[ANU Pacific.Institute] FW: colloque Oceania Ensemble à UH Manoa

[Miranda Forsyth]

Dear PI members, please see below from Serge T.

I have cut and pasted from one attachment but can forward them individually if anyone is interested.

Hi Miranda, PI Team, an information on the 2nd Colloquium of the network Oceania Ensemble; the detailed program with abstracts could interest some PI Members.
Best regards, Serge T


REREADING CLASSICS: FRANCE AND OCEANIA


UHM’s French Speaking Oceania and Asia Initiative is dedicated to increasing awareness and visibility of both UH and international creative and critical scholarship in the French-speaking Pacific. Created by then Interim Chancellor Robert Bley Vroman, and informally renamed “Oceania Ensemble” this working group organized its first successful symposium with UHM faculty, graduate students and colleagues from partner institutions the University of French Polynesia (UPF) and University of New Caledonia (UNC) in 2015. Three years later, our partners institutions have joined us for the second triennial Oceania Ensemble colloquium with the theme "Re-reading classic texts: France and Oceania.” With scholars from various disciplines, students, and community members from across our campus, we are delighted that you have joined us for this two-day symposium that seeks to strengthen our institutional ties, and enhance the voice and visibility of scholarship in and of the French speaking islands of the Pacific both at UHM and at our partner universities in the Francophone Pacific. The colloquium includes several roundtable panels and a series of presentations from local and visiting scholars to foster a fertile space for discussion and scholarly exchange around the focus of “re-reading classic texts in/of the France entangled Pacific Islands.” We hope the colloquium’s location at the East-West Center and on the UHM campus will also play a crucial role in developing a meaningful and concrete framework for future collaboration in the production and circulation of contemporary regional scholarship.


ANDERSON-FUNG, Puanani (UHM)

Title: Recovering bio-cultural knowledge of Polynesia using a bi-cultural approach to the classics


Abstract: As an ethnobotanist of Polynesian and European descent, I often find myself re-visiting and re-reading the works of certain enlightened individuals who, in my view, seem to have been fascinated by Oceanic cultures... their languages, their stories, and their relationships with nature.  I am inspired by their views, their goals, and their works, and I return to them as much for information as for reaffirmation of the perspectives that fuel my research. Using the recent results of two in-depth studies as a backdrop, I share some of the personalities, attitudes, tools, and written works that have helped me to




reconstruct and recover pieces of the science, culture, and history of my Polynesian ancestors.  Specifically, I share my reconstructions of the histories of two Polynesian plant names that originated in Tonga, underwent unique innovations in Marquesas and Tahiti, and were later carried to Mangareva, Rapanui, Cook Islands, Aotearoa, and Hawai‘i, in a manner consistent with the understandings provided by indigenous and Euro-American scholars in other fields of study. In closing, I reflect on the significance of the facts recovered and insights gained in the studies, and I acknowledge: the crucial role of classical scholars who respectfully regarded and fastidiously chronicled Polynesian culture and nature; the importance of older sources—especially old dictionaries—as repositories of words later lost; and share predictions made by my favorite classical scholars between 125–250 years ago that were substantiated by my results. “Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses." Alphonse Karr


Bio:  Puanani Anderson-Fung, is an ethnobotanist and ecological scientist of Hawaiian and European descent who combines a love of native Polynesian plants, language, and culture with research that assumes the mutual competence of both Polynesian and Linnaean science.  Nani restored a 1.5 acre garden of native plants at Kamehameha’s Kapālama campus before college, and later published on the importance of growing lei plants to preserve Hawai‘i’s native ecosystems and culture.  She has conducted botanical research on native ecosystems, the effects of invasive animal species, the status and variability of culturally important plant populations, such as ‘olonā and kukui, and has worked as a conservation volunteer on all of Hawai‘i’s high islands, except Ni ‘ihau.


BOUSQUET, Louis (UHM)

Title: From Loti’s romanticism to Houellebecq’s consumerism: “inventing the primitive we need”


Abstract: Michel Houellebecq’s literary opus gives rise to a new type of character; a frustrated man wrestling with the challenges of a new global economy that defeats him entirely. In his third novel, Platform, Houellebecq’s hero trades unapologetically the throes of modern France for the ubiquitous pleasure of Phuket’s whorehouses. A century earlier, Julien Viaud invented an Edenic albeit morbid Polynesia in his Marriage of Loti, in which his main character, Harry




Grant also known as Loti, falls in love with his young Tahitian bride Rarahu. This presentation will underscore how Loti’s English naval officer and     Houellebecq’s homunculus touristicus paradoxically share an almost identical “burden of civilization”. They both long for the rejuvenation they find through their hedonist encounters abroad with native women. In the process, they each create their own version of a primitive world into which they can deploy their own opportunistic creed, under a romantic guise in Loti’s prose and with cynical bluntness in Houellebecq’s novel. A similar and ambivalent ideology, that promotes and condemns at the same time the civilization they claim to represent.


Bio:  Louis Bousquet is an associate professor of French and the Chair of the French and Italian division at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is a specialist of 20th and 21st-century French literature with an emphasis on the Pacific. His research focuses on disenchantment and the rise of the homunculus. He is co-organizing with Alexander Mawyer the second triennial Oceania Ensemble Colloquium titled “Rereading Classics: France and Oceania”.


CASEY, Terava (UHM)

Title: A Contemporary View of Ancient Tahiti: Navigating Mā’ohi Migrations


Abstract: This presentation focuses on Teuira Henry’s Ancient Tahiti with the aim of understanding a fundamental aspect of Mā’ohi way of life, that of varied and dynamic migrations within the various islands of French Polynesia and beyond. Ancient Tahiti, a symbol itself of migrations between Tahiti and Hawai’i, also helps to forge new meaning in the conversation on migrations both old and new, by offering many stories that contextualize the continuity of historical  migrations. Exploring this historical continuity reveal exciting processes of exchange that characterize contemporary peoples and further nuance our understanding of the Pacific.


Bio:  Terava Kaʻanapu Casey is a Ph.D. History student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa studying Pacific and Hawaiian History. Her research focuses on the mobilities of Mā’ohi and their cross-cultural encounters throughout history as a way of understanding contemporary island communities.



CAVERT, Matthew (UHM)

Title: Environmental R/Evolution : Citizen Jacques Labillardière’s Pacific, 1791-93


Abstract: As the Revolution gripped France, Citizen Labillardière boarded a ship whose track would carry him far away from the political and social struggles of his homeland.  Labillardière joined the mission of D’Entrecasteaux as it set out for the Pacific in search of the missing French navigator La Pérouse.  As

a naturalist, Labillardière took detailed notes of the island environments and peoples he came across.  His published account of the voyage was a best seller.  It described the Pacific through the lens of the French Revolution; environment   was read as a determinant for the existence of social order, slavery, freedom, liberty.  It was also a canvas upon which a culture expressed itself through agriculture, land clearance, or settlement patterns.  Reread from

the contemporary moment, one infused with concern over environment changes wrought by pollution, invasive species, and climate shifts, Labillardière appears as an ecological vandal.  While in the Pacific Labillardière believed he was engaged in his own revolutionary acts in the Pacific.  The planting of gardens,   the sowing of European crops, the relocation of deer, or goats, would alter Pacific Environments and therefore alter the cultures that called them home.  Rereading Labillardière reveals the foundations of French projects in the 19th century to reform and remake island environments and a firm belief in the morality and historical inevitability in doing so.


Bio:  William Cavert is a doctoral student at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa where he is wrapping up a dissertation examining types of

environmental change on the islands of France’s Pacific Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.  His research highlights the connected nature of colonial projects for reshaping the environment of Pacific Islands.  He has published articles on epidemic disease and naturalists in the Pacific.


CHAPPELL, David (UHM)

Title: Alain Saussol's L'Héritage: a classic study of colonial land alienation in New Caledonia


Abstract: This talk engages Alain Saussol's book L'Heritage as a classic study of




and reflection on colonial land alienations and their legacy in New Caledonia, which addresses the centrality of that issue in race relations as well as the concept of a colonie de peuplement manque (apart from nickel boom démographics).

Bio:  Prof. Chappell has studied and published on New Caledonia for over twenty years. His works include Kanak Awakening: The Rise of Nationalism in New Caledonia. He recently retired from being a professor of Pacific Islands History at UH Mānoa.


GODIN, Patrice (UNC)

Title: A Very Unusual Ethnographical Relationship: Bwêêyöuu Ërijiyi and Maurice Leenhardt at Work


Abstract: Maurice Leenhardt was both a missionary and an ethnologist who was sent to New Caledonia in 1903, where he lived for almost twenty-five

years. Bwêêyöuu Ërijiyi was one of the first kanak protestant ministers and also one of Maurice Leenhardt’s so-called “missionary assistants”, and may be the most influential. The aim of this paper is to question the historical limits of the dialogue between the kanak and the French ministers.While engaged

with Bwêêyöuu Ërijiyiin the translation of the Bible into Ajië language, spoken in the Waa Wi Luu (Houaïlou) Valley where he resided,  Leenhardt took an interest about the culture of the Kanak people. So during his ethnographical investigations,  Bwêêyöuu Ërijiyi became more than an translator and an informant, the true ethnographer himself. As Emmanuel Kasarherou has noted, the main ethnographical works of the French missionary and ethnologist repeat and sometimes just translate the whole bulk of the data recorded about his own society in the Bwêêyöuu Ërijiyi’s notebooks” (Kasarherou 2002:4). But,

through the translation of the Bible, Bwêêyöuu Ërijiyi became also
the unwitting initiator of Maurice Leenhardt’s ideas about the Kanak person and psychology, as outlined in the most famous French missionary’s book, Do    Kamo: Person and Myth in a Melanesian World (1947). The dialogue

between Bwêêyöuu Ërijiyi and Maurice Leenhardt asks many questions about the ethnographical relationship, about the ideological porosity between anthropology and missionaries’ work in Oceania, about authorship in ethnography and so on. Some of them are discussed in this paper.





Bio:  Patrice Godin is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of New Caledonia (Nouméa). He has lived and worked in New Caledonia since 1982. His long term ethnographic research has been among the kanak communities of  Hienghène, in the Northeast area of the island.


GOLUB, Alex (UHM)

Title: Inheriting the Inheritor: Marcel Mauss's Gift and The Pacific


Abstract: Marcel Mauss's essay "Essai Sur Le Don" is the most widely taught text in anthropology graduate programs in the United States. Mauss's essay relies heavily on Pacific anthropology and, in one of its most famous passage, on the words of a Pacific Islander. This paper traces the history of Mauss's essay from primary sources in Aotearoa/New Zealand, through the the Third Republic, and into anglophone anthropology up to the present day. This history, I argue, demonstrates that anthropology was a complex undertaking with many political positioning. Indeed, Mauss's inheritors exemplify the complex political dyanmics

-- including possibilities both good and bad -- for contemporary anthropologists. Not just the history of anthropology, but also its politics, can be read in the history of Mauss's Gift.


Bio:  Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He studies the history and anthropology of Papua New Guinea, and also has a focus on the history of anthropology.


GONSCHOR, Lorenz (Atenisi University)

Title: Pre-Christian Tikopia as a Model for Neo-Pagan Tahiti: Reading Raymond Firth’s work on traditional religion in the context of religious revival movements in contemporary French Polynesia


Abstract: Raymond Firth’s series of monographs documenting the society and religion of the Polynesian outlier of Tikopia from the 1920s to the 1960s have   long been considered anthropological classics. Recently, Firth’s documentation of traditional religious practices on Tikopia has unexpectedly become relevant in




another part of Polynesia, namely as a source of inspiration for the polytheistic religious revival movement Te Hivarereata in Tahiti. Unlike the fragmentary materials on pre-Christian Tahiti from the turn of the nineteenth century, Firth’s work on Tikopia offers the advantage of describing a Polynesian society  becoming fully Christianized only in the 1950s, i.e. more than a century later than the Society Islands, and thoroughly documents traditional religious practices by a professional participating observer. This paper juxtaposes Firth’s participant observation of Tikopian religion and the process of its conversion to Christianity with the author’s own participant observation of Te Hivarereata and its ongoing efforts of reviving polytheist practices in a previously Christianized society while exploring how the former has inspired the latter.


Bio:  Lorenz Gonschor studied anthropology in Germany before coming to UH Mānoa, where he earned a MA in Pacific Islands studies in 2008 and a PhD in political science in 2016. After teaching for several years at the UH Department of LLEA, he is now a senior lecturer in Pacific Studies at ‘Atenisi University in Nuku‘alofa, Tonga, where he also serves as associate dean and librarian. He has a wide range of research interests, one of which are current polytheistic revival movements in Polynesia.


HO‘OMANWANUI, ku‘ualoha  (UHM)

Title: Mana Vahine Mā’ohi: Chantal Spitz’s Island of Shattered Dreams as Indigenous Feminism


Abstract: Since it was first published in 1991, Chantal Spitz’s L'ile des rêves écrasés (Island of Shattered Dreams) is a classic literary text in Oceania, as the first novel published by a Mā’ohi woman, more so since it was subsequently translated into English (by Jean Anderson, 2007), making it one of the most widely-read texts by a mā’ohi writer worldwide. The primary theme of mā’ohi cultural agency in engaging with and critiquing French colonialism and its devastating effects on mā’ohi lands and people through the development of nuclear testing makes the text an important voice of Indigenous feminism and literary nationalism that resonates beyond Tahitian shores. This presentation situates Spitz’ novel within the larger framework of literary studies, cultural studies, Indigenous literary nationalism, and Indigenous feminism, showing how it demonstrates Daniel Heath Justice’s argument of why Indigenous literature matters, both internal and




external to a given culture.


Bio:  kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui is a Professor of Hawaiian and Pacific literatures in the English Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her research and teaching specialties are Native Hawaiian and Pacific literatures, folklore, and Indigenous rhetorics. She is the founding and current Chief Editor of ‘Ōiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal. Her first book, Voices of Fire—Reweaving the Lei of Pele and Hi‘iaka Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) won honorable mention in the 2017 MLA (Modern Language Association) award for best new Indigenous scholarship. She is currently developing Ka Ipu o Lono, a Native Hawaiian  digital humanities resource of Hawaiian literature and Mele o nā Vāhine Mā’ohi, a digital humanities resource on Oceanic women’s poetry.


LOGAN, Joy (UHM)

Title: King Kalākaua in Spain: Of Montaigne and Travel


Abstract: In August of 1881, the Hawaiian monarch, King David Kalākaua, made a short visit to Madrid as part of his around-the-world tour. During his brief time  in Spain his every movement was detailed in a flurry of news articles, opinion columns, and fictionalized accounts written for a variety of Spanish publications. In my paper I examine two oppositional interpretations of Kalākaua’s visit to Madrid. While the majority of the journalistic accounts portrayed Kalākaua as a modern, sovereign subject tied to science, progress, culture, and travel, José Ortega Munilla’s acerbic, “El diario del Rey Kalakaua” [The Diary of King Kalakaua], evoked Michel de Montaigne’s “On Cannibals” (c. 1580) to craft a tale of a visiting “exotic native other” who serves to critique Spanish civilization. I contend that Ortega Munilla’s re-framing of Montaigne’s essay exchanges the Americas for the Pacific in a new, and anachronistic, conjuring of past Spanish privilege and empire. However, the contrasting accounts of Kalākaua’s visit (although they still repeat the “European self-Pacific other” dichotomy as a  means for self-examination), offer a very different vision of Kalākaua. They forge a nuanced characterization of Hawaiʻi, not as a place of “lack”, nor as an Edenic utopia, but rather as a profuse alternative, and possibly superior model, to Western progress and modernity, with respect to politics, education, and technology.




Bio:  Joy Logan is a Professor in the Division of Spanish and Latin American & Iberian Studies in the Department of Languages and Literatures of Europe and the Americas (LLEA) at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. Her research and publications have focused on gender and ethnic identity construction, the anthropology of adventure, and narrative expression in the Southern Cone. Her work on King Kalākaua and his time in Spain is part of an on-going research project, in collaboration with her French and German colleagues in LLEA, that focuses on Kalākaua’s 1881 trip around the world.


KAME‘ELEIHIWA, Lilikalā (UHM)

Title: Poepoe on Wākea as an Akua from Kahiki/Tahiti who traveled to Hawaiʻi


Abstract: Joseph Mokuohai Poepoe [1852-1913] was a brilliant Native Hawaiian scholar who wrote voluminously in the Hawaiian language newspapers. One of his most fascinating works was “Ka Moolelo o Wakea” wherein he tells the story of Wākeaʻs Akua, Haumea, the Earth Mother, who lived on the cliffs of Nuumea [Noumea?], Oʻahu, and where the first female temple was built called Kawāluna. Poepoe was also descendant of Paʻao, a priest of Raʻiatea, who affirms that Wākea [Ātea], the Hawaiian Sky Father, was from Tahiti.


Bio:  Lilikalā K. Kame'eleihiwa is a senior professor at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, who has frequently served as KCHS Director. Trained as a historian, and fluent in Hawaiian language, she is an expert in Hawaiian Ancestral Knowledge

on mythology, history, cultural traditions, and temples, and has taken students to Tahiti to investigate similarities in Hawaiian and Tahitian temples.


MALEUVRE, Didier (UCSB)

Title: Bougainville against the Tide


Abstract: This article examines the mechanisms that have made the name of the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville synonymous with exoticism and the myth of the noble savage. A careful reading of his Voyage around the World draws the more nuanced picture of a man contorting under the pressure of an




ideology. Bougainville upholds a system of thought which many of his observations disprove. If, as I argue, this invites the reader to notice the discrepancy, then Bougainville asks us also to ponder the forces which, then as now, conspire to make him an apologist of exotic idealism.

Bio:  Didier Maleuvre is Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has written books and articles on modern art, literature, and culture, among which these four volumes: Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford UP, 1999); The Religion of Reality: Inquiry into the Self, Art, and Transcendence (Catholic University of America, 2006); The Horizon: A History of our Infinite Longing (California UP, 2011); and The Art of Civilization: A Bourgeois History (Palgrave, 2016); a new book, The Legends of Modern Art, is currently in editorial production.


MAWYER, Alexander (UHM)

Title: Rereading Classics: France Entextualized Oceania


Abstract: What makes a classic text? How do over-taught seminal works, little known obscure pieces that should be more widely known, personal classics that one returns to again and again over years or decades of diverse scholarship, works that are tucked away in archives and literally waiting to be excavated,  play different roles in our individual and collective scholarship? With reference  to three different sorts of “classic” texts which have mediated twenty years of anthropological and linguistic encounter with Mangareva, this opening intervention ask how re-reading re-contextualizing, re-textualizing, re- considering a "key" or "centering" text in any of our disciplines bears on scholarly practice.


Bio:  Alexander Mawyer is Associate Professor at the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, Editor of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs, and Co- Director of the University of Hawai‘i's Biocultural Initiative of the Pacific. He has conducted fieldwork with the Mangarevan community in the Gambier and Society Islands of French Polynesia.


LARGEAUD-ORTEGA, Sylvie  (UPF)





Title:  “Tahitians in Nordhoff and Hall’s Bounty narrative”


Abstract: Inspired by the ground-breaking Pacific Bounty studies of scholars Dening, Edmond, Salmond, Smith and Thomas, this presentation shifts focus from extensively-examined Bounty figures such as Banks and Bligh, and investigates instead the history and culture of the Polynesian Island of Tahiti. It pays attention to the “little people on both sides of the beach” as documented by Dening, from the perspective of “the beach”, Dening’smetaphor for culture contact and conflict in the Pacific Islands.It looks at the way Islanders and Bounty beachcombers are represented by these two American authors who had “crossed the beach” and were based in Tahiti. Referring to the works of Pacific historians and anthropologists, critics in colonial studies and narrative theorists, it approaches their Tahitian narrative from an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural perspective, to see to what extent their representation of Tahiti is made from the “strangers”’ side of the beach.It highlights the narrative strategies used to focus mostly on the British little people on the beach, while occluding the Islanders or “exoticising” them through the filter of Western values.

Bio:  Sylvie Largeaud-Ortéga is associate professor of English literature at the University of French Polynesia, Tahiti. Her L2, 3 and M1 seminars bear on Pacific colonial and postcolonial literatures. Her most recent work is The Bounty from the Beach: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Disciplinary Essays (ed., ANU Press, 2018). She has published a monography, Ainsi Soit-Île (Honoré Champion, 2012) and scholarly articles and book chapters on Stevenson’s Pacific fiction, including “Who’s who  in ‘The Isle of Voices’?” in Victorians and Oceania (Ashgate, 2013), “Stevenson’s  The Ebb-Tide or Virgil’s Aeneid revisited” in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She has just finished writing a monography on Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors entitled Agonisme de L’Âme des Guerriers d’Alan Duff (manuscript).


NESMITH, Keao (UHM)

Title: Reflecting on the Hawaiian Mission to Marquesas


Abstract: In the mid-1800s Hawaiian Protestant missionaries in the Marquesas Islands reported regularly through Hawaiian language newspapers about the




progress of their proselytizing work, what they learned about Marquesan culture and language, particular Marquesans of note, and the influence Hawaiians had on local individuals and society in general. Hawaiian missionary, Kakela, is one whose name is mentioned often today among Marquesans as an ancestor.

Missionaries also reported that Marquesans were learning to speak Hawaiian and using Hawaiian language church materials, while Marquesan language church materials were also being published in Hawaiian newspapers. But in an era of outward projection of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s political influence overseas, it should not be surprising that the Hawaiian mission in Marquesas would have also been motivated by an element of political and national expansionism as well. This paper examines possible political motives behind the Marquesas Mission agenda that have not yet been explored as a focus.

Bio:


NICOLET, Brigitte (UHM)

Title: Forsake Sex, for God’s sake! (or) Franco-Samoan’s Re/Visions of Ceremonial Sex (1777-now)


Abstract: A brief perusal of 18thcentury texts (Rousseau, Bougainville, Diderot) will place Lapérouse’s landing in Samoa in its social and intellectual setting, and acknowledge that the myth of Polynesian sexual hospitality was already strong. We will peruse “Lapérouse’s Journal” to observe the first contacts in Samoa according to Lapérouse and his companions. Then, Serge Tcherkézoff’s “First Contacts in Samoa” will shed light on the cultural misunderstandings.  And finally, we’ll listen to the manifesto of an indigenous expert: Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Taisi Efi, who turns “whispers” into revelations in his seminal essay in “Whispers and Vanities: Samoan Indigenous Knowledge and Religion” (2014).


Bio:  Dr. Brigitte Nicolet, is a French Lecturer in the Department of Languages and Literatures of Europe and the Americas at the University of Hawai’i, at Manoa. Her Ph.D., from the University of Texas, at Austin was on how 18thcentury French women writers viewed women of that period.

Subsequently, she researched and taught courses on how French writers viewed women throughout history, and how French writers viewed “others”. Her current research focuses on how 18thcentury French writers viewed indigenous




people in the Pacific, with a particular interest for the first contacts in Samoa in 1777. She collaborated with Serge Tcherkézoff to the translation of his “First Contacts in Samoa” into French


PAIA, Mirose Paia (UPF) and Goenda REEA-TURIANO (UPF)

Title: Use of the "classical" texts of the 19th century in the context of the Heiva in Tahiti from 2010-2018: between relevance and legitimacy.  ( Usage des textes « classiques » du XIX siècle dans le cadre du Heiva à Tahiti de 2010-2018 : entre pertinence et légitimité.)


Abstract: Myths, songs and words of invocation or polynesian epic tales, which exist in the vernacular language, are vectors of elements that constitute cultural identities and as such are placed among the Polynesian texts of reference. If we consider today the use of texts from Tahiti in ancient times (T. Henry, 1951) or Memoirs of Marau Taaroa (A. T. Pomare, 1971) in Tahiti, the annual  Heiva cultural festivals celebrated in July seem to be the ideal place for authors or choreographers of dance groups to reappropriate or adapt these texts. Our presentation will share the results of our quantitative  and  qualitative  research, based on the identification of texts inspired by epic myths and narratives or the habits and customs of yesteryear and their comparative linguistic analysis over the period from 2010 to 2018. This study reveals underlying dynamics that accompany the act of relying on these classic texts to produce and legitimize traditional Tahitian "culture".


Bio: Goenda Turiano-Reea is a research professor at the University of French Polynesia. She also taught Polynesian languages and culture for 22 years  in teacher training centres. This research work covers fields ranging from the study of comedy in oral tradition and contemporary literature to the relationship to students' learning and teaching skills. Very committed to the promotion of Tahitian literature and culture, she is a poet and award-winning author  of themes on the heiva, and would like to report on the current state of research in this field.


Bio: Mirose Paia is a research professor  at  the  UPF,  EASTCO  laboratory  (EA 4241). Her research fields (and her publications) focus on the descriptive work of the Polynesian languages reo mā'ohi, Tahitian in particular, as part of the problems of teaching in a multilingual context and the conditions for revitalizing




and transmitting these languages in a diglossic context. For 8 years, she has coordinated three experimental bilingual teaching schemes in Tahiti and one on the practice of public speaking at the  first  level.  The  work  of  linguistic description finds its extension in the  comparative  analysis  of  Polynesian literature texts. She is also the award-winning author of the heiva theme for 2018.


PFERSMANN, Andreas (UPF)

Title: The Savage’s Speech: Rereading the Narrations d’Omai

Abstract: Since the Dialogues ou entretiens entre un Sauvage et le baron de Lahontan (1703), the literary technique consisting in delegating the speech to a fictional savage and make him an observer of the West has been used a few times during the Age of Enlightenment. Bricaire de la Dixmérie (in Le Sauvage de Taïti aux Français, 1770) and Diderot (in Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, 1773) make Tahitians speak in order to take a critical look at European customs. A priest, abbot Guillaume André René Baston (1741-1825) chose the historical figure of Omai and put him in charge of a four volumes autobiographical narration.

Unrecognized classic, sometimes considered as “reactionary”, the Narrations d’Omaï, insulaire de la mer du Sud, ami et compagnon du Capitaine Cook (1790) deserves to be reread for many reasons. It conveys an original perspective on the moment when navigators encountered Oceanian people, but also on Omai’s journey with Capitain Cook, on his stay in London and particularly on his return to the Society islands where he supposedly introduced modern European techniques. But Omai also shows anthropologist and historian skills while observing Oceanian people either when confronting navigators or during  internal wars. Reread the Narrations d’Omai means also, indirectly, reread Cook and Forster’s narrations as read, discussed or even distanced by the savage.

Bio:  Andréas Pfersmann is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of French Polynesia, Tahiti. He published a monograph about the literary use of footnotes from the Baroque period to contemporary fiction: Séditions infrapaginales: Poétique historique de l’annotation littéraire (XVII-XXI siècles) (Genève, Droz, 2011). More recently, he co-directed with Titaua Porcher a special issue of Interculturel Francophonies (31, June-July 2017) on francophone literature of Oceania and a special issue about “Literature and politics in Oceania”, to be published soon by the New Zealand Journal of French Studies.





PORCHER, Titaua (UPF)

Title: The Overman vs the Noble Savage: Nietzschean approach of Segalen’s Les Immémoriaux


Abstract: When he decided to write about Tahiti, Segalen was willing to take the opposite approach from authors like Loti who contributed to build the great edenic myth of Tahiti. They wrote their “travel impressions” while remaining the focal point of an experience where exotism appeared as a negation of diversity.

Segalen’s project is at the same time anthropological and literary. His philosophy of alterity emerges in Les Immémoriaux through the representation of the first contacts between Tahiti and the missionaries observed from the inside and through the eyes and through what he suppose could be the mental dynamics of Tahitian people whose habits, impulses, way of thinking are rooted in a “Will  zur Macht” ( Will to power) closer to Zarathoustra than Rousseau. Segalen is a passionate reader of Nietzsche’s philosophy and this presentation intends to show the influence of the german philosopher’s concepts on Segalen’s novel.

Bio:  Titaua Porcher is associate professor at UPF. She published in 2011 a book about the French author Pierre Jean Jouve (Pierre Jean Jouve: Mystère et sens dans l’oeuvre Romanesque) and she has been working on Oceanian literatures for ten years now. She worked at UH in 2011and kept very strong links with this university. She co-directed with Andreas Pfersmann a special review on francophone literature in 2017 in Interculturel Francophonies and a special review of the New Zealand Journal of French Studies on “literature and politics” which should be published very soon. She also published in October a play called Hina, Maui and company.


RIGO, Bernard (UNC)

Title: Critical re-reading as a mean to decolonize the contribution of social and cultural anthropology for contemporary Pacific communities and peoples


Abstract: It is impossible to study the cultures of Eastern Polynesia without referring to the work of Teuira Henry’s Ancient Tahiti. It is impossible to look at




Kanak cultures without engaging with the work of Maurice Leenhardt.  However, these two authors are also the source of profound misunderstandings. This communication seeks to raise a number of questions surrounding the possibility of a new critical reading of some of our Oceanic “classics.”


Bio:  Philosopher and anthropologist, Bernard Rigo is Professor in Pacific studies at the University of New Caledonia.


SAURA, Bruno (UPF)


Title: One Hundred Years Later: Re-evaluating Teuira Henry’s Cannonical
Ancient Tahiti (1928)


Abstract: Although not ethnically Polynesian (she belonged to two families of English missionaries who settled in Tahiti at the beginning of the 19th  Century) Teuira Henry (1847-1915) was nevertheless an expert in Tahitian language and culture. She devoted her life to translating the ethnographic materials collected  by her grandfather John Orsmond. Her work appeared in 1928 under the title Ancient Tahiti. This book had been the subject of a long publishing process in which ethnologist E. S. Craighill Handy appears to have been actively involved. Unfortunately, the manuscript used as a basis for the 1928 edition was not kept  by the editor, the Bishop Museum. What is the value of this book for the 2018 reader? To answer this question, it will be necessary to try to appreciate what is included and also what is missing in it; also, the quality of the writing of the texts in Tahitian, as well as their translation into English (then into French, in the edition published in Paris in 1951 - very read by Tahitians today -).  At the beginning of the 21st century, Ancient Tahiti is the subject of sometimes severe criticism, concerning the Christian culture of J. Orsmond and T. Henry, which would have altered their text. The ethnologist Jean Guiart described it as (2002: 251-259) "a false ethnographic Bible" [J. Guiart (2002). Mon Dieu là-haut, la tête en bas ! Essai sur les fondements anthropologiques de la connaissance des cultures océaniennes. Nouméa, Le-Rocher-à-la-Voile, 308 p.].  Other critics consider this book too favourable to the Pomare family. This argument will be examined in relation to the content of the genealogies that appear in Ancient Tahiti, in particular that of Ra'iatea's ari'i Tamatoa (from which the Pomare actually held part of their legitimacy). More broadly, it appears that Ancient Tahiti gives pride of place to the traditions of Island of Raiatea. This is very noticeable when




reading the myth of the fish Tahiti detached from Raiatea (Havai'i) - a tradition   in which Tahiti is a subaltern island -; the fact is that this myth is not found in  any other ethnographic book published before Teuira Henry’s book. Our reevaluation of Ancient Tahiti will then be for us an opportunity to rediscover this myth, much appreciated by both ESC Handy and Peter Buck Te Rangi Hiroa,  who found inspiration in it for their own theories on the social, political and religious order in the Society Islands in ancient times.

Bio: Bruno Saura is a Professor of Polynesian Civilization at the Université de la Polynésie française (Tahiti). He has a background in anthropology and political science. He is now director of a multi-disciplinary research group -  EASTCO, Equipe d’Accueil Sociétés Traditionnelles et  Contemporaines  en  Océanie  - working on Pacific societies of the past and the present. Bruno Saura has written extensively on ethnic, linguistic and religious issues  in  today's  Polynesia, authoring several books (recently : Tahiti ma’ohi, 2008; Mythes et usages des mythes: autochtonie et idéologie de la Terre Mère en Polynésie, 2013; Histoire et mémoire des temps coloniaux en Polynésie française, 2015) and contributed articles to scholarly journals (The Contemporary Pacific, Pacific Studies, The Journal of Pacific  History, Journal of the Polynesian Society, Journal of Pacific Studies, International Journal of Research Into Island Cultures). He is now working on Polynesian oral tradition and mythology in a comparative and diachronic perspective.


Niklaus Schweizer (UHM)

Title: Geneva or Rome?


Abstract: The story of how the struggle between Protestant missionaries from England and New England on one hand, and Catholic priests from France on the other led to a French protectorate over Tahiti in the 1840s  and eventual colonization, and in Hawai'i to an edict of religious tolerance in 1839. This  process was set into motion by the journey of King Kamehameha II to London in 1823/24. When the king died in London from the measles, his close friend and aikane, Jean Rives, decided to return to his native France. There he alerted the Roman Catholic Church that their arch-enemies, Calvinists from England and the US, had established themselves in Tahiti, respectively in Hawai'i. The Church consequently sent priests as missionaries to eastern Polynesia as a counter- measure.  The Hawaiian and Tahitian governments both expelled these priests




forthwith, with the result that French warships appeared and enforced the evolution sketched above.

Bio:  Niklaus R. Schweizer, born and raised in Zurich, Switzerland, has been a Professor of German at UHM since 1969 as well as honorary Consul of Switzerland in Honolulu. His classic Turning Tide: the Ebb and Flow of Hawaiian Nationality was published in its third edition in 2005 and his most recent book Twelve Good Haole, in Hawaiian and in English is currently in press.


Virginie Soula (UNC)

Title: Transposition et recréation de l’oralité dans la fiction contemporaine océanienne


Abstract: Elément fondamental des cultures océaniennes, l’oralité demeure pleinement investie par les écrivains autochtones des différents espaces insulaires du Pacifique. Celle-ci ne semble pas en contradiction avec le développement d’une littérature écrite dans la langue de l’autre, celle qui, imposée par la colonisation, devient le véhicule des cultures et des identités de ces peuples. Nous tenterons toutefois de montrer que, si cette oralité occupe une place importante dans la littérature du Pacifique, celle-ci ne se déploie pas de manière identique. Ainsi nous proposons, à travers quelques exemples de fictions océaniennes (Déwé Gorodé (Nouvelle-Calédonie), Chantal T. Spitz (Polynésie Française) et Witi Ihimaera (Nouvelle-Zélande), de voir comment les auteurs la transposent leur langue et différentes formes d’oralités sinon la recrée par l’écriture.


Abstract: The fundamental element of Oceanians’ cultures is its  oral  character which remains very often used by native authors in the(different)South Sea Islands. This oral character does not seem to go against the development of a literature written in a language imposed by colonisation and which serves as a vehicle for the South Sea islanders’ different cultures and identities. We will try to show that, even tough this oral character has an important place in Oceanian literature, it doesn’t appear in identical ways in the different islands. Thus we will study how the authors adapt or even recreate their own language and their own oral traditions with a few examples of Oceanian fictional works for instance in the works of Dewe Gorodé (New Caledonia), of Chantal T. Spitz (French Polynesia), and of Witi Ihimaera ( New Zealand).]





Bio:  Virginie Soula is a professor and researcher in the Département Lettres, Langues, Sciences humaines Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie.


TCHERKEZOFF, Serge (CREDO, AMU-CNRS-EHESS; CHL, ANU-CAP; MSHP-UPF)

Title: I hate even more the philosophers...” : when La Perouse's journal ended the illusion of the Polynesian 'Bon Sauvage' in Europe


Abstract: The circumstances are now rather well-known, that led to the violent encounter between the Samoans and the French of La Perouse in 1787 rom La Perouse, published in what became a major book in 1797 ("Le Voyage..."), transcribed from the "Massacre" (Laperouse meaning of course the massacre of the French at the hand of the Samoans), and the attached maps naming the Asau bay in (now) American Samoa as "the Bay of Massacre". This paper would like to enlarge into a comparative point of view. Far from viewing the violent aspect in the Samoan-European first encounter as exceptional, even if it brought up new and large cracks within the neat image of the Polynesian 'Bon Sauvage', we must consider it as unveiling what in fact has been a common, but silenced, feature of all early encounters between European and Polynesians. It has been written too often that such violence has been common in the encounters with "the Melanesians" but not with the "Polynesians". The question is not to differentiate between misconstrued (by European scholarship) sub regions of the Pacific, but  to see the invariable succession of events, put in motion by Europeans as well, that produced the same effects in the whole of the Pacific, and then to remember for what reason and under which circumstances, the violence in the "Polynesian" 'first contacts' have been silenced... until the 1797 La Perouse's Journal, awaited  by the whole European intelligentsia (since La Pérouse did not give any more news after his last call -- in Australia-- in early 1788), interrupted the silence, with a lot of ambiguities and unanswered queries.


Bio:  Professor (emeritus) in Anthropology and Pacific Studies (EHESS University, France where he is Chercheur Titulaire of the CREDO), Professor (Hon.) in ANU, Australia, at the School Culture History and Language of the College of Asia & the Pacific), and Chercheur Associé at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme du Pacifique (UPF), his works bring together results of fieldwork in




Samoa during the 1980-1990s with a critique of European narratives of “Polynesia”, in 18th century and again today. See his websites:  <www.pacific- credo.net>  <www.pacific-dialogues.fr<http://www.pacific-dialogues.fr/>>  <www.pacific-encounters.fr<http://www.pacific-encounters.fr/>>.


VERNAUDON, Jacques (UPF)

Title: A fresh look on the Tahitian dictionary and grammar of John Davies: what the past tells about the present


Abstract: This communication will explore the "Tahitian and English Dictionary with Introductory Remarks on the Polynesian Language and a Short Grammar of the Tahitian Dialect", of Rev. John Davies, published in 1853. This composite  book is the foundation of all subsequent lexicographic and grammatical works on Tahitian. I will show how the dictionary, which served as the basis for all later dictionaries, in particular that of the Tahitian Academy, reveals the profound transformation of the Tahitian vocabulary for more than one and a half century. The introductory remarks of J. Davies reflect the general conceptions circulating at the time on Polynesian languages. In his grammatical sketch, the author coped with the common metalinguistic framework, inspired by Greek and Latin, thought he knew it was not adapted to the description of Tahitian.


Bio:  Jacques Vernaudon was born in Tahiti. He began his career in 1999 at the University of New Caledonia where he participated in the promotion of     Kanak languages teaching at the university and in the New Caledonian educational system. Since 2013, he has joined the University of French Polynesia where he continues his work which revolves around two complementary axes,
one centered on the description of the Oceanic languages, now more particularly the East Polynesian languages, the other dedicated to the transmission of these languages in a multilingual context. With Hugues Talfer, he now works on the development of the online Tahitian-French dictionary of the Tahitian Academy (www.farevanaa.pf/dictionnaire.php).<http://www.farevanaa.pf/dictionnaire.php)> He notably wrote « Teaching Oceanic Languages in French Polynesia and New Caledonia » (in B. Saura et L. Mu Si Yan (dir.), Decolonization, Language, and Identity: The Francophone Islands of the Pacific, The Contemporary Pacific, volume 27, n°2, p. 433-463, 201
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