Polynesia

Marquesan society has long captured the interest of observers, in part because of unfamiliar institutions such as polyandry. Based on a critical study of a wide range of sources, this is the first book to provide a clear account of early Marquesan social relations and culture. Thomas's analysis of a dynamic and highly fluid Chiefly society and its encounters with early European visitors and traders encompasses wider debates about the nature of gender relations in Polynesian societies, small scale hierarchical structures, cultural transformation, and longer-term change. Linking specific features of early Marquesan society, its contact with foreigners, and the longer-term transformations of eastern Polynesian societies, this will be a key source for Pacific studies.

Anuta is a small Polynesian community in the eastern Solomon Islands that has had minimal contact with outside cultural forces. Even at the end of the twentieth century, it remains one of the most traditional and isolated islands in the insular Pacific. In Oral Traditions of Anuta, Richard Feinberg offers a telling collection of Anutan historical narratives, including indigenous texts and English translations. This rich, thorough assemblage is the result of a collaborative project between Feinberg and a large cross-section of the Anutan community that developed over a period of twenty-five years. The volume's emphasis is ethnographic, consisting of a number of texts as related by the island's most respected experts in matters of traditional history. Feinberg's annotations, which arm the reader with essential ethnographic and historical contexts, clarify important linguistic and cultural issues that arise from the stories. The texts themselves have important implications for the relationship of oral tradition to history and symbolic structures, and afford new evidence pertinent to Polynesian language sub-grouping. Further, they provide insight into a number of Anutan customs and preoccupations, while also suggesting certain widespread Polynesian practices dating back to the pre-contact and early contact periods.

This multidisciplinary volume presents a fresh look at New Zealand settlement history. Contributors re-examine the orthodox scenario of Polynesian colonization, and by studying aspects of New Zealand like the languages, the climate, the archeological evidence, and the geomorphology, they create new and challenging models for the date, type, and source of that country's colonization.

In this innovative book, Kirch and Green develop the theory and method of an anthropological approach to long-term history. Combining archaeology, comparative ethnography, and historical linguistics, they advance a phylogenetic model for cultural diversification, and apply a triangulation method for historical reconstruction. Through an analysis of the history of Polynesian cultures they present a first-time detailed reconstruction of Hawaiki, the Ancestral Polynesian culture that flourished some 2,500 years ago. This book will be essential reading for any anthropologist, prehistorian, linguist, or cultural historian concerned with the study of long-term history.

This major new interdisciplinary study focuses on the representation of the body in the work of eight of Polynesia's most significant contemporary writers. Drawing on anthropology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, history and medicine, Postcolonial Pacific Writing develops an innovative postcolonial framework specific to the literatures and cultures of this region.