"Tahiti is far famed yet too little known." Thus wrote J. M. Orsmond in 1848, and the same assertion can be made in 1972. Thousands of pages had been published about Tahiti and its neighboring islands when Orsmond uttered his judgment, and tens of thousands have been published since that time, but a unified, comprehensive, and detailed description of the pre-European ways of life of the inhabitants of those Islands is yet to appear in print. The present work, lengthy as it is, makes no such claim to comprehensiveness; rather, it is concerned mainly with the social relations of those inhabitants, and it serves up only enough about their technology, their religion, their aesthetic expressions, and so forth to place descriptions of their social relations in context and render them more comprehensible. Volumes 1 and 2 of this work are a reconstruction of the Islanders' way of life as it was believed to have been just before it began to be transformed by European influence-a period labeled the Late Indigenous Era. Volume 3 covers events in Tahiti and Mo'orea from about 1767 to 1815-a period labeled the Early European Era.

“Tahiti is far famed yet too little known.” Thus wrote J. M. Orsmond in 1848, and the same assertion can be made in 1972. Thousands of pages had been published about Tahiti and its neighboring islands when Orsmond uttered his judgment, and tens of thousands have been published since that time, but a unified, comprehensive, and detailed description of the pre-European ways of life of the inhabitants of those Islands is yet to appear in print. The present work, lengthy as it is, makes no such claim to comprehensiveness; rather, it is concerned mainly with the social relations of those inhabitants, and it serves up only enough about their technology, their religion, their aesthetic expressions, and so forth to place descriptions of their social relations in context and render them more comprehensible. Volumes 1 and 2 of this work are a reconstruction of the Islanders’ way of life as it was believed to have been just before it began to be transformed by European influence—a period labeled the Late Indigenous Era. Volume 3 covers events in Tahiti and Mo‘orea from about 1767 to 1815—a period labeled the Early European Era.

2e de couv.: This book is based on two years of field study supplemented by the archival research that went into the writing of the author's three-volume Ancient Tahitian Society. It has three objectives: -to describe in detail the activities and social relations of rural Tahitians in the mid-twentieth century; -to do so by the method of "controlled comparison"; and in doing so -to focus on the economies of the villagers studied. The ways of life portrayed in these pages were products of nearly two centuries of contact between Polynesians and Europeans, but still contained many features of the aboriginal culture described in Ancient Tahitian Society. Subsequent to the field study, however, these islands were subjected to new and much more massive kinds of outside influences (mainly those resulting from expanded tourism and from France's nuclear experiments nearby), so that much of what is described in this book has disappeared, which lends extra value to the description - another relic to be placed in the Museum of Humanity's Past. Because of anthropologist's inability (and unwillingness) to conduct sufficiently controlled experiments upon the societies they study, the method of controlled comparison employed in writing this book has been proposed as the sole means of arriving at scientific generalizations. It is left to the reader to judge whether this opinion has been confirmed. As for the book's focus on the "economics of village life," an effort has been made to broaden the applicability and the usefulness of this way of viewing human societies-large or small industrialized or "primitive."

As culturally diverse, non-Western communities are drawn into the international division of labour, capitalism takes root in a number of ways. This book describes how capitalism has become a part of the lives of rural Tahitians, starting with the arrival of Westerners to the islands and detailing the nature of the transformation brought about by missionaries, merchants, and French colonisers - a transformation whose pace has accelerated with the islands' rapid modernisation and incorporation into the French welfare state.