This seminal work in several fields—person-centered anthropology, comparative psychology, and social history—documents the inner life of the Tahitians with sensitivity and insight. At the same time Levy reveals the ways in which private and public worlds interact. Tahitians is an ethnography focused on private but culturally organized behavior resulting in a wealth of material for the understanding of the interaction among historical, cultural, and personal spheres. "This is a unique addition to anthropological literature. . . . No review could substitute for reading it."—Margaret Mead, American Anthropologist
As culturally diverse, non-Western communities are drawn into the international division of labour, capitalism takes root in a number of ways. This book describes how capitalism has become a part of the lives of rural Tahitians, starting with the arrival of Westerners to the islands and detailing the nature of the transformation brought about by missionaries, merchants, and French colonisers - a transformation whose pace has accelerated with the islands' rapid modernisation and incorporation into the French welfare state.
Tahiti evokes visions of white beaches and beautiful women. This imagined paradise, created by Euro-American romanticism, endures today as the bedrock of Tahiti's tourism industry, while quite a different place is inhabited and experienced by ta'ata ma'ohi, as Tahitians refer to themselves. This book brings into dialogue the perspectives on place of both Tahitians and Europeans. Miriam Kahn is professor of anthropology at the University of Washington and author of Always Hungry, Never Greedy.
The Polynesian island of Tahiti is in the imagination an island paradise, an idyllic world inhabited by noble savages, carefree and uncomplicated. Tahiti separates myth from reality. Finney describes and analyzes the forces of change that have confronted Tahiti and its inhabitants in the modern world. As the author notes in the introduction, "Neither isolation in the South Pacific, nor the romantic aura invested in them by philosophers and escapists of the West, has saved Tahitians from intense involvement in the twin processes of industrialization and urbanization." This study of Tahitian life concentrates upon two different communities. One is a peasant community moving from subsistence farming to an increased reliance upon the production of cash crops. The other is a proletarian community whose members were at the time abandoning farming and fishing in favor of wage labor. Finney compares the two contemporaneous communities, enabling him to define different but interrelated variables of the economic and social change. These are responsible for Tahiti's evolution from a subsistence oriented peasant life to a life based increasingly on cash crops and wage labor. What happens to family life, work patterns, land use, and other traditional modes of social organization when a small, underdeveloped society is confronted with economic forces largely beyond its control? In dealing with this question as it applies to Tahiti, Finney makes an important contribution to our understanding of how modernization affects a society once thought to be outside the boundaries of the modern world. A major study in English of the socio-economic forces at work in Tahiti, this book provides the reader with both an understanding of the changing nature of Tahitian life, and the reactions of Tahitians to such changes.
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“Tahiti is far famed yet too little known.” Thus wrote J. M. Orsmond in 1848, and the same assertion can be made in 1972. Thousands of pages had been published about Tahiti and its neighboring islands when Orsmond uttered his judgment, and tens of thousands have been published since that time, but a unified, comprehensive, and detailed description of the pre-European ways of life of the inhabitants of those Islands is yet to appear in print. The present work, lengthy as it is, makes no such claim to comprehensiveness; rather, it is concerned mainly with the social relations of those inhabitants, and it serves up only enough about their technology, their religion, their aesthetic expressions, and so forth to place descriptions of their social relations in context and render them more comprehensible. Volumes 1 and 2 of this work are a reconstruction of the Islanders’ way of life as it was believed to have been just before it began to be transformed by European influence—a period labeled the Late Indigenous Era. Volume 3 covers events in Tahiti and Mo‘orea from about 1767 to 1815—a period labeled the Early European Era.
In the 1830s, missionaries in French Polynesia sought to suppress the traditional art of tattooing, because they believed it to be a barbaric practice. More than 150 years later, tattooing is once again thriving in French Polynesia. This engrossing book documents the meaning of tattooing in contemporary French Polynesian society. As a permanent inscription, a tattoo makes a powerful statement about identity and culture. In this case, its resurgence is part of a vibrant cultural revival movement. Kuwahara examines the complex significance of the art, including its relationship to gender, youth culture, ethnicity and prison life. She also provides unique photographic evidence of the sophisticated techniques and varied forms that characterize French Polynesian tattooing today.Winner of The Japanese Society for Oceanic Studies Award 2005.
In her study of eighteenth-century literature and medical treatises, Mary McAlpin takes up the widespread belief among cultural philosophers of the French Enlightenment that society was gravely endangered by the effects of hyper-civilization. McAlpin's study explores a strong thread in this rhetoric of decline: the belief that premature puberty in young urban girls, supposedly brought on by their exposure to lascivious images, titillating novels, and lewd conversations, was the source of an increasing moral and physical degeneration. In how-to hygiene books intended for parents, the medical community declared that the only cure for this obviously involuntary departure from the "natural" path of sexual development was the increased surveillance of young girls. As these treatises by vitalist and vitalist-inspired physiologists became increasingly common in the 1760s, McAlpin shows, so, too, did the presence of young, vulnerable, and virginal heroines in the era's novels. Analyzing novels by, among others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and Choderlos de Laclos, she offers physiologically based readings of many of the period's most famous heroines within the context of an eighteenth-century discourse on women and heterosexual desire that broke with earlier periods in recasting female and male desire as qualitatively distinct. Her study persuasively argues that the Western view of women's sexuality as a mysterious, nebulous force-Freud's "dark continent"-has its secular origins in the mid-eighteenth century.
In the wake of the navigators who finally opened up the Pacific came missionaries, traders and finally administrators. In the early decades of the 19th century Polynesia was a rich field for the curious and the calculating, for writers and adventurers. The pioneer European settlers in Eastern Polynesia were ministers and mechanics sent out on the crest of an Evangelical wave the merged with the currents and eddies of trade and whaling to break down the isolation of the islands and their inhabitants. Among the pioneers was Welshman John Davies (1772-1855) who spent just over 50 years of his life on Tahiti and neighbouring islands. He witnessed the rise of the Pomare dynasty, conversion to Christianity, reaction to attempts at theocratic government, and the gradual encroachment of alien commerce and European rule. His colleagues have made their contribution to the history and anthropology of Polynesia. Davies himself, teacher, linguist and careful observer, wrote his own story of the Mission, its personalities and their contact with the Polynesians, from the early phase of disillusionment through three decades of political and economic change, destruction and reconstruction. From this contact there emerged the uneasy compromise of missionary and indigenous beliefs and institutions that characterized Tahiti and its neighbours before and after the advent of French administration. Davies's manuscript History is here edited and annotated, supplemented by the writings of other missionaries and presented as a contribution to the literature of the Pacific. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1961.
