Anuta, a small Polynesian community in the eastern Solomon Islands, has had minimal contact with outside cultural forces. Even at the start of the 21st century, it remains one of the most traditional and isolated islands in the insular Pacific. In Polynesian Oral Traditions, Richard Feinberg offers a window into this fascinating and relatively unfamiliar culture through a collection of Anutan historical narratives, including indigenous texts and English translations. This rich, thorough assemblage is the result of a 25-year collaboration between Feinberg and a large cross section of the Anutan community. The volume's emphasis is ethnographic, consisting of a number of texts as related by the island's most respected experts in matters of traditional history. The texts themselves have important implications for the relationship of oral tradition to history and symbolic structures, affording new evidence pertinent to Polynesian language subgrouping. Further, they provide insight into a number of Anutan customs and preoccupations, while also suggesting certain widespread Polynesian practices dating back to the precontact and early contact periods. Feinberg's annotations, an essential aspect of this volume, arm the reader with essential ethnographic and historical contexts, clarifying important linguistic and cultural issues that arise from the stories.

Exploring the oral traditions of the South Pacific, this work demonstrates that oral media and native cultural forms are vital throughout the South Pacific. It appeals to scholars concerned with the relationships between verbal art, social change, gender, power, and social organization.

Anuta is a small Polynesian community in the eastern Solomon Islands that has had minimal contact with outside cultural forces. Even at the end of the twentieth century, it remains one of the most traditional and isolated islands in the insular Pacific. In Oral Traditions of Anuta, Richard Feinberg offers a telling collection of Anutan historical narratives, including indigenous texts and English translations. This rich, thorough assemblage is the result of a collaborative project between Feinberg and a large cross-section of the Anutan community that developed over a period of twenty-five years. The volume's emphasis is ethnographic, consisting of a number of texts as related by the island's most respected experts in matters of traditional history. Feinberg's annotations, which arm the reader with essential ethnographic and historical contexts, clarify important linguistic and cultural issues that arise from the stories. The texts themselves have important implications for the relationship of oral tradition to history and symbolic structures, and afford new evidence pertinent to Polynesian language sub-grouping. Further, they provide insight into a number of Anutan customs and preoccupations, while also suggesting certain widespread Polynesian practices dating back to the pre-contact and early contact periods.

A blend of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester’s Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know. For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history. How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonize these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind. For Christina Thompson, this mystery is personal: her Maori husband and their sons descend directly from these ancient navigators. In Sea People, Thompson explores the fascinating story of these ancestors, as well as those of the many sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists, and geographers who have puzzled over this history for three hundred years. A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People combines the thrill of exploration with the drama of discovery in a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world. Sea People includes an 8-page photo insert, illustrations throughout, and 2 endpaper maps.

Maori oral tradition is the rich poetic record of the past handed down by voice over generations through whakapapa, whakatauki korero and waiata. In genealogies and sayings histories, stories and songs Maori tell of te ao tawhito or the old world: the gods, the migration of the Polynesian ancestors from Hawaiki and life here in Aotearoa. A voice from the past today this remarkable record underpins the speeches, songs and prayers performed on marae and the teaching of tribal genealogies and histories. Indeed, the oral tradition underpins Maori culture itself. This book introduces readers to the distinctive oral style and language of the traditional compositions acknowledges the skills of the composers of old and explores the meaning of their striking imagery and figurative language. And it shows how nga korero tuku iho the inherited words can be a deep well of knowledge about the way of life wisdom and thinking of the Maori ancestors. Publisher description.

A new interdisciplinary interest has risen to study interconnections between oral tradition and book culture. In addition to the use and dissemination of printed books, newspapers etc., book culture denotes manuscript media and the circulation of written documents of oral tradition in and through the archive, into published collections. Book culture also intertwines the process of framing and defining oral genres with literary interests and ideologies. The present volume is highly relevant to anyone interested in oral cultures and their relationship to the culture of writing and publishing. The questions discussed include the following: How have printing and book publishing set terms for oral tradition scholarship? How have the practices of reading affected the circulation of oral traditions? Which books and publishing projects have played a key role in this and how? How have the written representations of oral traditions, as well as the roles of editors and publishers, introduced authorship to materials customarily regarded as anonymous and collective?

Indigenous peoples have our own ways of defining oral history. For many, oral sources are shaped and disseminated in multiple forms that are more culturally textured than just standard interview recordings. For others, indigenous oral histories are not merely fanciful or puerile myths or traditions, but are viable and valid historical accounts that are crucial to native identities and the relationships between individual and collective narratives. This book challenges popular definitions of oral history that have displaced and confined indigenous oral accounts as merely oral tradition. It stands alongside other marginalized community voices that highlight the importance of feminist, Black, and gay oral history perspectives, and is the first text dedicated to a specific indigenous articulation of the field. Drawing on a Maori indigenous case study set in Aotearoa New Zealand, this book advocates a rethinking of the discipline, encouraging a broader conception of the way we do oral history, how we might define its form, and how its politics might move beyond a subsuming democratization to include nuanced decolonial possibilities.