Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (Critical Perspectives on Empire)

Smith, Vanessa

ISBN 10: 0521728789 / ISBN 13: 9780521728782

Published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge England, 2010

About this Item

A Solid Tight Clean Book, No Marks Or Inscriptions. Glossy Illustrated Card Covers With Schematic Sketch Of Indigenous And Naval Officer Bartering. No Apparent Shelf Or Reading Wear.

Seller Inventory # 908421

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (Critical Perspectives on Empire)
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge England
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521728789
• ISBN 13: 9780521728782
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Like New
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket

About this title

Synopsis

When Louis Antoine de Bougainville reached Tahiti in 1768, he was struck by the way in which 'All these people came crying out tayo, which means friend, and gave a thousand signs of friendship; they all asked nails and ear-rings of us.' Reading the archive of early contact in Oceania against European traditions of thinking about intimacy and exchange, Vanessa Smith illuminates the traditions and desires that led Bougainville and other European voyagers to believe that the first word they heard in the Pacific was the word for friend. Her book encompasses forty years of encounters from the arrival of the Dolphin in Tahiti in June 1767, through Cook's and Bligh's voyages, to early missionary and beachcomber settlement in the Marquesas. It unpacks both the political and emotional significances of ideas of friendship for late eighteenth-century European, and particularly British, explorations of Oceania.

About the Author

Vanessa Smith teaches in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (1998) and co-editor of Exploration and Exchange: A South Seas Anthology 1680–1900 (2000) and Islands in History and Representation (2003).