Interesting Vessel - Tiki or Not Tiki - Collecting Tiki

A aquarj Tiki Socialite SF bay area, CA Joined: Apr 02, 2002 Posts: 1125	A aquarj Posted posted on Thu, Apr 27, 2006 2:00 PM Agree that Rapa Nui is generally considered part of Polynesia - I guess it's partly by cultural association and partly by geography. My impression is that some of the other Pacific islands, even closer to the main area of Polynesia than Easter Island is, are not considered part of Polynesia, maybe because of less direct cultural association. Probably the lines get blurry though, and that's the part that I personally find interesting about what bigbro was discussing, especially in the differences between popular modern notions of tiki and sort of historical / anthropological tiki forms. For example, I'd say a moai is a tiki in the pop sense, but not in the traditional sense. The skinny, starved moai kava kava figures do not seem tiki at all to me in either a pop or scientific sense. But if we tried to get all technical about it, it'd be hard to explicitly say why. They're both from the same island, and both are figural representations derived from human forms, with some kind of spiritual meaning. More examples on this page. There are a few images here from Hawaiian mythology, but for some reason only one of them is really consistent with the more common pop form of tiki. There's also that whole discussion about why "tiki" drinks are mostly based on Caribbean rums. But anyway, I hope I didn't derail this a whole lot. -Randy

Agree that Rapa Nui is generally considered part of Polynesia - I guess it's partly by cultural association and partly by geography. My impression is that some of the other Pacific islands, even closer to the main area of Polynesia than Easter Island is, are not considered part of Polynesia, maybe because of less direct cultural association. Probably the lines get blurry though, and that's the part that I personally find interesting about what bigbro was discussing, especially in the differences between popular modern notions of tiki and sort of historical / anthropological tiki forms.

For example, I'd say a moai is a tiki in the pop sense, but not in the traditional sense. The skinny, starved moai kava kava figures do not seem tiki at all to me in either a pop or scientific sense. But if we tried to get all technical about it, it'd be hard to explicitly say why. They're both from the same island, and both are figural representations derived from human forms, with some kind of spiritual meaning.

More examples on this page. There are a few images here from Hawaiian mythology, but for some reason only one of them is really consistent with the more common pop form of tiki.

There's also that whole discussion about why "tiki" drinks are mostly based on Caribbean rums. But anyway, I hope I didn't derail this a whole lot.

-Randy

Post #229025 by aquarj on Thu, Apr 27, 2006 2:00 PM