Voyagers by Nicholas Thomas

Author:Nicholas Thomas [Thomas, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Pandanus plants near shoreline, Kwamera, Tanna, Vanuatu.

The Lapita people’s colonizing burst began suddenly and came to an end that was not necessarily sudden, but definite. Once they reached Fiji and western Polynesia, they settled the wide range of larger and smaller islands, from Viti Levu through the Tongan archipelago to Upolo and Savai‘i. They reached this region around 1000 BC, but communities and culture then developed across these relatively proximate island groups for nearly two thousand years before venturing farther.

This was the environment in which Polynesian culture assumed a distinct identity. “Polynesia,” as we saw earlier, was one of Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville’s terms, an invention of nineteenth-century racial anthropology that was juxtaposed negatively with “Melanesia” for well over a century. But the fact that d’Urville’s theorization was an expression of its time—indeed, of invidious colonial thought—did not mean that it was entirely wrong. Whereas the French geographer’s other two regional and ethnic types—Melanesian and Micronesian—did not reflect ancestrally unified cultures or coherent traditions (let alone “races”), there were and are Polynesian peoples, cultures, and languages that have common origins.

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