Voyages and beaches
Subtitle: Pacific encounters, 1769-1840
By: edited by Alex Calder, Jonathan Lamb, and Bridget Orr.
Contributors: Calder, Alex.; Lamb, Jonathan, 1945-; Orr, Bridget.; David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar (9th : 1993 : University of Auckland)
Publisher: University of Hawai'i Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Honolulu
Language: eng
Number of pages: 344
Subjects: Oceania -- Discovery and exploration -- Congresses.
Description: "What actually happened as Europeans and peoples of the Pacific discovered each other? How have their respective senses of the past influenced their understanding of the present? And what are the consequences of their meeting?"--BOOK JACKET.

"In this collection of essays, scholars from European, Polynesian, and Settler backgrounds provide answers to these questions.

Writing from, and between, a variety of disciplines (history, anthropology, Maori Studies, literary criticism, law, cultural studies, art history, Pacific Studies), they show how the Pacific reveals a more various and contradictory history than that supposed by such homogenizing metropolitan myths as the introduction of civilization to savage peoples, the general ruin of indigenous cultures by an imperial juggernaut, or the mimicry of European models by an abject population.

They examine contact from both sides of beaches throughout Polynesia, exposing the many inconsistencies from which Pacific history is made."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Papers presented at the 9th David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, University of Auckland, 1993.