'Sea People' Examines the Origins and History of Polynesia

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BCFOS -- Humans are curious creatures, seekers of new lands and new knowledge. But the results of our shared explorations have often been destructive.

The first people to arrive and settle in the many islands that lay in the middle of the Pacific Ocean — the largest watery basin on earth — were certainly harmful to the ecology of those places, where species of both flora and fauna went extinct quite quickly after human settlement. Worse, however, is the destruction wrought, both purposefully and accidentally, by the arrival of humans to already peopled lands.

Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Harvard Review editor Christina Thompson, however, treads lightly on this theme, preferring instead to dwell in the optimistic and romantic idea of cultures meeting and melding.


Thompson admits in the prologue that "the story of the Polynesian settlement of the Pacific is not so much a story about what happened as a story about how we know." Indeed, as a tracing of Western epistemology, of the ways we have collected knowledge and made meaning out of it, Sea People is a roaring success that addresses observer bias, different ways of understanding knowledge and relating to the natural world, and the covert and overt racism that colored many strains of research and thought surrounding Polynesia.


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