Polynesian cultures have been radically altered by Western colonialism. European explorers navigated much of the area in the latter quarter of the 18th century, and the first missionaries arrived in the late 1700s and early 1800s...Missionary influence on Polynesian peoples increased over time, and Christianity eventually became an integral part of the islanders’ lives. In many areas, Christianity was also influenced by local traditions and customs. Read more...
Polynesia has loomed large in the Western imagination for more than 200 years. Idealised images were disseminated around the world from the time of first contact with Europeans: people in Europe avidly read the reports of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1771), Captain James Cook (1773), and other explorers and saw images made by the artists who accompanied them. These provided source material for published and widely circulated engravings. This fascination with an imagined “paradise” continued in the form of fiction—including such novels as Herman Melville’s Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Footnote to History (1892) and In the South Seas (1896)—and visual art, particularly that of Paul Gauguin. Bred by these and other artists and by tourist iconography, musicals, and films, the notions of an almost blissfully carefree and easy way of life, devoid of harsh extremes of any type, played out on islands of great beauty and natural abundance, persisted into the 21st century in the popular imagination. Far from conforming to Western notions of paradise, traditional Polynesian cultures were in fact complex, highly specialized, and adapted to environments that could be quite hostile. Read more...
