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POLYNESIAN OUTLIERS: The State of the Art. Ethnology Monographs, no. 21. Edited by Richard Feinberg and Richard Scaglion. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 2012. viii, 225 pp. (Maps, illus.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-945428-15-2.
This book problematizes a classificatory convention we have come to take for granted: that the 22 Polynesian outlier societies (from Nukuoro in the Caroline Islands to West Uvea in New Caledonia) are starkly distinct populations isolated among culturally Melanesian or Micronesian archipelagos in the western Pacific. Feinberg, Scaglion and their contributors demonstrate that the outlier concept is an imperfect response to the limitations of Dumont d'Urville's reductive early nineteenth-century demarcation of Oceania into Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Moreover, these 12 ethnological essays compile and analyze a wealth of information on the complexity of Oceanic settlement processes and cultural interaction over the last three millennia. The thematic chapters are highly interdisciplinary and shift from archaeology, linguistics, material culture and economy, to kinship, social structure, performing arts and religion. In its own way, each essay asks how the Polynesian outlier societies are similar and different, and attempts to identify the settlement processes, cultural interactions and independent transformations each has undergone to alter an initially Polynesian people into 22 diverse and hybrid populations.
Following Feinberg and Scaglion's clear and synthetic introduction, the prehistory of outlier settlement is reconstructed by essays from Patrick Kirch, Mike Carson and Robert Early. Originally published in 1984, Kirch's chapter synthesizes data drawn from lexicostatistics, voyaging simulations, excavation and ceramic analysis to overturn the relict...