Tahiti Beyond the Postcard: Power, Place, and Everyday Life

Introduction

3 I n a darkened conference room of a sumptuous hotel in French Polynesia, the word “TAHITI” appeared—in large turquoise letters—on the screen in the front. The image grabbed my attention, and that of the other people in the room, most of whom worked in Tahiti’s tourism industry. The speaker, the North American representative for Tahiti Tourism, brought his presentation to a close with that one slide, reminding us that the vision of Tahiti, evoked by its mere name, was powerful. “Like magic,” he said. Leaving us with that thought, he flipped the lights back on. I rose from my seat, gathered my materials, and left the room. Yet the image of Tahiti lingered, not only on the screen but also in my mind. The word and everything about it—its power, its turquoise color, its ability to flaunt itself and seduce you, as well as its knack for fading under intense light—seemed to encapsulate everything I was trying to understand. Why does “Tahiti” have such overwhelming power beyond its geographical borders? How does the mere name of a place become “like magic,” capable of making people from all over the world pay high prices and travel endless hours to fulfill a lifelong dream? How do Tahitians, living their daily lives in a place others refer to as “paradise,” experience Tahiti? How does the global circulation of this mediated imagery affect the people for whom Tahiti is home? How do these two perspectives—Tahitians’ senses of their place and outsiders’ visions of “Tahiti”—intersect, disrupt, and influence one another? Introduction 4 introduction Several scholars have written about the “myth” of Tahiti and its history.1 Even the government of French Polynesia realizes the value of “le mythe de Tahiti” and the need to perpetuate it consciously, cleverly, and with a large investment of funds. Less has been written, however, about the complexity of this myth today. Employing a theoretical lens of “place” helps shed light on this complexity. From a “place” perspective, one can see how power dynamics reinforce the creation and maintenance of this myth and affect the ways in which Westerners imagine and experience “Tahiti.” As an American anthropologist who does research in Tahiti/French Polynesia , I constantly find myself tangled in the far-flung web of this myth. Tahiti is a place that causes others to chuckle when I mention it as the location of my serious scholarly work. It’s a place from which one of my colleagues has a postcard on the wall in her lab to remind her that, if her scientific experiments fail, there’s always plan B, namely to escape to Bora Bora. It’s a place that, when I recently was introduced at a professional gathering as someone who had just returned from doing research in Tahiti, made others in the room roll their eyes and ask, “Why did you come back?” This tangled web that has created a place of unusual power (and in whose filaments I’m also caught) is the very reason that I chose to do research on the power of place in Tahiti. There are few locations that bring forth as many images of, and associations with, a particular place as this one does. Yet beyond the postcard image exists another, quite different, place—the one inhabited and experienced by ta‘ata ma‘ohi, as many Tahitians refer to themselves . For ta‘ata ma‘ohi, their land/place (te fenua ma‘ohi) provides physical and spiritual nourishment as well as a profound sense of identity. Their lived reality also includes the fact that Tahiti is still a colony of France.2 Over the centuries, the French government has appropriated these Polynesian islands as refueling stations for the French navy, mined one of them for phosphate, and destroyed others. Less well known to the public is that Tahiti’s long history of colonial domination includes thirty years (1966–96) of nuclear testing by France in the air above and in the bedrock below Tahitian soil. Although these different places—the imagined and the experienced— seem disconnected at first glance, they are deeply intertwined in both economic and political ways, emerging from the complex, nearly 250-year-long colonial relationship between France and French Polynesia. Romanticized accounts by the first European visitors to Tahiti in the eighteenth century led countless writers, artists, adventurers, missionaries, colonists, scientists, filmmakers, and tourism entrepreneurs to follow, searching for and creating [18.117.153.38] Project MUSE (2024-04...