Contenu du sommaire

This paper looks at identity problems in French Polynesia, an overseas territory confronted with crucial changes after French government's decision to stop nuclear testing in Tuamotu archipelago. Nuclear experiments which started in the mid-sixties have ended for good in 1996 after a three years' moratorium and an ultimate range of tests. Then, to prepare the after-CEP period, national and territorial authorities launched negotiations which lead onto an orientation law and a strategic program attesting French commitment to the territory and ensuring him important financial compensations for the next ten years. As for French Polynesia authorities, they engaged themselves to allocate the money to productive activities in order to reduce dependency from the mother country. Concomitantly, a new status was elaborated giving greater autonomy to the Territory and enabling him to develop relations with other countries on the regional and international scene. All these changes associated with difficult times have locally generated an identiy crisis and a search for roots which is still going on. They have also opened onto a new pattern of relationship between the Territory and the mother country as well as between Tahiti and outer islands. The trend is particularly strong in remote islands which have been durably kept out of development policies and financial support all along the past years. This paper is committed to these topics and looks at identity not as a fixed cultural feature but as a complex and evolutive process set up by well identified agents.

This paper focusses on the links found in Polynesia between navigation and the stars (such as the star compass and etak). It also attempts to show other links, such as those existing between stars and islands, stars and sea travels, stars and time, between the names of the stars, heroes and toponymy.

Recent research, in anthropology and linguistics, showed that the development of children's spatial representation is bound by a « moderate linguistic relativism ». This leads to the possibility of a reversal of traditional stages of cognitive development in some cultures. The main question is how to infer cognitive competence from observed performance (i.e. action and/or language), competence which is unobservable and supposed to be « in the head » of subjects. Indeed, the evocation of moderate linguistic relativism as the basis of a reversal of known ontogenetic stages does not appear satisfactory from an epistemological point of view. We propose that traditional (i.e.Western) ontogenetic stages are not being reversed but rather that a historical and cultural heritage produces, nowadays, new kinds of spatial representation. The stages of their development remain to be described by developmental psychologists. This assumption is discussed in the light of recent data obtained from two spatial orientation tasks realized with two samples of Polynesian children (Tahiti and Moorea, French Polynesia, Oceania).

The Christian ritual constisting in laying the foundation stone of a temple or a church bears in Eastern Polynesia a deep symbolic signification. As a matter of fact, it echos back two autochtoneous traditions of foundation still very observed, the burial of the infant's placenta, and the conservation of its umbilical cord. These correspondances are not only a really for the analyst : as will be shown in this article, the rituals do interfere mutually, both in their logic and through the objects involved in its accomplishment.

« The elder's child » is an etiologic category which as a psychiatric nosography owns specific features. On the Mare island (Loyalty archipelago), the relations of the psychologist with Victor's family, the polyhandicaped elder child, show cultural and anthropological aspects driving the clinician toward the underlying social and subjective meaning. Psychological and anthropological aspects are complementary within a transcultural approach where investigating cultural items, social organisation and cosmogony are part of the clinical interaction and a strong tool for therapeutic alliance.

Between the mid 1910's and 1950, the year of his death, HeinrichKüper, German deserter and adventurer, lived in Gupuna, a village on the island of Santa Ana, in the south east of the Solomon Islands. Combining an authoritarian, sometimes violent, style with a trade spirit and a highly refined knowledge of local culture and representations of power, he became over the years a leader well respected by the inhabitants. Mainly ethnographical, this article traces the uncommon history of this former military and reveals how he acceded to the status of arafa and became a figure of authority within a Melanesian community. The article also discusses the heritage left by Küper who, during more than thirty years, generated and inspired ideas and new practices influencing the social and symbolic configuration of this village.

This exceptional Biwat painting, photographied in its totality by Margaret Mead in 1932, was bought in 1935 at Rabaul, a thousand kilometers from its place of origin, by members of the Korrigane expedition. Three quarters of the original painting were kept for fifty years at the Musée de l'Homme while one-quarter became part of the private collection. The Korrigane show (2001-03) at the Musée de l'Homme was the occasion to put together all four parts of the painting and to restore this rare exemple of the artistic heritage of the Biwat people. This painting will be exhibited in Paris in the new Musée du Quai Branly.