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Marquesan
societies : inequality and political transformation in Eastern
Polynesia / Nicholas Thomas. - Oxford : Clarendon press, 1990.
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XV-256 p.-[4] p. of pl. : maps ;
22 cm.
ISBN
0-19-827748-2
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NOTE
DE L'ÉDITEUR
: Marquesan society has long captured the interest of
European
observers, in part because of unfamiliar institutions such as
polyandry. But because of complex and destructive historical changes
and the very scattered nature of early source-materials, the
distinctive Marquesan developments of Polynesian society have been
obscure and at odds with anthropologists' and historians' overall
understanding of Pacific societies.
Nicholas
Thomas's book, based on a critical study of the fullest
possible range of sources, is the first to provide a clear account of
early Marquesan social relations and culture, and as such will become a
key source for Pacific scholars. The author's discussion is not
restricted to ethnohistoric documentation however. His analysis of
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.
In linking
specific features of early Marquesan society, its contact
with foreigners and the longer-term transformations of eastern
Polynesian societies, Marquesan
Societies offers Pacific studies a distinctive new
perspective.
| ❙ | Nicholas
Thomas was born in Sydney in 1960. He studied anthropology and history
at the Australian National University, and visited Polynesia first in
1984 to research his PhD thesis on the Marquesas Islands. He later
worked in Fiji and New Zealand, as well as in many archives and museum
collections in Europe, North America, and the Pacific itself, and has
written widely on art, voyages, colonial encounters, and contemporary
culture in the Pacific Islands. He has also curated several
exhibitions, most recently Skin Deep : a History of Tattooing for the National Maritime Museum, London, and Cook's Sites
for the Museum of Sydney. He is now Professor of Anthropology at
Goldsmiths College, University of London. — Otago University
Press |
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| CONTENTS |
Glossary
List of illustrations
1- The islands : geography and prehistory
Part
I Early marquesan social and
cultural dynamics
2- Social groups and their
chiefs
3- Property and hierarchy
4- Disentangling tapu
5- Gender and hierarchy
6- Feasting and warfare
7- Between chiefs and shamans : ritual agency and
the diffusion of power
Part
II Contact history :
short-term transformations
8- The appropriation of an
invader : Opoti and the reorientations of chiefly practice
9- Southern marquesan transformations
Part
III Prehistory
and longer-term change
10- Crises and social transformations
Appendix A - Sources for the study of early marquesan culture and
history
Appendix B - Polyandry and demography
Notes
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index |
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| COMPLÉMENT
BIBLIOGRAPHIQUE |
- Nicholas Thomas,
« Social and cultural dynamics in early Marquesan
history » (PhD thesis), Canberra :
Australian national
university, 1986
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- Nicholas Thomas, « L'art de l'Océanie »,
Paris : Thames & Hudson, 1995
- Nicholas Thomas and Diane Losche (ed.),
« Double
vision, art histories and colonial histories in the Pacific »,
Cambridge : Cambridge university press, 1999
- Nicholas
Thomas, Anna Cole, Bronwen Douglas (et al.), « Tattoo :
bodies, art, and exchange in the Pacific and the West », Durham
(North Carolina) : Duke university press, 2005
- Nicholas
Thomas, « Islanders : the Pacific in the age of
empire », New Havec (Conn.) : Yale university press,
2010 ; « Océaniens : histoire du Pacifique
à l'âge des empires » trad. par Paulin Dardel
avec une préface d'Eric Wittersheim, Toulouse : Anacharsis,
2020
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| mise-à-jour : 7 février 2020 |
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