Customer Reviews

Islands of History

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Marshall Sahlins, a renowned expert in Polynesian archaeology, has produced an excellent, well-written book that focuses on synchrony and diachrony in archaeology, as reflected in the early encounters between Captain Cook and the early Polynesians. This book is essential reading for scholars interested in the concepts of cyclical and linear time. The text also demonstrates that the early Polynesians, like many other non-western societies, in fact had a dynamic, recursive history before European contact; a history not based on written records but rather on a rich array of oral traditions. Essentially, this book can be used as an important frame of reference for scholars of other early oceanic societies, for example pre-Columbian societies in the Caribbean, particularly with respect to issues of European contact and indigenous time reckoning and time conception.

As a graduate student in history, I was intrigued by Sahlins subject. However, Sahlins does his best to hide his subject from any reader not in "the club" -- i.e. anyone who does not speak the jargon of a structuralist (or post-structuralist) anthropologist. Sahlins is a very inaccessible (and is thus, by most rules of writing, a BAD) writer, whose elitist attitude negates any interest I may have had in his subject matter.

Highly recommend this book, especially cultural historians. It is amazing to read the blend of Island and British culture.

This book is thoroughly researched, and intelligent. It is simultaneously an account of the history of Hawai'i's integration into the world economy, a reminder of the complexity of social change in colonial contexts, and a rekindling of the beauty of structuralism