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The question of Tahiti population at contact was first addressed by assessing the reliability of early and later estimates, and then by a retrodiction based on the first reliable censuses and data on trends. Cook's famous estimate of 204,000 Tahitians, affected by a wrong number of districts, has been reworked based on his own and the Forsters' observations, using coast length and the age and sex structure of Tahiti population at contact in relation to infanticide, resulting in a range of 156,000-188,000 persons in 1774, before Boenechea's flu in 1772 and the 1774 flu epidemics. The discrepancies between Wilson's 16,050 and other missionaries' estimate of 50,000 as of 1797 are puzzling, but the 1829-1830 missionary estimates were strongly affected by Tahitians' resistance to Christianization. The twentieth century estimates are affected by a political context related to colonization - decolonisation, leading to the fact that researchers favour low estimates. McArthur uses missionary data, assuming that baptisms are births, although before the conversion was completed, baptisms included adults and children of all ages. She bases her estimate of 30,000 Tahitians at contact in 1767 on Wilson's number of 16,050, who applied the size of nuclear households, 6 persons, to clans. Oliver followed her, however not excluding numbers twice as high or more. Our retrodiction on the 1848 and 1881 censuses, based on qualitative missionary reports on sanitary situation and data of Rarotonga that experienced similar events as Tahiti, yield, with conservative assumptions, 180,000 persons at contact, showing consistent results with early navigators' estimates. My own PhD experience in the late 1980s shows that scholars' re-estimates were constrained, directly or indirectly, by political considerations related to the guilt syndrome and colonialist ideology. This appears in the frequent contradictions found in their works to support low estimates in order to reduce the decline, despite evidence of dramatic epidemics and a steady decline extending almost throughout the 19th century. The same attitude of denial is found in some missionary, administrative and medical reports, particularly on the Marquesas in the late 19th century. Colonisation was associated with various ideologies, related to anthropology's early attempts based on theories of evolutionism, functionalism and structuralism, occasionally resulting in fictions such as "primitive thinking", "ahistorical societies" and "collective unconscious", that were part of the justification of colonisation and its mistakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Comment offers a response to Guillaume Alevêque's 'Remnants of the "Wallis Maro 'Ura"" (Tahitian Feathered Girdle): History and Historiography', The Journal of Pacific History, 53:1 (2018). The response is from a specialist, Tahitian perspective. While Alevêque is applauded, the paper disputes many English terms applied to maro 'ura, places maro 'ura in a wide Polynesian context and insists on the enduring mystic and political power of maro 'ura for the people of Tahiti. The Comment also discusses the materials used in the 'remnants' described by Alevêque. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article establishes a link between entrepreneurship and a new ‘cultural dimension’: thrift vs. sharing. This cultural dimension measures what is the overriding social norm in a group: thrift or sharing. Our first hypothesis states that long winters with annual harvests fostered thrift while foraging and tropical horticulture and continuous harvesting fostered sharing. Our second hypothesis states that thrift promotes entrepreneurship, while sharing hampers it. We find empirical support for both hypotheses when comparing indigenous Polynesians and the Hakka Chinese minority in Tahiti, French Polynesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the emergence of protest music in Tahiti, understood as voiced feelings of opposition against social or political injustice and processes of cultural standardization, as well as more implicit and "pacific'forms of artistic reactions to such issues. The study identifies a system of overlapping musical "fields" within the Tahitian musical landscape, and discusses key historical, cultural, and artistic factors that have, led in the last decades to the emergence of contemporary Tahitian protest music. It unveils connections between literature, oratory art, and songwriting, and looks into their implications on the work of selected singers-songwriters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A diaspora of Polynesian travellers on foreign ships began with the foreign discoverers. Jem, a young Tahitian boy, lived in Sydney for some years before shifting to New Zealand. There he married and became a Ma?ori chief. He helped Revd Samuel Marsden in 1814 and later joined a private ship on a disastrous expedition to get sandalwood from the New Hebrides in 1829-30. About 350 Rotumans, 120 Tongans, 500 Hawaiians and various others, including some Ma?ori, died, mostly from fevers caught at Erromanga. Jem survived and was reported in Tonga in 1832, but whatever happened thereafter?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia throughout the 1980s and 1990s, anxieties about new reproductive technology crystallised especially conspicuously around surrogacy, resulting in legislative disfavour for the practice. Since then there has been a partial de-problematisation of surrogacy. This article examines the extent to which the increased legal acceptability of surrogacy in Australia has extended to its use by gay men. It also examines judicial approaches to federal provisions relating to the ascription of parental status with respect to children born into surrogacy arrangements, and reflects upon their impact on gay families. Finally, because gay surrogacy foregrounds parenting intention as the decisive ground for allocation of parental status, the article reflects upon the nature of surrogacy in the West by engaging in a comparative analysis of Tahitian parenting, which traditionally has accommodated intentional parenthood on a large scale, through the institutionalisation of adoption practices. The fact that in Tahiti sexuality- a n d gender-variant people may figure as adoptive parents makes the comparison all the more interesting. The article elaborates on the policy implications of the insight that this comparative analysis yields into the nature of surrogacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the painting of Indian-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil titled "Self-Portrait as Tahitian." It mentions that the Tahitianness in Sher-Gil's painting marks the simplicity of its nude woman figure as the absence of couture. It notes that the work of the said painter has barely been mentioned in literature that supports her standard status in modern Indian art. She also points out that it addresses influential ways to contemporary intellectual concerns.

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As Teissier-Landgraf's novel Hutu Paīnu: Tahiti, racines, et déchirements and Chantal Spitz's L'Île des rêves écrasés suggest, the concept of a Ma'ohi identity and métissage is not monolithic. The métissé identity is shaped by a combination of individual personality traits and preferences, family dynamics and environment. In the spirit of métissage and migration, Ma'ohi creative and experiential ideas and energies can extend throughout the rest of Polynesia and Oceania, and further outward to the West. Sharing cultural productions, such as art and literature, functions as a powerful medium to resituate Oceanic peoples in dialogue with one another. Such dissemination will generate a long overdue (re)exchange of ideas and literatures between Oceanians that needs to occur vis-à-vis an intellectual cross-fertilization between formerly and currently colonized nation states. Such a shift will result in more inter-island exchanges and access to thoughts and experiences of other Oceanians. Importantly, this cross-fertilization of ideas will allow Ma'ohi writers to engage in a long overdue era of self-representation within their own Oceanic contexts. Dans plusieurs de ses écrits, Epeli Hau'ofa élabore une vision océanique du Pacifique sud qui met fin aux frontières héritées du colonialisme. Une telle vision est d'autant plus nécessaire pour décoloniser cette région grande comme l'Europe mais peuplée d'à peine l'équivalent de la population de la Belgique que le fossé entre les îles sous domination française et le reste de la région ne cesse de grandir. La littérature polynésienne a elle-même bien du mal à franchir les frontières coloniales, étant donné qu'elle est rédigée principalement en français ou dialecte local. Comme le montrent toutefois Marie-Claude Teissier-Landgraf dans Hutu Paīnu: Tahiti, racines, et déchirements and Chantal Spitz's L'Île des rêves écrasés, l'identité Ma'ohi et la littérature qu'elle engendre ne sont pas monolithiques. L'élan créateur et expérimental des auteurs francophones peut s'étendre au-delà des frontières francophones et générer un dialogue océanien qui permettra en retour une reconnaissance accrue de cette littérature trop souvent méconnue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates a prevalent skepticism about the veracity of Oceanic sentiments, evident in accounts of early contact in Tahiti. It places this skepticism in the context of broader philosophical concerns about the capacity of individuals to evaluate the emotions of others as genuine or false. It focuses on Tahitian mourning, which incorporates an element of excess, including practices of self-mutilation, whose ethical value must be negotiated within European accounts. Adducing the insights of eighteenth-century performance theory, the essay argues that the dismissal of such practices as false theatrics involves a justification of comparative European reserve that chimes with contemporary philosophical writing on the emotions, in seeking to invest performativity with suspicion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role that educational policies and practices have played in weakening the Norf’k language, a contact language that developed among British sailors and their Tahitian entourage on Pitcairn Island in the late 18th century. It is argued that the education system was only one of several factors in the decline of Norf’k and that its projected revival will require more than just supportive educational measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an overview of the Tahitian fau headdress and discusses several examples, illustrations, descriptions and commentary by 18th century voyagers and 20th century scholars. The differences between the two fau, one at the British museum and another in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, are discussed. The role and importance of fau in the late 18th century Tahitian society and material culture is further examined.

Tahitian activist and poet/playwright Henri Hiro expressed his views of colonialism in French Polynesia in both French and Tahitian while actively participating in the anti-nuclear and independence movements. The late poet has been an inspiration to other Oceanian artists and activists, especially in islands like American Samoa where present-day colonialism challenges the position of a ‘postcolonial’ critique and notions such as ‘indigenous’ and ‘native’ sometimes seem to substitute for and weaken arguments of sovereignty and culture/language foundations. The author, a poet and artist from the US territory of American Samoa, looks at the relationship between Polynesian spirituality and movements of Oceanian independence, exemplified in the difference between the Polynesian belief in Hiro's ‘te tupu’ - the flourishing essence of life - and the western belief in ‘nature’ as separate from the human quest for identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Levy's pioneering work in Tahitians on hypocognition, feeling, and sensation can contribute to recent attempts in anthropological theorizing to address the problematic relationship between "culture" and "experience." Informed by the phenomenologically oriented works of the likes of Dilthey, Hussert, Schutz, and Merleau-Ponty, this growing body of literature in anthropology has become increasingly concerned with clarifying the relationships between culture and "objective" and "pre-objective" modes of "lived experience." This article suggests that in many ways Levy can be understood as one of the first anthropologists to systematically investigate this relationship ethnographically with his focused attention on the role that culture plays in differentially articulating patterns of conceptualization and sensation in the structuring of experience cross-culturally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of three decades my understanding of Samoa has been profoundly protected by Robert Levy's seminal work on Tahiti. No influence on my thinking has been more compelling. In this article I pay tribute to Levy by tracing the influence of his ideas on my understanding of Samoan ethnopsychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over 75 years, Pacific Island societies have been sites of pioneering and significant research on culture, child socialization, and psychological development. With the publication of Robert Levy's Tahitians in 1973, psychological anthropology, in the Pacific was transformed. His analysis of psycho-cultural patterns among Tahitians advanced our understanding of how child socialization mediates between the bio-psychological template and the socio-cultural world. In the decades following Levy's study, household economic practices in rural French Polynesia changed dramatically. This article examines the impact of this social transformation on familial relations and cultural practices within the family. In particular, Levy's theories are used to explore the impact of these changes for the construction of personal experience, affect, and thought among rural Tahitian children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert I. Levy's 1973 book Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands was a landmark study in the ethnopsychology of a non-Western culture, explicating not only the terms in which Tahitians experience mental phenomena but also the historical and contemporaneous contexts of social action and interaction that give those terms their cultural meanings and psychological salience. This article briefly reviews the features that distinguished the study at the time and in terms of which it remains an unsurpassed model for future research. Placing Tahitians in the history of ethnopsychology the article suggests that ethnopsychological studies carried out by insiders trained in anthropology and/or clinical psychiatry provide a needed complement to the daunting achievement represented by Levy's masterwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that many Tahitians of the `Bounty's time were descended from European seamen of the lost caravel San Lesmes. Physical characteristics of Tahitian women; Inheritance of anthropometric and qualitative traits among descendants of the `Bounty' mutineers and their Polynesian wives; Production of predominantly white Caucasoid through selective breeding.

The article focuses on the use of lattice analysis for detecting patterns in the material possessions of various ethnic groups. Information about material possessions is very useful for the study of the fundamental organizational principles of societies. Lattice analysis detected a hierarchical chaining of possessions and stratification of households in case of the Tahitians. This method revealed division of labor in case of the Mbuti hunters and gatherers. Their possessions were related to their basic hunting traits.

Examines the significance of `maro 'ura' or feather girdles in Tahiti. Relationship to 'Oro the Tahitian god of war; Significance for tribal politics; Significant `maro 'ura' at the Opoa `marae' in Ra'iatea; Intertribal conflicts; Intensification of 'Oro worship.

The article presents a discussion of the author's experience of growing in an environment with various ethnicity, which include Hawaiians, Samoans, Tongans, Tahitians, English, Scottish, Irish, German, and Chinese. The author focuses on a small village on the island of O'ahu called La'ie. The author examines La'ie as a place deeply connected with Hawaiian values which have sustained life in its many forms from before Europeans became involved.

Gauguin's pictorial attitude towards Tahitian women was ambivalent, as was his concept of a revived Paradise on Earth. He wished to accept a life of primitive bliss and yet remained very much a European intellectual. With him from Europe he brought all the time-honoured ideas about the primeval Fall of Man having given rise to consciousness and brooding thought. It is all there in Gauguin's large »Credo» of 1897 in Boston, as well as in its immediate sequel, the wooden relief Que sommes-nous? (Fig. 1). Three kinds of work may be singled out for their totally different attitudes. The first is illustrated by Parau api, one version of which exists in Paris and another in Dresden (Fig. 2). The painter here reveals himself as a European observer, noting the racial characteristics of two Tahitian women and emphasizing them as heavily primitive beings. This has been achieved by highly plastic modelling together with sharp contrasts and shades. Gauguin uses similar means in the carved portrait of his first Tahitian wife, Tehaamana, where he has heightened the primitive effect by colouring the eyeballs green (Fig. 3). Gauguin's second attitude is most clearly brought out in Arearea (Fig. 4), in which the two girls have been turned into products of a highly sophisticated Oriental civilization. Gauguin here acted somewhat like Pierre Loti, telling a most poetical and charming lie whose unmistakable address is the public in Paris. He has moderated the plasticity, and the canvas works mainly through surfaces of intense colours. Whereas the two girls in Parau api hardly communicate at all, music brings them together in Arearea. In the back- ground we encounter the worship of a huge cult image of a kind that perhaps never existed in Tahiti. Gauguin's third, more mature and realistic attitude becomes particularly evident in the works that followed after his attempted suicide on New Year's Eve, 1897. The main work here is Les seins aux fleurs rouges (fig. 5), in which Gauguin apostrophizes the Tahitian woman's power of thought and reflection by means of a soft modelling without shades and an almost classical contraposto. A mild, wistful mood pervades this representation of two women, which may bring to mind Poussin's Arcadian shepherdesses. This attitude evolved in Gauguin's art at a time when he no longer reckoned on returning to Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]