Abstract
This chapter considers Stevenson’s perception of Oceanic geographies and the baffling topography of coral atolls in In the South Seas, “The House of Tembinoka,” and a series of photographs depicting the chiefs of Butaritari, Abemama, Hawaiian missionaries, and dancers from Makin. In his writing, Stevenson draws an analogy between the geographically diminutive atolls and the authority of their rulers. But, the photographs generate alternative narratives that partially revise Stevenson’s account. The potential subversion that is latent in every photograph is most clearly demonstrated in the series of the Makin dancers. Here, Stevenson and his family undergo an unexpected process of Othering and they become the objects of ridicule. In the most marginal of locations, Stevenson becomes the object of the Pacific gaze.
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Notes
- 1.
The word Kiribati (pronounced “Kee-ree-bass”) is derived from the local pronunciation of the word Gilberts, the island group’s former name. The people of Kiribati are referred to as I-Kiribati (the prefix I- means “inhabitant of”) (Teaiwa 2015, xix). Today, the modern nation of Kiribati is comprised of what used to be known as the Gilbert Islands, the Line Islands, and the Phoenix Islands.
- 2.
According to the geographer Fred M. Shelley (2013) climate change will cause sea levels in Kiribati to rise “as much as 20 feet or more over their present levels. If this occurs, nearly all of Kiribati would be submerged” (583).
- 3.
For examples of traditional modes of adaptation, see Weir, Dovey, and Orcherton (2017, 1021).
- 4.
For a discussion of the “motif of a change in scale,” see Spiegel (2008, 377).
- 5.
Colvin, in a letter to Baxter from May 1890, refers to Isobel and Joseph Strong as a “wretched mill stone … their existence was one thing which made me dread [Stevenson’s] going to the Pacific at all” (Beinecke, MS. 664, 4173–4417).
- 6.
Later, Island Nights’ Entertainment (1893) became the title for a collection comprised of “The Beach of Falesá” (1892), “The Bottle Imp” (1891), and “The Isle of Voices” (1893).
- 7.
For a comprehensive study of Hawaiian missionization in Micronesia and the Marquesas, see Morris (1987).
- 8.
Once Robert Maka returned to Hawai‘i he worked on behalf of the I-Kiribati plantation workers by reporting on “their complaints regarding conditions on the plantations, as well as working to better their conditions through pressure from the HBCFM” (Cook 2001, 104).
- 9.
Cook (2001) discusses traces of the origins of this rhetoric to the influence of Western discourse (5, 88).
- 10.
- 11.
Unbeknownst to Stevenson perhaps, Kiribati oral poetry begins with “lengthy rites and several invocations” to “obtain poetic inspiration” (Sabatier 1977, 64–6).
- 12.
For more on different categories of adoption in Kiribati, see Grimble (1989, 3–6).
- 13.
On some twentieth-century maps, Butaritari is labeled “Makin,” and Makin “Little Makin.” The principal villages on the two islands are also called Butaritari and Makin, respectively.
- 14.
Sabatier (1971) gives the following definition for kanikamaen: “Method or school or composition for dance singing, dances with magic rites and formula.”
- 15.
Sabatier (1971) gives the following definition for kaunikai in his Gilbertese-English Dictionary: “competition, contest, combat.”
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Manfredi, C. (2018). “Incongruities of Scale”: Encountering the Atolls of Kiribati. In: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Impressions. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98313-4_4
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