Post #430228 by Cammo on Fri, Jan 23, 2009 12:44 PM

Actually, if you wanna really get serious about this whole topic, I'll admit that I don't agree with almost ANY of BigBro's assumptions about the growth of Polynesian appreciation in North America.

For starts, why call it Tiki Culture? Why choose Tikis as the defacto rallying point around which the entire culture swirls? It's entirely a random choice; more than that it limits giant areas of important influences.

It's like choosing a little bush in a thousand acre wilderness and saying the forest is centered around this single bush. It's just absurd.

You could just as easily choose Rum, or Hula Girls, or Tapa prints, or better - Hawaii itself as the central icon of the movement. Is it just because the word Tiki sounds cool? Or because Tikis are so seminally foreign to our own culture? Is that the reason?

I have an entirely different "Tiki" time scale in my head that goes back to the very beginnings of Western navigation through the South Pacific and African coast, that charts how both Tikis and the discovery of 'savage' cultures influenced us enormously throughout more than the last three centuries. Tiki is a part of it, but not the largest part. And much of it involves the outstanding cultures of the Pacific and Africa, not just our ethnocentric view of those cultures; there's literally a world of difference...