or consistent. But we also chart the ongoing, if now largely illegitimate appeal of the race concept, its chameleon capacity to take on the colouring of the time and the place, and its propensity to recur in the face of the most determined efforts to invalidate or extirpate it.