Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Anthropology in Polynesia
Polynesia has been traditionally a region of anthropological interest, stimulated perhaps on the one hand by the *Romantic, *Rousseau-coloured journals of Bougainville and his ship-mates, and on the other hand by the availability of detailed descriptions of Polynesian islands by explorers such as Cook, Foster, or Dumont d‘Urville, and missionaries like Ellis, Bingham, Laval and Turner. But Polynesia, from the writings of the early explorers, through the selfmythologization of European visitors like Paul Gauguin, through to early ethnographies like †Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), has been the site of European fantasy as well as European fascination. Mead’s romanticized account of Samoa was, nevertheless, balanced by the more prosaic (and careful) work of †Raymond Firth in Tikopia, or †A.M.Hocart in Fiji, not to mention the researches of her own nemesis, †Derek Freeman, in Samoa itself.
Since World War II, and the era of decolonization, the ethnography of Polynesia has become far more self-conscious about its origins in European domination. Sahlins’s historical recon-struction of the events surrounding Cook’s death in Hawaii (1985) has become the focus of an extra-ordinary controversy as a result of Obeyesekere’s polemical postcolonial challenge (1992). Hanson’s (1989) investigation of the politics of Maori tradition in New Zealand has provoked controversy and challenge from Maori activists. To some extent, these controversies, like the Mead-Freeman *scandal, all involve the growing recognition of the political complexity of romanticized versions of the region, whether these are presented in the name of indigenous activism or American cultural criticism. As anthropology has outgrown its own roots in romantic primitivism, younger anthropologists (like N.Thomas, A.Biersack, R.Borofsky, J.Kelly, M.Kaplan and J.Siikala) have started to construct much more historically sophisticated accounts of the region, both in the colonial and the postcolonial context (Borofsky and Howard 1989; Thomas 1990).
HENRI J.M.CLAESSEN
See also: missionaries, Pacific: Melanesia, scandals, taboo
Further Reading
Alkire, W.H. (1978) Coral Islanders, Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing Corp.
Borofsky, R. and A.Howard (eds) (1989) Developments in Polynesian Ethnology, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press
Campbell, I.C. (1989) A History of the Pacific Islands, Berkeley: University of California Press
Firth, R. (1936) We the Tikopia, London: George Allen and Unwin
Goldman, I.
(1970) Ancient Polynesian Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Hanson, A. (1989) ‘The Making of the Maori: Cultural Invention and its Logic’, American Anthropologist 91: 809–902
Irwin, G. (1992) The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonialisation of the Pacific, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Jennings, J.D. (ed.) (1979) The Prehistory of Polynesia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Kirch, P.V. (1984) The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Mead, M. (1928) Coming of Age in Samoa, New York: William Morrow
Obeyesekere, G. (1992) The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, Princeton: Princeton University Press
Robillard, A.B. (ed.) (1992) Social Change in the Pacific Islands, London: Kegan Paul International
Sahlins, M. (1958) Social Stratification in Polynesia, Seattle: University of Washington Press
——(1985) Islands of History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Siikala, J. (1982) Cult and Conflict in Tropical Polynesia. A Study of Traditional Religion, Christianity and Nativist Movements, Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fenica
Thomas, N. (1990) Marquesan Societies: Inequality and Political Transformation in Eastern Polynesia, Oxford: Clarendon
Van Bakel, M.A. (1989) Samenleven in gebondenheid en vrijheid: Evolutie en ontwikkeling in Polynesië (Living Together in Restraint and Freedom: Evolution and Development in Polynesia), PhD Thesis, Leiden
This is the complete article, containing 535 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
View More Summaries on Polynesia
