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How do images circulating in Pacific cultures and exchanged between them and their many visitors transform meanings for all involved? This fascinating collection explores how through mimesis, wayfarers and locales alike borrow images from one another to expand their cultural repertoire of meanings or borrow images from their own past to validate their identities.
List of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
PART I: INTRODUCTION
Introduction: Mimesis in Theory and in Cultural History
Jeanette Mageo
PART II: MIMESIS THROUGH TIME
Chapter 1. Imitation as Relationality in Early Australian Encounters
Francesca Merlan
Chapter 2. Transitional Images and Imaginaries: Dressing in Schemas in Colonial Samoa
Jeannette Mageo
Chapter 3.
Reel to Real: Mimesis, Playing Indian, and Touring with The Vanishing Race in New Zealand 1927
Sarina Pearson
PART III: SELLING MIMESIS: FROM TOURIST ART TO TRADE STORES
Chapter 4. Traditional Tahitian Weddings for Tourists: An Entwinement of Mimetic Practices
Joyce D. Hammond
Chapter 5.
Of Dragons and Mermaids: The Art of Mimesis in the Trobriand Islands
Sergio Jarillo de la Torre
Chapter 6. Capitalism Meets Its Match: Failed Mimesis of Market Economics among the Asabano of Papua New Guinea
Roger Ivar Lohmann
PART IV: RITUAL MIMESIS AND ITS RECONFIGURATIONS
Chapter 7. Mimesis, Ethnopsychology, and Transculturation:
Identifications in Birthday Celebrations among Banabans in Fiji
Elfriede Hermann
Chapter 8. Mimesis and Reimagining Identity among Marshall Islanders
Laurence Marshall Carucci
Chapter 9. Anthropology, Christianity, and the Colonial Impasse: Rawa Mimesis, Millennialism, and Modernity in the Finisterre Mountains of Papua New Guinea
Doug Dalton
PART V: AFTERWORD
“1 Lot Magic Sticks 6 Bundles”: Mimetic Technologies, Their Intimacies and Intersecting Histories
Joshua A. Bell
Index
About the author
Jeannette Mageo is a psychological anthropologist. Her work focuses on how subjectivity, identity, and emotion evolve out of cultural and historical experiences. Since 1980, she has been involved in research and publication on Samoan culture, history, and psychology.
Summary
How do images circulating in Pacific cultures and exchanged between them and their many visitors transform meanings for all involved? This fascinating collection explores how through mimesis, wayfarers and locales alike borrow images from one another to expand their cultural repertoire of meanings or borrow images from their own past to validate their identities.
Additional text
“Anthropologists, as scholars and teachers, should welcome these analyses, as mimesis is at the core of our foundational ethnographic method, participant observation, and also is a popular strategy of hands-on, experiential learning within classrooms. As Bell concludes, ‘mimesis is profoundly engaging anthropologically because of issues it raises about the nature of cross-culture engagement’. Anthropologist see, anthropologist do.” • JRAI (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute)
“…a rich and nuanced thesaurus of instances of mimesis. Common themes are developed across the chapters, skilfully knit together in the Afterword penned by Bell…The impressive internal coherence of the volume and the questions it generates encourage an engagement with this publication beyond its regional specificity.” • Anthropos
“This edited collection offers an important contribution to mimesis and its role in transcultural encounters, both in the past and present, in the Pacific region.” • Alison Dundon, University of Adelaide, Australia
