Apollo alone and adrift in Samoa; early mead reconsidered

Derek Freeman. Margaret Mead and Samoa; the Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983. 375 pp. $20.00     

Copra World: Coconuts,Plantations and Cooperatives in German Samoa

ABSTRACT

Since the mid-19th century, the copra trade has created challenges and opportunities for Pacific Islanders, including Samoans. In the wake of formal annexation in 1900, German colonial officials tried repeatedly to force Samoans to work on foreign plantations for wages. In this article, I argue that Samoans resisted these demands in two major ways. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of Samoans continued subsistence agriculture that offered greater control over their lives. On the other hand, Samoans selectively adapted to new economic circumstances. Occasionally, Samoans engaged in wage labour on Euro-American plantations to earn the cash needed for imported goods, government taxes and church donations. To circumvent the monopolistic practices of Euro-American traders, Samoans also founded copra cooperatives. These ultimately folded under coercion, but not without creating a crucial legacy for future anti-colonial resistance. In Samoa’s world of copra, sweetness and colonial power were tightly bound together.     

The last days of the Melanesian labour trade in Western Samoa

Drake's Island of Thieves. Ethnological Sleuthing. By William A. Lessa. Honolulu, University Press of Hawaii, 1975. xviii, 289 pp. Maps, illus., bibliography. $US 12.00.

The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam. By phillip knightley. London, Andre Deutsch, 1975.465 pp, plates, notes on sources, bibliography and index. £5.95.

Not as a Duty Only: An Infantryman's War. By Henry ('JO') gullett. Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1976. x, 169 pp, illustrations. $A 12.00.

Voyages to Hawaii before 1860. By Bernice Judd, enlarged and edited by Helen Yonge Lind. Honolulu, The University Press of Hawaii, 1974. xviii, 129 pp. Bibliography.     

Honouring Saint Louis in a small town

The cult of Saint Louis of France has traditionally been regarded as largely limited to royal shrines and aristocratic patronage, but two documents published here provide some tentative evidence that patronage may have been wider. Evidence of this sort may be rare not because non-aristocratic patronage was rare but because so few records of parish church endowments have survived.     

Louis Renou 1896–1966

Sans résumé

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Louis Renou 1896–1966