A Brevegraph: Tides of Mana: The Artful Currents of Oceanic Soulforms
I. Introduction: Oceanic Art as Sacred Geography
Across the vast waters of the Pacific, scattered like stars upon a liquid sky, lies an archipelagic realm where art is not merely ornamentation, but ontology. In Oceania, to carve, to weave, to paint, or to mark the skin is to speak with ancestors, to echo myth, and to realign the living with the pulse of the sacred. Oceanic art is not separated from life; it is life—animated by mana, governed by tapu, and moored in stories that ripple across generations like tides on coral reef.
Unlike the Western canon that often quarantines art within the frame or the gallery, Oceanic art lives within canoes, dance, tattoo, speech, and ceremony. It is mobile, performative, and inseparable from land and sea. A Polynesian tiki is not a statue—it is a vessel of ancestral presence. A Melanesian mask is not a disguise—it is a momentary body for spirit. An Aboriginal rock painting is not an image—it is a memory made visible, an archive drawn into the skin of the earth.
To understand Oceanic art is to understand a way of knowing that is indigenous, fluid, and fiercely storied. This deep dive takes up that challenge by tracing the evolution of Oceanic visual culture from its earliest archaeological expressions to its vibrant present-day reassertions. It seeks not just to describe what these artworks look like, but to interpret what they do—and why they matter—in their cultural, cosmological, and historical contexts.
This journey will follow a loosely chronological structure, beginning with the earliest known forms (such as the Lapita ceramic tradition and Australian Aboriginal rock art) and proceeding through the spiritual systems and aesthetic principles that shaped the artforms of Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Australia. As the waves of colonialism, missionization, piracy, and global trade swept over the region, these artforms shifted, resisted, transformed. The project will trace how these disruptions fed new expressions—some tragic, some triumphant.
In this inquiry, mythological frameworks will be placed beside migration histories, sacred geometry will be read alongside scarred skin, and museum-housed artifacts will be reunited—at least in word—with their cultural kin. Outside influences will not be treated as mere footnotes, but as essential forces in the evolving narrative of Oceanic art, especially when connected to war, blackbirding, piracy, and religious erasure.
Through this synthesis, Tides of Mana endeavors to honor not only the artistry of Oceanic cultures, but also the philosophies, ecological relationships, and cosmologies that animate them. The goal is not to look at Oceanic art—but to look through it.
Sources Used in This Section:
• Thomas, N. (1995). Oceanic Art.
• Kaeppler, A. (2008). The Pacific Arts of Polynesia and Micronesia.
• Gell, A. (1998). Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory.
• Hau‘ofa, E. (1994). “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific.
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II. Deep Origins: Prehistory and First Artistic Expressions (Pre-3000 BCE – 1000 BCE)
The roots of Oceanic art lie far beneath the visible—etched into earth, clay, and stone long before the West inscribed the term “art” into its lexicon. Long before Polynesian navigators traced star paths or Melanesian carvers shaped ancestor effigies, there was Lapita—an ancestral voice pressed into ceramic skin—and there were the Dreamings, eternal and vast, painted onto the very body of the continent.
Rock Art of Sahul: Dreaming the World into Being
The continent of Sahul, encompassing prehistoric Australia and New Guinea, holds some of the oldest continuously practiced artistic traditions on earth. Aboriginal Australians, whose visual languages stretch back at least 40,000 years, created complex rock paintings such as the Wandjina and Gwion Gwion figures. These were not decorative images, but living manifestations of the Dreamtime—ancestral time that is both primordial and present. Each stroke of ochre on sandstone constituted an act of cultural memory, mapping songlines that connected landforms to stories, beings, and laws.
These artworks weren’t meant to be “seen” in a Western aesthetic sense; they were meant to be read, sung, and walked. They functioned as mnemonic devices for survival—both spiritual and ecological—encoding knowledge of waterholes, seasonal changes, and moral codes.
The Lapita Horizon: Ancestry in Clay
Emerging around 1500 BCE across the Bismarck Archipelago and migrating eastward into Tonga and Samoa by 1000 BCE, the Lapita peoples left behind the first clear archaeological trail of Austronesian expansion into Remote Oceania. Their most iconic legacy is the distinctive dentate-stamped pottery, marked with repeating geometric motifs and stylized faces. These designs were not random decorations but likely served communicative and ritual functions—possibly referencing genealogies, clan affiliations, or spiritual forces.
Lapita pottery was also utilitarian—used in food storage, burial, and possibly initiation rites—but the painstaking care given to their symmetrical patterns suggests a cultural imperative far beyond mere functionality. These early visual systems would later echo in Polynesian tapa design, Micronesian weaving, and Melanesian carved motifs.
Art as Navigation, Memory, and Devotion
Both the Lapita and the Dreamtime traditions reflect a core Oceanic principle: art as encoded motion. Whether inscribed on clay, carved into stone, or sung across desert paths, these early expressions acted as maps—literal, spiritual, and social. They did not depict the world; they enacted it.
In this ancestral world, a pattern was a prayer, a mark was a mnemonic, and a vessel was a voice.
Sources Used in This Section:
• Morwood, M. (2002). Visions from the Past: The Archaeology of Australian Aboriginal Art.
• Taçon, P.S.C., & Chippindale, C. (2008). “Australia’s Ancient Warriors: Changing Depictions of Fighting in the Rock Art of Arnhem Land.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
• Kirch, P.V. (2000). On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands Before European Contact.
• Allen, J. (2014). “Lapita and the Temporal Dimensions of Oceania.” World Archaeology.
• Spriggs, M. (1997). The Island Melanesians.
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III. Sacred Symmetries and Spiritual Systems (1000 BCE – 1500 CE)
By the first millennium BCE, the vast blue constellation of Oceanic islands had become richly inhabited by peoples whose visual languages embodied not just aesthetic beauty, but metaphysical order. Across Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, art emerged as an active force in the orchestration of life, death, and continuity. This era witnessed the codification of symbolic forms in relation to cosmology, kinship, and ritual—a sacred geometry of social and spiritual design.
Polynesian Tattoo: Genealogy on the Skin
In Polynesian societies, the body itself was a canvas of cosmic meaning. Tatau, moko, and malofiewere not merely adornments—they were genealogies, contracts, and prayers inked into flesh. These tattooing traditions encoded ancestral prestige and sacred responsibility, often rendered in strict geometric motifs and rhythmic symmetry that mirrored the structure of the cosmos.
Each motif had a story, and each story was a node in a genealogical web binding the living to the divine. In Aotearoa, the intricate moko etched onto Māori faces served as visual whakapapa (lineage) and carried mana—the spiritual potency that imbued individuals with authority. The act of tattooing was itself a rite of passage, performed with ritual chants, tapping combs, and blood—a living sculpture drawn in pain and permanence.
Melanesian Masks and Malagan Memory
In Melanesia, artistic expression flourished in ceremonial spaces where wood, pigment, and fiber were animated by ancestral spirit. The Malagan traditions of New Ireland produced some of the most intricate sculptural forms in the Pacific—elaborate masks and carvings created to honor the dead during final mourning rites.
These objects were not static representations but ritual actors. They existed temporarily, activated during performance and then often destroyed—an embodiment of art as a vehicle for transition, not preservation. Each carving condensed social memory, kinship claims, spiritual obligations, and cosmological truths into a single ephemeral moment of visual drama.
Micronesian Charts: Navigation as Visual Cosmology
While Polynesians and Melanesians anchored meaning in bodies and wood, Micronesian navigators did so in the ocean itself. Their stick charts, constructed from palm ribs and shells, were not maps in the Western sense but cognitive diagrams of wave refraction, island chains, and current patterns. These artworks were tools—but also spiritual diagrams, learned by heart, not sight, through years of mentorship and immersion in sea-based epistemology.
Navigation, like carving and tattooing, was a sacred act: a way of aligning with the rhythms of the divine sea and ancestral wisdom.
Sources Used in This Section:
• Gell, A. (1993). “Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia.” Oxford University Press.
• Hooper, S. (2006). Pacific Encounters: Art and Divinity in Polynesia, 1760–1860.
• Neich, R. (2001). Carved Histories: Rotorua Ngāti Tarāwhai Woodcarving.
• Lewis, D. (1972). We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific.
• Feinberg, R. (1995). “Island Navigation: Traditions and Transitions.” The Journal of the Polynesian Society.
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IV. External Disruptions and Artistic Transformations (1500–1900 CE)
The arrival of outsiders upon Oceanic shores brought with it more than sails and steel—it carried new gods, new markets, and new hierarchies that would disrupt, distort, and in some cases obliterate existing artistic traditions. This was the age of encounters, of piratical incursions and missionized mandates, of whalers and blackbirders and collectors whose hunger for the “exotic” rendered sacred objects into commodities. Yet amid this rupture, Oceanic art did not vanish—it adapted, subverted, and endured.
Contact, Colonization, and Iconoclasm
European arrival in the Pacific, beginning with the Spanish and Dutch in the 16th and 17th centuries and intensifying through British and French imperial campaigns in the 18th and 19th, brought a tidal shift in cultural dynamics. Missionaries in particular viewed traditional Oceanic art as profane—many carvings, totems, masks, and ritual implements were burned, buried, or stolen. In Hawai‘i, the heiau (temples) were dismantled under missionary pressure, and gods once carved in towering wood were hidden or destroyed.
Entire visual languages were forcibly silenced, their sacred geometries labeled as “pagan” and their artists relegated to manual labor. Where once a tattoo marked divine inheritance, it now marked “savagery.” Where once a mask invited spirit, it now invited judgment.
Pirates, Blackbirders, and Cultural Plunder
Outside formal colonial channels, pirates, beachcombers, and blackbirders—men who kidnapped islanders for forced labor—played significant roles in destabilizing traditional societies. Ships often raided villages not only for goods but for carvings, ornaments, and woven works. These artifacts were traded as curios or souvenirs, removed from context and meaning.
Accounts from the 18th and 19th centuries document pirate captains acquiring tiki figures, barkcloth, and shell valuables in raids and exchanges—some under duress, others under manipulation. Though less systematized than missionary purges, such acts contributed to the fragmentation of ritual knowledge and artistic lineage.
Resistance, Secrecy, and Hybridization
In response to these pressures, Oceanic communities often turned to concealment and subversion. Some sacred forms were hidden in caves or buried beneath villages, only to re-emerge generations later. Others were reinvented in hybrid forms—Christian iconography carved with indigenous motifs, missionary clothing reworked with sacred patterning.
Artistic expression, stripped of its public ritual domain, retreated into private memory and encoded forms. What could no longer be shouted was whispered. What could not be worn was sung. This period saw the rise of an aesthetic underground, where art remained a vessel of identity, even as its surface form shifted under colonial glare.
Sources Used in This Section:
• Dening, G. (1988). Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774–1880.
• Sahlins, M. (1995). How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example.
• Jolly, M. (1997). “From Point Venus to Bali Ha’i: Eroticism and Exoticism in Representations of the Pacific.” Pacific Studies.
• Howe, K. R. (2000). Nature, Culture, and History: The “Knowing” of Oceania.
• Smith, B. (1985). European Vision and the South Pacific.
• Kirch, P.V. (2017). On the Road of the Winds.
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V. Reclaiming Identity: Art as Cultural Revival (1900–Present)
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries witnessed the reawakening of Oceanic art—not as museum artifact, but as ancestral invocation, political resistance, and cultural sovereignty. After centuries of suppression, what had once been carved, painted, or sung in secrecy re-emerged into the open, often transformed but never extinguished. Art became both shield and sword—reclaiming language, reviving ceremony, and challenging colonial narratives through brushstroke, fiber, and flesh.
Salvage, Spectacle, and the Anthropologist’s Gaze
The early 1900s saw Western anthropologists and museum curators begin a frantic campaign of “salvage ethnography,” collecting Oceanic artworks with the belief that these cultures were vanishing. Institutions such as the British Museum, the Musée du quai Branly, and the Bishop Museum amassed extensive collections, often acquired without consent and displayed as aesthetic relics divorced from ritual context.
While these archives now serve as valuable sources for cultural revitalization, their origins remain fraught. The very act of preservation was also an act of estrangement. A ceremonial mask in a climate-controlled case becomes an orphan—divorced from the chant, sweat, and spirit that once activated it.
Cultural Resurgence and Indigenous Agency
From the mid-20th century onward, indigenous Oceanic artists began reasserting authority over their traditions. Art schools in Papua New Guinea and New Zealand nurtured new generations who fused ancient techniques with contemporary themes. Carvers returned to abandoned styles. Women revived tapa-making and mat-weaving in Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji. In Arnhem Land, bark painting was not only preserved—it evolved into a form of land rights activism.
Movements across Oceania demanded repatriation of sacred objects and challenged the curatorial gaze. These artists were no longer content to be “studied”; they became the scholars, the curators, the sovereign makers of meaning.
Artists as Cultural Guardians and Visionaries
Contemporary Oceanic art pulses with ancestral memory and radical reclamation. In Australia, Emily Kame Kngwarreye painted Country with pointillist reverence, merging Dreaming with abstraction. In Vanuatu, Ralph Regenvanu fuses traditional iconography with political commentary. Fatu Feu’u of Samoa and Lisa Reihana of Aotearoa reinterpret colonial narratives through print, sculpture, and digital media. Yuki Kihara, a fa’afafine artist of Samoan descent, uses photography and performance to interrogate gender, empire, and diaspora.
These artists do not replicate—they reinterpret. Their work is neither revivalist nostalgia nor modern rupture. It is continuity by other means.
Sources Used in This Section:
• Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century.
• Herle, A. (2000). “Carvings, Casts, and Contexts: The Changing Use of Objects in the Torres Strait.” Journal of Museum Ethnography.
• Myers, F. (2002). Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art.
• Morphé, H. (1998). Kuninjku Art: Hunter-Gatherer Art from Western Arnhem Land.
• Langton, M. (1993). “Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television…” Australian Film Commission.
• Exhibition catalogs: Lisa Reihana: In Pursuit of Venus [infected], Paradise Camp by Yuki Kihara
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VI. Symbolism Across the Archipelagos: Thematic Crosscurrents
Though each island group across Oceania speaks its own visual dialect, shared motifs flow like currents beneath the regional distinctions. Beneath the tapa cloths, body marks, carved prow-boards and painted barks lies a foundational grammar of meaning—one shaped by sacred geometries, spiritual hierarchies, and the eternal conversation between land, sea, and the unseen. This section traces the symbolic structures that pulse through Oceanic art across time and territory: the ocean as spirit corridor, the body as shrine, and design as law.
The Ocean: Womb, Highway, Ancestral Veil
In Oceanic cosmologies, the sea is never empty—it is densely populated with meaning. It births, connects, separates, and consumes. For many cultures, the sea is both origin and afterlife: a route of migration and a dwelling place for the dead. Canoes, therefore, are not merely vessels but sanctified spaces—like the waka of the Māori or the va’a of Polynesia, each carved and adorned in accordance with mythic lineage and navigational mana.
The rhythm of waves echoes in repetitive design: chevrons, spirals, undulating lines—all invoking the ocean’s pulse, its power to deliver and devour. The ocean is not background—it is actor, archive, ancestor.
Sacred Geometry and the Language of Balance
Across countless traditions, symmetry in Oceanic design is not aesthetic but cosmological. The repetition of motifs—zigzags, crosshatches, concentric circles—reflects a deep commitment to balance and continuity. These forms often mirror dualities: life/death, male/female, earth/sky, sacred/profane.
In Fijian masi and Tongan ngatu barkcloths, geometric symbols are layered in intentional arrangements that communicate genealogical authority or ritual power. In Solomon Island war canoes, abstracted spirit figures are embedded within the decorative planking—guardians cloaked in pattern.
Design thus becomes a kind of law, a visual manifestation of cosmic order where each line carries both aesthetic weight and metaphysical charge.
The Body as Mobile Shrine
Perhaps the most intimate surface of Oceanic art is the human body. Tattooing, scarification, piercing, and adornment function as both biography and theology. The marked body speaks a history of initiation, lineage, marriage, death, and divine favor.
To mark the body is to bind it to spirit—to inscribe narrative onto skin that walks, dances, fights, and prays. In this sense, the body becomes an itinerant canvas, bearing the sacred into every space it enters.
Here, Oceanic symbolism is not confined to object or painting. It breathes, sweats, moves.
Sources Used in This Section:
• Gell, A. (1998). Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory.
• Kaeppler, A. (2008). The Pacific Arts of Polynesia and Micronesia.
• Shore, B. (1989). Mana and Tapu in Polynesian Cosmology.
• Turner, T. (1986). “The Social Skin.” The Anthropology of the Body.
• Tcherkézoff, S. (2008). First Contacts in Polynesia: The Samoan Case.
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VII. Conclusion: Continuity and Creation Beyond Rupture
In the long wake of waves and empires, Oceanic art remains—not as a relic preserved in amber, but as a living current, weaving together ancestors, landscapes, and futures still arriving. To trace the arc of Oceanic artistic expression is to witness a form of resilience that is neither passive nor nostalgic. It is adaptive, layered, often defiant—a visual and spiritual vocabulary that has survived disruption not by freezing itself in time, but by refusing to be unmoored from it.
Despite centuries of erasure, theft, and misinterpretation, Oceanic art continues to speak. Its forms evolve, its meanings deepen, and its creators—past and present—anchor their identities not just in what was, but in what continues to unfold. This is not a simple story of revival, nor a linear tale of loss and recovery. It is a constellation of survivals, each flashing bright and specific, yet connected across vast distances by the shared pulse of mana.
The spiritual codes embedded in barkcloth, body markings, stone altars, and ceremonial songs remain potent today—not always in their original contexts, but in their ability to generate meaning, memory, and motion. A Maori moko worn in a climate protest, a Polynesian tapa print on digital film, or a Melanesian canoe prow on a reparation claim—these are not reinterpretations; they are renewals. Art becomes action, and action becomes continuity.
Just as the ocean itself is not one uniform body but a symphony of currents, swells, and tides, so too is Oceanic art a layered archive. It remembers what it must. It forgets what is no longer needed. It adapts to new winds and still sings the old songs beneath.
As the Pacific now faces rising seas, cultural erosion, and ecological precarity, the role of art becomes even more vital—not only as documentation but as declaration. Art is how the islands remember. Art is how they imagine. Art is how they persist.
The story of Oceanic art is not only about objects or images. It is about spirit made visible, community made tactile, and philosophy made rhythmic. It is the coral writing of the ancestors. The echo of the drum. The mark that endures.
It is, always, the tide of mana—coming in.
Sources Used in This Section:
• Hau‘ofa, E. (1994). “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific.
• Teaiwa, K. (2015). Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba.
• Salmond, A. (2010). Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti.
• UNESCO (2021). “Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Pacific.”
• Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples.
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VIII. Appendices
The following appendices provide additional orientation. These elements are not secondary, but structural—offering key tools for navigating the depths of terminology, geography, and time that have shaped and reshaped Oceanic artistic traditions.
A. Glossary of Key Indigenous and Cultural Terms
Mana – A pervasive spiritual force that imbues people, objects, and actions with power and prestige across many Pacific cultures.
Tapu – A state of sacred restriction or spiritual prohibition. Often paired with mana in regulating social and spiritual life.
Tatau / Moko / Malofie – Traditional tattooing practices from Samoa, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Tonga respectively. Visual genealogies etched onto the skin.
Heiau – A sacred Hawaiian temple structure used for religious rites and offerings.
Malagan – Funerary art and ritual complex from New Ireland, involving elaborately carved sculptures used to honor the dead.
Lapita – A prehistoric Austronesian culture known for its dentate-stamped ceramics, marking the earliest wave of settlement into Remote Oceania.
Songlines – In Aboriginal Australian belief, the paths traced by ancestral beings during the Dreaming; these are sung and visualized in art and landscape.
Waka / Va’a – Oceanic canoes used for long-distance voyaging and symbolic representations of ancestry and migration.
Stick Chart – Navigational chart from the Marshall Islands made from palm ribs and shells, encoding wave and current patterns.
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B. Maps of Major Cultural Zones and Artistic Styles
Map Set 1: Core Regions of Oceania
• Polynesia: Including Hawai‘i, Aotearoa, Samoa, Tonga, Rapa Nui
• Melanesia: Including Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Fiji
• Micronesia: Including Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Palau, Guam
• Australia: Aboriginal cultural regions, with focus on Arnhem Land, Kimberley, and Central Desert
Map Set 2: Art Style Distribution (Pre-Contact to Present)
• Distribution of Lapita ceramics and expansion routes
• Zones of barkcloth production
• Regions associated with tattooing traditions and visual styles
• Centers of colonial disruption and missionary impact
• Contemporary art hubs and repatriation centers
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C. Chronological Timeline of Key Cultural and Historical Events
• 40,000 BCE–500 CE: Aboriginal rock art traditions; Dreamtime cosmologies
• 1500 BCE–1000 CE: Lapita migration and ceramic culture; Micronesian navigation
• 1000–1500 CE: Consolidation of Polynesian and Melanesian spiritual systems; tattooing, carving, barkcloth
• 1500–1900 CE: European contact, missionary campaigns, piracy, cultural loss
• 1900–Present: Cultural revival, artistic hybridity, repatriation, global exhibition
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IX. Source Reference Compendium
I. Introduction: Oceanic Art as Sacred Geography
• Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
• Hauʻofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 147–161.
• Kaeppler, Adrienne L. The Pacific Arts of Polynesia and Micronesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Thomas, Nicholas. Oceanic Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1995.
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II. Deep Origins: Prehistory and First Artistic Expressions
• Allen, Jim. “Lapita and the Temporal Dimensions of Oceania.” World Archaeology 26, no. 3 (2014): 388–403.
• Kirch, Patrick Vinton. On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands Before European Contact. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
• Morwood, M. J. Visions from the Past: The Archaeology of Australian Aboriginal Art. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002.
• Spriggs, Matthew. The Island Melanesians. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997.
• Taçon, Paul S. C., and Christopher Chippindale. “Australia’s Ancient Warriors: Changing Depictions of Fighting in the Rock Art of Arnhem Land.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18, no. 3 (2008): 247–264.
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III. Sacred Symmetries and Spiritual Systems
• Feinberg, Richard. “Island Navigation: Traditions and Transitions.” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 104, no. 2 (1995): 219–244.
• Gell, Alfred. Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
• Hooper, Steven. Pacific Encounters: Art and Divinity in Polynesia, 1760–1860. London: British Museum Press, 2006.
• Lewis, David. We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1972.
• Neich, Roger. Carved Histories: Rotorua Ngāti Tarāwhai Woodcarving. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001.
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IV. External Disruptions and Artistic Transformations
• Dening, Greg. Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774–1880. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1988.
• Howe, Kerry R. Nature, Culture, and History: The “Knowing” of Oceania. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2000.
• Jolly, Margaret. “From Point Venus to Bali Ha’i: Eroticism and Exoticism in Representations of the Pacific.” Pacific Studies 20, no. 4 (1997): 99–121.
• Kirch, Patrick Vinton. On the Road of the Winds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.
• Sahlins, Marshall. How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
• Smith, Bernard. European Vision and the South Pacific. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
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V. Reclaiming Identity: Art as Cultural Revival
• Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Herle, Anita. “Carvings, Casts, and Contexts: The Changing Use of Objects in the Torres Strait.” Journal of Museum Ethnography 12 (2000): 119–134.
• Kihara, Yuki. Paradise Camp [Exhibition Catalogue]. Aotearoa: New Zealand Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2022.
• Langton, Marcia. Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television…. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993.
• Morphé, Helen. Kuninjku Art: Hunter-Gatherer Art from Western Arnhem Land. Melbourne: Fine Arts Press, 1998.
• Myers, Fred. Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
• Reihana, Lisa. In Pursuit of Venus [infected] [Exhibition Catalogue]. Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 2015.
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VI. Symbolism Across the Archipelagos
• Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
• Kaeppler, Adrienne L. The Pacific Arts of Polynesia and Micronesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Shore, Bradd. Mana and Tapu in Polynesian Cosmology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989.
• Tcherkézoff, Serge. First Contacts in Polynesia: The Samoan Case. Canberra: ANU Press, 2008.
• Turner, Terence. “The Social Skin.” In The Anthropology of the Body, edited by John Blacking, 112–140. London: Academic Press, 1986.
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VII. Conclusion: Continuity and Creation Beyond Rupture
• Hauʻofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 147–161.
• Salmond, Anne. Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
• Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 2012.
• Teaiwa, Katerina Martina. Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.
• UNESCO. “Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Pacific.” United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2021.
