Transformation of Christian Ritual in the Pacific: Samoan White Sunday

1988 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Roach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
The Pacific

Nineteenth-century LMS agents brought to Samoa, along with other elements of Christianity, the festival of Pentecost. In its new home, however, the celebration of this festival was changed from May or June each year to October. More important, in Samoa it is also a ritual of status reversal. This article gives a detailed description of Pentecost, referred to in Samoa as White Sunday or as Children's Sunday, in a Western Samoan village and shows how a Christian festival has been reinterpreted in terms of traditional values and meanings.

South Sea Tales

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Louis Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
South Sea ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Subject Material

The literary world was shocked when in 1889, at the height of his career, Robert Louis Stevenson announced his intention to settle permanently on the Pacific island of Samoa. His readers were equally shocked when he began to use the subject material offered by his new environment, not to promote a romance of empire, but to produce some of the most ironic and critical treatments of imperialism in nineteenth-century fiction. In these stories, as in his work generally, Stevenson shows himself to be a virtuoso of narrative styles: his Pacific fiction includes the domestic realism of ‘The Beach at Falesé, the folktale plots of ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’, and the modernist blending of naturalism and symbolism in The Ebb-Tide. But beyond their generic diversity the stories are linked by their concern with representing the multiracial society of which their author had become a member. In this collection - the first to bring together all his shorter Pacific fiction in one volume - Stevenson emerges as a witness both to the cross- cultural encounters of nineteenth-century imperialism and to the creation of the global culture which characterizes the post-colonial world.

Wide Angle: Eadweard Muybridge, the Pacific Coast, and Trans-Indigenous Representation

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-72
Author(s):  
Robert D. Aguirre
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Wide Angle ◽  
Economic Networks ◽  
Temporal Dimension ◽  
Indigenous Representation ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Important Site

Eadweard Muybridge's Pacific Coast photographs provide an important site for investigating Victorian visual practices of the “wide.” They do not simply expand a referential frame to encompass novel subjects; they also, and more critically, register powerful narratives of temporality and modernity. This essay's analysis of the “wide” as an incipient concept of critical spatiality is not set against the more familiar temporal dimension of the long nineteenth century (a false and ultimately unproductive opposition). Rather, it places these two concerns in some tension with each other, though the argument is less about periodicity than about the representation of timescales in nineteenth-century media. In Muybridge's photographs, thinking about the representational possibilities of width is impossible without also confronting temporality. The Pacific Coast photographs are important both as explorations of timescales and artifacts in an influential nineteenth-century medium and prompts to reconsider the politico-economic networks that were central to the progress of expeditionary photography itself.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Migrant Labor ◽  
Labor Discipline ◽  
Land Dispossession ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Indigenous Land

This book’s epilogue considers how the story of the rise and fall of Hawaiʻi’s indigenous workers—and the diasporic, migratory nature of their experiences—revolutionizes what we think we know about the place of Hawaiʻi in the Pacific, and the place of the Pacific in the world. I also raise questions about what this story can contribute to twenty-first-century struggles over capitalism and colonialism in Hawaiʻi as well as across our globalizing world. The epilogue looks specifically at the twenty-first-century legacies of nineteenth-century practices and experiences of Hawaiian migrant labor, state labor discipline, indigenous land dispossession, policing and incarceration, and life in “perpetual diaspora.”

Mathematics in the Pacific Basin

1988 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garry J. Tee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pacific Basin ◽  
Australian Aborigines ◽  
The People ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Numeral Systems ◽  
The Common ◽  
Literate Culture ◽  
Almost All

The development of systematic mathematics requires writing, and hence a non-literate culture cannot be expected to advance mathematics beyond the stage of numeral words and counting. The hundreds of languages of the Australian aborigines do not seem to have included any extensive numeral systems. However, the common assertions to the effect that ‘Aborigines have only one, two, many’ derive mostly from reports by nineteenth century Christian missionaries, who commonly understood less mathematics than did the people on whom they were reporting. Of course, in recent decades almost all Aborigines have been involved with the dominant European-style culture of Australia, and even those who are not literate have mostly learned to use English-style numerals and to handle money. Similar qualifications should be understood when speaking of any recent primitive culture.

scholarly journals From the Indian Ocean to the Pacific: Affranchis and Petits-Blancs in New Caledonia

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Elizabeth Speedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
New Caledonia ◽  
Sugar Industry ◽  
Production Equipment ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Rich

The sugar crisis of 1860 in Reunion motivated the migration of thousands of Réunionnais to New Caledonia. Along with sugar planters, wealthy enough to transport their production equipment as well as their indentured workers, significant groups of both skilled and unskilled labourers made their way from Reunion to the Pacific colony in the second half of the nineteenth century. In previous publications, I have focused my attention on the sugar industry and the immigration of the rich planters and their coolies. While I have drawn attention to the heterogeneity of the sugar workers and have signalled the arrival and numeric importance of tradespeople, manual and low skilled workers from Reunion, I have not yet described these immigrants in detail. This is because this group has been largely ignored by history and details surrounding their circumstances are scant. In this paper, I discuss the background and origins of these people and highlight some of the fascinating stories to emerge from this migration to New Caledonia and beyond.

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