Kategoria BISAC: History >> Oceania

The stories of Kauai's ruling chiefs were passed from generation to generation in songs and narratives recited by trained storytellers either formally at the high chief's court or informally at family gatherings. Their chronology was ordered by a ruler's genealogy, which, in the case of the pua alii (flower of royalty), was illustrious and far reaching and could be traced to one of the four great gods of Polynesia--Kane, Ku, Lono, and Kanaloa. In these legends, Hawaiians of old sought answers to the questions Who are we? Who are our ancestors and where do they come from? What lessons can...

Did they come from space, from Egypt, from the Americas? From other ancient civilizations? These are some of today's most fanciful claims about the first settlers of the islands of the Pacific. But none of them correctly answer the question: Where did the Polynesians come from?

This book is a thoughtful and devastating critique of such new learning, and a careful and accessible survey of modern archaeological, anthropological, genetic, and linguistics findings about the origins of Pacific Islanders. Professor Howe also examines the two-hundred-year-old history of Western ideas about...

Worldwide supplies of sugar and cotton were impacted dramatically as the U.S. Civil War dragged on. New areas of production entered these lucrative markets, particularly in the South Pacific, and plantation agriculture grew substantially in disparate areas such as Australia, Fiji, and Hawaii. The increase in production required an increase in labor; in the rush to fill the vacuum, freebooters and other unsavory characters began a slave trade in Melanesians and Polynesians that continued into the twentieth century.

The White Pacific ranges over the broad expanse of Oceania to...

Europeans' romanticist imaginings of people from the South Pacific have been around since the Enlightenment and have been significantly informed by the accounts of voyages to Tahiti by people such as Louis Bougainville. This book shows that the overtly promiscuous behavior that the French perceived as hospitality on the part of the Tahitians in 1768 was actually a defensive ploy, and that our contemporary image of sex and sexuality in Pacific Island societies is influenced by a fantasy based on this French misperception.

This volume takes a very detailed look at traditional Tahitian...

A small canoe with Polynesians brought the first humans to Easter Island in 700 CE, and when boat travel in the South Pacific drastically...