Early observations of Marquesan culture, 1595-1813 /

A straightforward and very traditional synthesis of ethnological materials on pre- and early-contact Marquesas Islands. Ferdon has culled comprehensively from early European observers of the Marquesas and from older as well as more recent anthropological studies of this eastern Polynesian people. Not a critical review of scholarship, this reconstruction is factual and is organzied like a classic holistic ethnography, by encyclopedic categories. Thus chapters locate the islands geographically and discuss material culture, social organization and government, daily life and diversions, the life cycle, the agricultural and fishing economy, warfare, and notions concerning the origins of the Marquesan people. Ferdon's book should be read with the journals of Edward Robarts, 1797-1824, and the work of Greg Dening or Nicholas Thomas, writings on which it also relies. General readers, community college students, and lower-division undergraduates. G. E. Marcus; Rice University