Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters

Jeannette Mageo is a psychological anthropologist. Her work focuses on how subjectivity, identity, and emotion evolve out of cultural and historical experiences. Since 1980, she has been involved in research and publication on Samoan culture, history, and psychology.

List of Figures

Acknowledgments



PART I: INTRODUCTION



Introduction: Mimesis in Theory and in Cultural History

Jeanette Mageo



PART II: MIMESIS THROUGH TIME



Chapter 1. 
Imitation as Relationality in Early Australian Encounters

Francesca Merlan



Chapter 2. Transitional Images and Imaginaries: Dressing in Schemas in Colonial Samoa

Jeannette Mageo




Chapter 3. 
Reel to Real: Mimesis, Playing Indian, and Touring with The Vanishing Race 
in New Zealand 1927

Sarina Pearson



PART III: SELLING MIMESIS: FROM TOURIST ART TO TRADE STORES



Chapter 4. Traditional Tahitian Weddings for Tourists: An Entwinement of Mimetic Practices

Joyce D. Hammond



Chapter 5. 
Of Dragons and Mermaids: The Art of Mimesis in the Trobriand Islands

Sergio Jarillo de la Torre



Chapter 6. 
Capitalism Meets Its Match: Failed Mimesis of Market Economics among the Asabano 
of Papua New Guinea

Roger Ivar Lohmann



PART IV: RITUAL MIMESIS AND ITS RECONFIGURATIONS



Chapter 7. Mimesis, Ethnopsychology, and Transculturation:
Identifications in Birthday Celebrations among Banabans in Fiji

Elfriede Hermann



Chapter 8. Mimesis and Reimagining Identity among Marshall Islanders

Laurence Marshall Carucci




Chapter 9. 
Anthropology, Christianity, and the Colonial Impasse: Rawa Mimesis, Millennialism, and Modernity in the Finisterre Mountains of Papua New Guinea

Doug Dalton



PART V: AFTERWORD



“1 Lot Magic Sticks 6 Bundles”: Mimetic Technologies, Their Intimacies and Intersecting Histories

Joshua A. Bell




Index