Polynesia

Polynesia (from Greek, "many islands") is a large grouping of over 1,000 islands in the central and southern Pacific Ocean. Geographically, Polynesia is a triangle with its three corners at Hawai'i, New Zealand, and Easter Island. Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Marquesas, and French Polynesia are the other main island groups located within the Polynesian triangle.

There is some overlap with Melanesia. The following islands and groups of islands have been considered to be part of Melanesia:

• Fiji (except for Rotuma, which is polynesian)
• New Caledonia
• New Guinea
• Solomon Islands
• Vanuatu

Polynesian languages are spoken by the Polynesian indigenous people. Culturally, Polynesia divides into two distinct groups, Eastern Polynesia and Western Polynesia. The culture of Western Polynesia is conditioned to high populations and infective diseases. It has strong institutions of marriage, and well developed judicial, monetary and trading traditions. It reaches almost from Japan, through Indonesia up to but not including the Marquesas Islands. Because of a strong readiness to accept new ideas and the numbers of Christian missionaries in the islands polynesians readily adopted Christianity.

From the Marquesas Islands eastward, the cultures are highly adapted to isolation. Populations were genetically in-bred. Women traditionally sought sex with off-islanders, to enhance their chances of bearing a healthy child. Anthropologists term their system of kinship the Hawaiian system. Religion, farming, fishing, weather prediction, catamaran construction and navigation were highly-developed skills, because the population of an entire island could hang on them. Trading was distinguished between luxuries, and emergency aid and evacuation. Many low-lying islands could suffer severe famine if their gardens were poisoned by the salt from the storm-surge of a hurricane. In these cases fishing, the primary source of protein, would not ease loss of calories. Navigators, in particular, were revered and each island maintained a house of navigation, with a boat-building area.

At a time when European sailors were navigating by keeping a watch for the shore-line in daylight, polynesians were commonly navigating the whole of the Pacific Ocean except for the arctic and antarctic areas. They used a whole range of nevigation techniques including use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the air and sea interferance patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and weather.

History

The spread of pottery and domesticates in Polynesia is connected with the Lapita-culture.

Island groups

The following are the island groups, either nations or sub-national territories, that are of native Polynesian culture.

• American Samoa
• Cook Islands
• Easter Island (Rapa Nui)
• French Polynesia
• Hawai'i
• New Zealand (Aotearoa)
• Niue
• Rotuma
• Samoa
• Tokelau
• Tonga
• Tuvalu
• Wallis and Futuna

See also Polynesian mythology, List of Polynesians

External links

• South Pacific Organizer (http://www.southpacific.org/)
• Map South Pacific (http://www.mapsouthpacific.com/)

de:Polynesien es:Polinesia eo:Polinezio fa:پولی‌نزی fr:Polynésie it:Polinesia he:פולינזיה nl:Polynesië ja:ポリネシア pl:Polinezja fi:Polynesia sv:Polynesien