European Visitors Research Articles

Characteristics of the leisure activities that create wellness in tourism destinations

The overall objective of this research is to analyse the conditions and attributes of the leisure activities that create wellness in a tourism context. Firstly, the literature on wellness leisure and wellness tourism demand is examined with a view to identifying major commonalities and patterns. Secondly, an exploratory study of the wellness leisure style of European visitors to Gran Canaria is conducted, covering socio–demographic characteristics, the wellness leisure activities at the place of residence (visits to wellness centres, trips for wellness motives and the reasons of the trip to Gran Canaria), the wellness leisure activities at the destination (visits to wellness centres and the enjoyment of wellness treatments), as well as the conditions and attributes of the leisure activities that are important in choosing wellness destinations.

Oriental Disguise and the Thousand and One Nights in Nerval

Oriental Disguise and the Thousand and One Nights in Nerval Dominique Jullien Il me semble que j'ai vécu en Orient; et lorsque pendant le carnaval je me déguise en quelque caftan et quelque tarbouch authentique, je crois reprendre mes vrais habits. J'ai toujours été surpris de ne pas entendre l'Arabe couramment; il faut que je l'aie oublié.1 "Me voici en pleines Mille et une nuits!" exclaimed Gérard de Nerval, as he wandered around Cairo impersonating Caliph Harun Al-Rashid incognito in the streets of Bagdad. The legendary caliph of 9th-century Bagdad is the hero of a number of stories in the Arabian Nights, in which he sets out, disguised as an ordinary merchant, in search of adventures in the streets of his city. For 19th-century artists on their Grand Oriental tour, the Nights— extraordinarily popular and familiar to most Europeans, not just as children's stories, but also through numerous stage adaptations— often served as a tourist guide, filtering their perceptions of the foreign reality, both an interpretative lens that colored travel experiences and a literary model that shaped travelogues. Arthur de Gobineau, in the introduction to his Nouvelles asiatiques, hailed the tales as the most accurate portrayal of the Orient: "C'est la vérité même" (III, 305). Travelers anticipated scenes and characters from the Nights and acted out the tales themselves. This included adopting the local costume, as Nerval, together with numerous other European visitors, would do in the course of his Oriental journey. These two paradigms— referring the oriental reality to the Nights and dressing as a local— coalesce into a recurring pattern, almost a cliché of 19th-century Oriental travelogues. Nerval enthusiastically adopted these practices common to the Orientalism of his generation. However, as this study argues, while all the elements found in other Oriental travelogues are also present in [End Page 31] Nerval's Voyage en Orient, there they compose a less controlled, more disturbing picture, one that goes to the heart of Nerval's identity crisis. By adopting the local costume, and by overlaying the tales over the 19th-century Oriental reality, Nerval was apparently conforming to what so many other Europeans before and after him would do. But, as we shall see, Nerval's use of these topoi was more complex than it would seem at first; for him it would lead to a more problematic engagement with the cultural Other and even more so with the other within himself. Oriental transvestism Donning the local costume, as Nerval did in Cairo, was hardly original. Oriental transvestism prevails from the earliest accounts of Western travelers to the East. We have portraits of Jean-Baptiste Chardin and Lady Mary Montagu (who described her Turkish attire in loving detail in her letters) in Oriental costume. Later, in Pierre Loti's Aziyadé, the protagonist dons local dress and settles in the Muslim quarter of Constantinople. Of course, transvestism initially served a simple pragmatic purpose: J. J. Rifaud's Tableau de l'Egypte, one of the first guidebooks, published in 1830, recommended adopting the local costume as a safety measure.2 Beyond being a precautionary measure, however, transvestism typically signaled the Western traveler's openness to the Oriental culture, a feeling that sometimes went far deeper than the dress (conversely, Chateaubriand's insistence on dressing as a Frenchman during his Oriental journey goes hand in hand with his rejection of Turkish culture).3 Indeed, in some cases travelers also embraced the lifestyle, customs, even the beliefs of their adopted country. Lady Hester Stanhope, mentioned by Nerval for her conversion to Druze beliefs (II, 522), was admiringly described by Lamartine in her "beau costume oriental" complete with turban, cashmere shawl, immense turkish robe and yellow boots.4 Isabelle Eberhardt, an ardent convert to Islam, dressed, not only as an Arab, but also as a man (calling herself Mahmoud Saadi), a gender-crossing disguise with obvious practical value (allowing her freedom of movement and protection from men during her adventurous travels) but which also manifested her Oriental persona, the itinerant scholar of Islam that she became in Algeria.5 Edward Lane, in his less flamboyant manner, spent years in...

The Earliest European Responses to Dancing in the Americas

The Earliest European Responses to Dancing in the Americas John Haines In June 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed from Plymouth, England to Newfoundland with five ships, in order “to plant Christian inhabitants … upon those large and ample countreys … esteemed fertile and rich in Minerals, yet not in the actuall possession of any Christian prince.” Gilbert would eventually reach the bountiful continent, but he was never to make it back home; he and his ship, named the Squirrel, sank into the Atlantic Ocean before reaching English shores. Thankfully, another one of the five vessels, the Golden Hind, did return safely to England carrying Edward Hayes, who, six years later, published a detailed account of the Humphrey expedition. Describing the company that set off on that fateful day in June, Hayes supplies some unusual musical information. “Besides for solace of our people, and allurement of the Savages, we were provided of Musike in good variety: not omitting the least toyes, as Morris dancers, Hobby horse, and Maylike conceits to delight the Savage people, whom we intended to winne by all faire meanes possible.”1 What is exceptional about this last remark is the type of music specified: the raucous English Morris dance originating in the late medieval moresca from Spain and North Africa, the related ritualistic Hobby horse dance, and general “Maylike conceits”—by which Hayes probably meant other springtime performances popular in England and related to the two dances just mentioned.2 This passage relating an English attempt to entice “savages” with dance music speaks to the broader European fascination in early modern times with dance in [End Page 1] “America”—so named in 1507 by map maker Martin Waldseemüller, who labeled the vast and unknown “fourth part” of the world after the Florentine voyager and self-promoter Amerigo Vespucci.3 Dance was ubiquitous in the Americas: the initial jubilant greeting as European ships hit foreign shores, as well as one of the most common activities in the rituals and festivities that star-struck Europeans witnessed in the place they called the New World.4 In the words of one observer concerning the Aztecs, “songs and dances were very important in all this land.”5 As I will argue in this essay, Native American dance fascinated the earliest European visitors to this continent because of a fundamental paradox. Ritual dance was at once foreign and familiar to them. On the one hand, dance disturbed the priests—Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and the newcomer Jesuits—who wrote up many of the surviving reports about the Americas. As an omnipresent activity, Native American dance as an ever-present cultural phenomenon had no exact counterpart in early modern Europe. On the other hand, similar dances had thrived in rituals and festivities not long before the early modern period—indeed, for the entire millennium known as the Middle Ages and long before that. An abundance of witnesses from all across Europe attests to these festive dances in contexts ranging from private banquets to public feast days throughout the liturgical year.6 For centuries, these European dance-related activities had more often than not been condemned by churchmen, the very group who now took in for the first time the non-Christian dances of the American continent and reported on them.7 What had especially irked medieval churchmen was the prominence of women, young and old, in these dances.8 Woman’s dance was feared because of woman’s perceived sensuality. Woman is “the organ of Satan,” explains Bernard of Clairvaux, for her sweet song and “shifting rhythms” are like “a siren of the sea”—the siren metaphor occurring more than once in medieval condemnations of dance.9 In sum, sixteenth-century European observers had more of an historical connection than an immediate cultural one with Native American dance. The latter conflicted—or at least appeared to conflict—with Christian music. Thus the early modern churchmen who first wrote about the “New World” viewed Native American dance with a mixture of condescension and fascination. But mainly apprehension. [End Page 2] This was unfortunate but inevitable. Europeans’ general predisposition against Native American dance music had been set up long before they reached American shores by centuries of...

The Fetish and Intercultural Commerce in Seventeenth-century West Africa

Fetish. Perhaps few words are more redolent of the negative outlook of “enlightened” Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries towards the “superstitions” embraced by the supposedly benighted inhabitants of the Dark Continent of Africa. This intellectual snobbery on the part of such European intellectual luminaries as Hume, Voltaire, Kant, and Marx led to fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of African religious beliefs and practices. In particular, it obscured the ways in which European visitors to the African coast made use of the concept of the fetish for their commercial purposes. In the process, they introduced European ideas about physical objects of supernatural power into the complex of beliefs that Enlightenment thinkers later came to deride as uniquely emblematic of African backwardness. The conception of the fetish as both a European and an African invention re-emerges in reading the documentary evidence left behind by European travellers and traders of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These sources present the fetish—and in particular the practice of sealing agreements by swearing oaths on fetish objects—as an intermediary between European and African systems of economic and spiritual value, thus fostering the modicum of trust necessary for trade to proceed.

European travelers’ return likelihood and satisfaction with Mediterranean sun-and-sand destinations: A Chi-square Automatic Identification Detector−based segmentation approach

Drawing on the literature on visitor satisfaction, return likelihood, and customer segmentation, this study applies a Chi-square Automatic Identification Detector segmentation technique to segment European visitors on their likelihood to revisit selected Mediterranean sun-and-sand destinations. The Chi-square Automatic Identification Detector procedure distinguishes five segments in terms of return likelihood, with different levels of satisfaction according to the respondents’ repeat visit status, occupation, and country of residence. The findings are further discussed in the framework of the literature on return likelihood. Marketing implications and suggestions for Mediterranean sun-and-sand destination managers are also presented.

Hunter-gatherers, biogeographic barriers and the development of human settlement in Tierra del Fuego

Tierra del Fuego represents the southernmost limit of human settlement in the Americas. While people may have started to arrive there around 10 500 BP, when it was still connected to the mainland, the main wave of occupation occurred 5000 years later, by which time it had become an island. The co-existence in the area of maritime hunter-gatherers (in canoes) with previous terrestrial occupants pre-echoes the culturally distinctive groups encountered by the first European visitors in the sixteenth century. The study also provides a striking example of interaction across challenging natural barriers.

Estambul otomano de Juan Goytisolo: lo propio y lo ajeno

The journeys to the East have generated a rich imagery in Western culture. Juan Goytisolo’s Ottoman Istanbul addresses this issue introducing the city and its past to the contemporary European visitor. He reviews the cliches collected by travelers and shows us how the city has been used in many cases as a scapegoat for personal fears. This paper aims to detect and analyze the intertextual strategies used by Goytisolo to enrich typical views of the city and to connect the Ottoman world to the contemporary one. The author looks for testimonies that provide us with different points of view, such as the letters of Lady Montagu or quotations from A Trip to Turkey. On the other hand, he compares the Oriental and Western worlds. Traveling to Istanbul thus becomes a way to approach this exotic universe, but also a self revealing experience.

Representing Burma: Narrative Displacement and Gender

When I was young, it seemed that most Americans had never heard of Burma. Since communication with Burma was constrained, I was curious about its culture, which my family carried so near to their hearts. My first memory of seeing “Burma” involved watching The King and I (1956) on television. I was captivated by Rita Moreno playing Tuptim, a Burmese girl who is given to the king of Siam by the prince of Burma and is secretly having an affair with her escort. The new British governess gives Tuptim Uncle Tom's Cabin to improve her English. The Burmese concubine articulates her frustration by staging an adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel for the king and some European visitors. During the performance, Tuptim attempts an escape with her Burmese lover.

Die Welt in der Stube. Begegnungen mit Aussereuropa in Kunstkammern der fruhen Neuzeit

This overhauled version of a doctoral dissertation tackles a theme that has been rather neglected in the Kunstkammer literature so far: To what extent can objects from outside Europe be said to have conveyed useful information about those regions to their European visitors? The author bases his findings on three case-studies: the Gotha Kunstkammer in Schloss Friedenstein, William Courten's cabinet in London, and the Repository of the Royal Society in the same capital, thus spanning the period from the middle of the seventeenth to the early eighteenth century. At first sight the decision to compare collections in England and Germany may seem surprising, but all three adhered to the Danish model of the Museum Wormianum and participated in the same networks of donors, merchants and (distinguished) visitors. The documentation on the Gotha collection in the form of diaries, correspondence and archival sources is particularly rich, and the author ably draws...

The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archeological and Demographic Perspectives (review)

Reviewed by: The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archeological and Demographic Perspectives Terry L. Hunt The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archeological and Demographic Perspectives, edited by Patrick V Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8248-3134-9, xvi + 390 pages, maps, notes, bibliography, index. US$35.00. Although not always at the fore, historical demography is among the most significant dimensions for understanding the evolution of human societies. In the Pacific, anthropological and other integrated research—ranging from island colonization to resource use, subsistence, human-induced environmental impacts (eg, deforestation and extinctions), social complexity, cultural elaboration (eg, monumentality), collapse, and contact induced genocide—have drawn on demography, or at least implicit assumptions about evolutionary trends in population. This volume edited by Patrick V Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu considers demography from historical and archaeological perspectives for an impressive array of Pacific Island cases. The collection is the result of an invited workshop on demographic evolution held on the idyllic shores of Paopao Bay on the island of Mo'orea, French Polynesia, in December 2003. The sixteen chapters offer readers an up-to-date review of mainstream anthropological demography and recent applications in the region. At the same time, the authors of these chapters—some more explicitly than others—acknowledge and sometimes illustrate the difficulties remaining in efforts to evaluate models of ancient population size and dynamics. Kirch and Rallu (chapter 1) frame the focus of the book with substantive questions concerning the size and density of Pacific Island populations at contact, and thus the resulting severity of demographic collapse. These substantive questions have been debated for decades, drawing on estimates of early European visitors, later missionary censes, and now a critical assessment that drops the ball squarely in the court of archaeologists. Kirch and Rallu embed long-term demographic evolution in questions that pervade the evolutionary dynamics of island (and other) societies. In chapter 2, Rallu illustrates the frustrating complexity—indeed the many significant yet often unknowable details—of demographic models for prehistoric Pacific Islands. Slight changes in growth rates, colonization dates, or the number of people in a founding population result in dramatically different outcomes. The magnitude of difference resulting from such slight changes provides a reality check for anyone tempted to take specific arguments about prehistoric population too seriously. The contributors to this volume share caution on this point. While critical values remain unknown, Rallu shows how working backward from census data and recorded epidemics permits another estimation of population size around the time of European contact. In a welcome theoretical contribution to the volume (chapter 3), Shripad Tuljapurkar and colleagues address the critically important issue of population and resources in terms of Malthusian limits. Whether or not it is acknowledged explicitly, this [End Page 207] relationship is the basis for most of the thinking in demographic evolution—for humans and other animals. The authors go on to consider the interaction of soils, plants, and food production in human-environmental dynamics. The next four chapters (4, 5, 6, 7) describe archaeological and historical approaches to population in the Hawaiian Islands, the focus of much recent debate. As Kirch and Rallu describe in chapter 1, archaeologists have attempted to measure relative and absolute population values using oesteological data (eg, fertility and life history aspects), settlement counts by temporal units, dating curves (ie, "dates as data" for human use of landscapes), and estimations of environmental carrying capacity (usually meant to be assessments of maximum, average, or sustainable productivity, particularly in agriculture). Archaeologists have routinely considered one or more of these analytical dimensions in case studies, although oesteological studies are not represented here. In chapter 6, regarding his research in Kahikinui, Maui, Kirch provides a concise, well-researched exemplar of estimating absolute population values from an archaeological case. From these values, in turn, there are implications for density and rates of growth. I suggest that this is as good as it gets in carefully, and critically, using archaeological data in paleo-demographic research. While difficult to say with greater certainty, as Kirch cautions, working backwards from historic census records to estimate the degree of population decline—indeed...

ANADOLU SU KÜLTÜRÜ TÜRK HAMAMLARI VE YIKANMA GELENEĞİNİN KÖKLERİ VE GELECEĞİ

From the sacred springs watched over by the formidable deities of Anatolia’s prehistoric past to the modestly beautiful clusters of domes of hamams that grace almost every neighborhood of Turkish cities, baths have become an intimate and inseparable part of Anatolian civilizations. The highland palaces of Bronze age and Iron age settlements, such as Hattusa, Aslantas and Zincirli, had bath chambers with remarkably advanced water supply and drainage systems. Greek and Hellenistic gymnasiums of Asia Minor displayed marble basins and pools for the use and enjoyment of athletes. The bath-gymnasium complexes of the Roman imperial era with their lofty, vaulted interiors and sparkling swimming pools were the special creations of Anatolia’s diverse cultural traditions and the pinnacles of pride for Anatolian cities. This heritage of water and bathing smoothly and seamlessly ushered in the culture of baths and bathing that flourished through Christian, Byzantine and Islamic-Turkish period down to our day. The classical tradition of bathing and hygiene resonated through Anatolia’s past, sustained by the Islamic core beliefs in cleanliness and leading to a new blossoming of public bathing habits and a renaissance of Islamic-Turkish bath architecture. The thermal magic of the warm, steamy interiors of the Turkish hamam under the twin kling lights of floating domes offered physical and social regeneration and, especially in the hidden world of women’s baths, the intimacy of a classless society. Hamams and spas intrigued and charmed many European visitors -such as Lady Mary Montague in the 18th century, and Julia Pardoe a century later- and provided inspiration for many Orientalist painters in memorable works such as Ingres’ Le bain Turc (1862). In the West, following the misplaced Early Christian notion of alousia (or the sanctity of “being unwashed”) and aided by the fear of several devastating plagues, bathing and water evoked feelings of fear and repulsion. In sum Islamic East washed, Christian West did not. Finally, in a world where traditional values and habits are steadily loosing ground, what is the future of Turkish baths and bathing culture? Can we restore the historic baths of Anatolia to their former glory and endow them with new functions relevant to those of the contemporary world including, perhaps, tourism? Can we re-locate them in their original and sustaining neighborhood context? Can we reestablish and embroider the sacred traditions of water and bathing into the diverse cultural past of Anatolia where they belong?

Impossible to Disprove Yet Impossible to Believe: the Unforgiving Epistemology of Deep-Time Oral Tradition

This is not a real old time myth but it is what they say now, and it must have been like that.This man from Ulimang was highly skilled in the art of warfare—like Eisenhower.A Tahitian businessman who provides ‘Polynesian’ entertainment for tourists in Hawaii with a young Marquesan man whom he took to Samoa to be tattooed by their artistsfollowing designs recorded by early European visitors.… as for oral Traditions, what certainty can there be in them? What foundation of truth can be laid upon the breath of man? How do we see the reports vary, of those things which our eyes have seen done? How do they multiply in their passage, and either grow, or die upon hazards?Writing about American Indian reactions to their discovery of large fossil remains, Adrienne Mayor observes in passing that “[f]olklore scholars now generally accept that oral traditions about historical events endure for about a thousand years, although some oral myths about geological and astronomical events can be reliably dated to about seven thousand years.” Mayor's chosen task is to demonstrate that American Indian legends suggest that they rightly regarded fossils as the remains of long extinct megafauna populations. In aid of this, Mayor accepts these arguments in her own work. While this claim might seem extravagantprima facie, and while most folklorists would disown Mayor's claim, she is not without support from the work of a relatively small, but not uninfluential (and possibly growing), cadre of anthropologists, mythographers, geologists, and historians, whose efforts on behalf of deep-time oral tradition I address here.Some interesting—even intriguing—things have been happening recently in discussions of the carrying capacity of oral tradition—its long-term historicity, in particular.À laMayor, the thrust of this is to credit tradition with being able to preserve “intact” various pieces of information for as long as tens of thousands of years. To the historian interested in the reality of the past in oral societies, this state of affairs is challenging, perplexing, and no doubt to some, highly promising. If, for instance, it can be demonstrated that certain information in oral data is thousands of years old and at the same time an accurate recollection, then reservations about much later (say, several centuries old) orally transmitted information might need to be reassessed, and with such rethinking would come new ways to approach great swaths of the past.

Immediacy, Mediation, and Media in Early Modern Catholic and Protestant Representations of Safavid Iran

AbstractIn this paper I argue that none of the sources produced by European visitors to Safavid Iran are unmediated, immediate expressions of observations, experiences, emotions and descriptions of the country's nature and culture. I offer as evidence different kinds of textual sources created by four travelers in the early seventeenth century, maps of Iran produced in various European cities and prints and engravings made by artists. I show that partly contradictory discourses governed these textual and visual representations of Iran and that particularities of each kind shaped the practices and norms of the creation of its individual representatives.

Long-term population declines in Danish trans-Saharan migrant birds

Capsule Long-distance migrant birds show less favourable trends than sedentary/short-distance species. Aims To use breeding bird surveys to contrast population trends amongst common species according to their migration pattern. Methods Changes in abundance of 62 Danish breeding sedentary, short-distance (Europe/North Africa) or long-distance (trans-Saharan) migrants were described by fitting log linear regression models to point-count census data gathered during 1976–2005. Results Trans-Saharan migrants declined by 1.3% per annum during this period, while short-distance migrants and sedentary species increased by 1.4% and 1.0% per annum, respectively. There were no significant decadal declines amongst species using different summer breeding habitats, except for wetlands, and there was no consistent variation in trends associated with wintering regions or habitats or diet. Conclusions More information is urgently needed on diet, feeding ecology, habitat requirements, winter distribution and intra-African movements of the commoner European summer visitors to identify causes of the declines and highlight when in the annual cycle detrimental effects occur. Studies linking individuals on their breeding, staging and wintering grounds are especially needed. Danish trends resemble those from elsewhere in Europe, confirming that restoration to favourable conservation status requires inter-continental action to meet European and global targets to reduce or halt biodiversity loss.

Recreational Travel Fatalities in US National Parks

Injuries are a public health problem affecting traveling populations such as tourists visiting National Parks. This study investigates the distribution of visitor fatalities in US National Park Service (NPS) units and identifies the predeath activities and contributing factors associated with them. A retrospective study was conducted of visitor fatalities from all NPS units during 2003 and 2004. There were 356 reported fatalities during 2003 and 2004. Fatalities were most common during the summer months and on weekends. Males accounted for 75% of the reported fatalities, and visitors aged 20 to 29 and 50 to 59 years accounted for 51% of all deaths. Only 99 of 388 (26%) NPS units reported at least 1 fatality, and only 10 units reported 10 or more fatalities. However, these 10 units were responsible for 36% of all fatalities. Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Blue Ridge Parkway, Grand Canyon National Park, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and Yosemite National Park reported the highest number of fatalities. Domestic visitors accounted for 73% of the fatalities, and European visitors accounted for 13%. Transportation and water-based activities recorded the highest number of fatalities. Motor vehicle crashes accounted for 20% of fatalities and was followed by suicide (17%), swimming (11%), hiking (10%), plane crashes (9%), climbing (6%), and boating (5%) incidents. Fatalities in NPS units are not widespread and are related to more common events such as motor vehicle crashes, suicide, swimming, and hiking rather than exotic causes such as bears or other wildlife. It is recommended that preventive techniques first be developed in the 10 NPS units responsible for 36% of the total NPS-wide fatalities.

Gender, Modernity, and Liberty – Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings

This book presents a dialogue between western and Middle Eastern womenthat is often presumed never to have happened. It supplies us with a collectionof extracts fromOttoman, Egyptian, British, andAmericanwriters, eachaccompanied with a biography and literary introduction of its writer. Thebook covers 100 years, beginning with 1837, and focuses on writings bywomen from Istanbul and Cairo, key locations for the flowering of MiddleEastern feminism. As mentioned in the “Introduction,” the articulation ofwomen’s views was particularly advanced in these two cities.The historical background of this period, as well as its effects uponwomen in both the Ottoman Empire (toward the establishment of the TurkishRepublic) and Egypt (marked by Arab nationalism and the country’smove toward independence) is well explained in the editors’ introductionand photo essay, which displays the collection’s main theme. In a nutshell,this period witnessed the emergence of organized feminism in both theWestand the East and, at the same time, marked the start of a significant growthin the number of European visitors to both cities due to the increased availabilityof regular steamship travel.Based upon the information provided, it seems that Middle Easternwomen followed the conditions and campaigns of western women with greatinterest, even though they proffered a cogent critique of western liberation’slimitations and adopted only select western feminist ideas. The writers’ very“staunch” feminism was strongly based on opinionated materials that aresubversive even in our times. For example, Lady Anne Brassey (1839-87) isquoted as writing: “Turkey would never take its proper place till…the softeningand purifying influence of women was allowed to be felt” (p. 128).Prior to that, she asserts: “It is a great mistake of the Turks to think that they ...

Excavations in Peva Valley, Rurutu, Austral Islands (East Polynesia)

The Peva dune site on Rurutu, Austral Islands, excavated in 2003, has yielded a rich archaeological assemblage containing artifacts and both vertebrate and invertebrate fauna from two distinct stratigraphic layers. The lower layer dates from the East Polynesian Archaic period (c. A.D. 1000–1450), and the upper layer from the Classic period (c. eighteenth and nineteenth centuries A.D.), during which time the site was a ceremonial marae. The two layers are entirely distinct, separated by a thick deposit of sterile beach sand. This article analyzes the major temporal trends in Rurutu's artifact and faunal assemblages, and discusses them in terms of both the general efflorescence of East Polynesian culture, and the more specific emergence of a uniquely Austral culture, which impressed early European visitors as being quite unique.

Conclusion: National Identity and Visual Culture in America

The subject of America's and national identity has been at the heart of written criticism and political speculation, since the founding of the nation.1 Scholars have tried to define the character, as have commentators both foreign and domestic. British and observers, such as Alexander de Tocqueville, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Fanny Kemble, Charles Dickens, and others have retained much of their relevance as historians. They provide enduring and piercing insights into gauging and understanding that animal with the prefix American; moreover, they wondered at the bounty, natural beauty, and diversity of the North continent. As Joshua Taylor, the first director of what is now named the Smithsonian Art Museum, noted in his bicentennial book of essays America as Art (1976), European visitors, in fact, not concerned with the physical problems of creating a productive livelihood in a new land, were initially more appreciative of the particularly rugged aspects of nature than were the local inhabitants (100). authors, ranging from the early novelists of a mythic past populated by noble savages, such as James Fenimore Cooper, and to novelists seeking to identify what was particularly American about Americans, like Mark Twain, were soon supplemented by scholars seeking to understand the America and its ascribed exceptionalism. Indeed, the shrewd essayist, de Crevecoeur, took on that subject before the conclusion of the Revolutionary War in his Letters from An Farmer (1872). However, it is in the visual arts, the common denominator of the preceding articles, that this question seems to have first appeared. Even before the Revolution, as is often related, the Pennsylvania-born and Philadelphia-raised Benjamin West moved to England and eventually came to hold the two impressive titles of Official History Painter to King George III and President of the Royal Academy. Although he became one of the most important painters in Great Britain, and though he never returned to his native land after leaving for Italy at the age of twenty-two in 1760, he nonetheless refused knighthood after the Revolution because titles were alien to the way of life and constitutional order. Many young men left the colonies to study with West in England before, during, and after the War for Independence, with a few emulating their teachers by becoming expatriates. Instead, most returned to employ their newly developed skills in documenting the appearance of their countrymen and the great events of their time. Among the latter was the young Matthew Pratt. Although a minor artist, his best known painting, The School (1765), represents a significant commentary on prerevolutionary identity and the arts. In this painting, West appears with a number of his students, including Pratt, the teacher wearing a rather modest outfit and a three-cornered, Quaker-style hat. It is highly unlikely that West would retain Quaker dress six years after leaving Philadelphia, and there is even less certainty that all the students presented were even from the Colonies. But Pratt is making a pointed statement here about the identity and independence from British fashion and absorption more than a decade before the War for Independence. Broadsides, graphics, and other combinations of the printed word and image had a lively life during the later Colonial and the early Federal periods, with much greater attention to the lives and foibles of people than did the so-called fine arts. Whether showing people in a street scene or a battle in progress, these graphic expressions reached many people for whom the fine arts were beyond their reach and outside their experience. Many of the posters and penny prints were political in nature (the battle prints of Paul Revere come to mind), although a goodly number also provided portraits of civic leaders and war heroes to a substantial cross-section of the public. …

Theme and variations: The development of differences in Polynesian socio-political organizations

This article discusses the development of differences in the socio-political organization on the various Polynesian islands. Such differences were observed by early European visitors. Most of their descriptions date from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, but a few sources date back to the early seventeenth century, including the journals of the Dutch voyagers Schouten and Le Maire, Tasman, and somewhat later Roggeveen. The voyagers’ logs and journals often contain lengthy and detailed descriptions of the Polynesian peoples and cultures they encountered. And, though they often did not understand what they observed, they carefully described what they saw — or what they thought they saw.

Monumental architecture in West Polynesia: origins, chiefs and archaeological approaches

Abstract In West Polynesia, monumental structures with a volume [greater than or equal to] 2500 [m.sup.2] include mounds of earth or stone that in traditional history were used to house or bury chiefs, as well as being the focus of ceremonial and religious activity. We review archaeological theory about the initiation of monumental architecture and examines how chiefly and high-status activity might be identified. Large structures with monumental dimensions often have a complicated construction history that spanned several centuries indicating change to the social structure, particularly the power of elites. As a result archaeologists need to develop ideas that relate episodes of architectonic change to alterations in the prehistoric socio-political system. ********** Complex societies are associated worldwide with monumental architecture, making the examination of massive structures integral to the study of the origins and development of socio-political complexity (Childe 1949; Peebles and Kus 1977; Trigger 1990). In Polynesia the hierarchically organized chiefdoms encountered by early European visitors displayed substantial variation in their size, organization and degree of stratification, as well as sharing fundamental features denoting a common origin (Sahlins 1957; Kirch and Green 1987). Such socio-political similarities and differences were manifested in the settlement landscapes of island groups, which often contained examples of monumental architecture made in earth, stone or a combination of the two (Kirch 1990; Graves and Green 1993). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] This paper examines the origins of monumental structures in West Polynesia (Figure 1), and reviews archaeological approaches to the study of massive structures. These include methods for assessing chiefly power from the evidence offered by large constructions, and how the study of monumental architecture might inform us about the development of late-prehistoric societies in the Central Pacific. Our approach draws on literature from Polynesia and other parts of the world, and illustrates conceptual perspectives on the study of monumental architecture, using examples from Samoa, particularly the Pulemelei mound, and Tonga, with which we are familiar. The review demonstrates the way in which different readings of monumental architecture, each containing a range of inbuilt assumptions, can be created for complex structures like the Pulemelei mound, and the importance of archaeological data to examine their validity. Several factors have been used to explore variability in Polynesian socio-political institutions and they provide a context for understanding the development of monumental architecture. They include the productivity of island environments (Anderson and Walter 2002; Ladefoged 1992), the population growth cycle (Kirch 1984), and the nature of the ancestral political system (Kirch and Green 2001). The nature of island environments clearly sets limits on the level of social complexity able to be supported by a Neolithic technology. Sahlins (1958) and Goldman (1970), for example, noted in their synchronic analyses of Polynesian chiefdoms that the least stratified societies came from resource-poor coral atolls that were unable to support large populations and where large-scale architecture was absent (see also Adler and Wilshusen 1990). The attainment of large, high-density populations in much of Polynesia has been argued by Kirch (2000:307-11) to follow some form of logistic pattern, in which high rates of initial growth eventually slowed as human numbers began to exert various kinds of pressure. In island ecosystems with plentiful productive resources, particularly arable land, population size and density could reach levels where intensification of the political, economic and social systems comprising a chiefdom were expressed in monumental construction. In addition to the demographic trajectory, political development was shaped by the social divisions and architectonic features of an Ancestral Polynesian Society (APS), hypothesized to be located in West Polynesia about 2200-1900 BP, and transported by colonists to East Polynesia (Kirch and Green 2001:79). …