| From Herman Melville to Paul Theroux, Tahiti is consistently perceived as a thoroughly Christian, French colony through which one must pass to find authentic "Polynesia" beyond. Anthropologists, too, have tended to dismiss Tahiti in favour of less "modern," more "traditional" islands in the region, skewing research away from Tahiti or away from typical subjects of anthropological inquiry in the region: hierarchy, kingship, chieftainship, ritual politics and economy. My dissertation challenges this perception and tendency.;Tahiti Royale studies the origins, history and trajectory of the group who epitomizes Europe or France in Tahiti: its colonial elite and bourgeois class, known locally as the "demis" and best represented by the illustrious Salmon family. Based on ethnographic and archival research into how this group commemorates itself, I find that their power and status today continue to be inspired by the mythical and ritual politics of Polynesian gods and ancestors, but personified now by protagonists drawn from European history and sociology ("kings," "aristocrats," "bourgeois," "colonists," "French," "families," "classes").;I argue that the skillful use by this elite of adopted European guises to achieve influence---both in Tahiti and abroad---is consistent with theories that a genius for absorbing and executing European symbols well is culturally distinctive of Polynesia. I propose kinship jealousy, rivalry and intrigue as typical registers for Tahitian hierarchy today, and I argue that kinship with Europeans, or stranger-marriage, has not been a process of westernization, but rather a variation on stranger-kingship that flourishes in the French-Tahitian conjuncture. In short, I explore how the ideals and ends of Polynesian hierarchy have today come to be pursued and at times achieved by European symbolic means.;Tahiti Royale contributes to studies of European contact in the Pacific and beyond by challenging the historical function or trajectory embedded in ideas of a French colonial elite and rising bourgeois class. By arguing for a politics of polyarchy and divine kingship among grand "demi" families in French Tahiti, I question what is imperative about colonialism and capitalism, and I conclude that quintessentially modern progress in Tahiti today functions in practice as quintessentially Polynesian kingship. |
