Engendering nationalism: Colonialism, sex, and independence in French Polynesia

France's nuclear testing in its overseas territory of French Polynesia ("Tahiti and her Islands") prompted mass protests by Polynesians in 1995, and lead to a significant rise in support for the Polynesian nationalist movement which seeks Polynesia's independence from France. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in the Society Islands of French Polynesia during that period and through an ethnography of contemporary Polynesian social life, this dissertation analyzes the sociocultural dynamics shaping the Polynesian nationalist social movement.;An ethnographic puzzle motivates this analysis: in a society in which women historically ruled islands and multi-island chiefdoms, most Polynesian women today are ambivalent about independence while Polynesian men, particularly young men, comprise its most ardent and activist advocates. Analyzing this puzzle focuses this study on the difference that "differences" make, theoretically and ethnographically, for understanding sociocultural processes and social and political change. This study integrates feminist critical theory (on difference and power), and anthropological theories of culture and practice, to create a theoretical and ethnographic placeholder for the social significance of differences in projects of social reproduction and social change, effected through development of the construct, "the discursive practices of difference.".;The ethnography tracks Polynesians' discursive practices of difference--of gender, generation, and place--in relation to kinship, exchange, labor, sexuality, household formation, French colonialism and the French State, and Polynesian nationalist activism and discourse. Along these pathways this study examines Polynesian epistemology, the structures of social authority, the practices of hierarchy, and concepts of the person, as each of these articulates with the discursive practices of difference in contemporary Polynesian social life and the nationalist project.;Out of this ethnography comes an argument for a theory of subjectivity and sociocultural processes as both organized through the discursive practices of difference; and an argument for the productivity of analyzing the locations, meanings, and uses of differences within transnational processes (of decolonization, nationalism) and discourses (of cultural and gender difference) by prioritizing, and theorizing, the particular and culturally inflected meanings which people attach to global processes as they articulate with and through their (re)production of social differences.