Post #705867 by bigbrotiki on Mon, Jan 27, 2014 11:31 AM

On 2014-01-27 11:16, lucas vigor wrote:
I happen to agree with Sven on all of this. If it is "tiki" and it is found in Hawaii, it was probably imported there from the mainland....

Hawaii has a lot of Polynesian artifacts....but they are more religious, and historical....too authentic to be "tiki" (tiki as a poly pop phenomena)

Thanks Lucas, but Hawaii also had a thriving tourist souvenir culture, like Coco Joe's and Hip and other manufacturers who made cartoony Tikis. But tourist culture is not unique per se, many places made mementos from tropical paradise, like Cuba, Jamaica, you name it. But nowhere did a tropical pop culture thrive AWAY from the source as it did in American Tiki style.

There were Tikis carved in Hawaii for commercial places like hotels also. But the majority of them were closer to authentic reproductions, and did not get as creative as their mainland versions. Closeness to the source demanded more respect to the originals.

Oh, and about "narrowly defined" in my book :) : But what a horn of plenty, what a well of creativity was mid-century Tiki ! I am just fighting to protect the specialness of that, by making clear what it is and what it is not.

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2014-01-27 11:35 ]