Europeans' romanticist imaginings of people from the South Pacific have been around since the Enlightenment and have been significantly informed by the accounts of voyages to Tahiti by people such as Louis Bougainville. This book shows that the overtly promiscuous behavior that the French perceived as hospitality on the part of the Tahitians in 1768 was actually a defensive ploy, and that our contemporary image of sex and sexuality in Pacific Island societies is influenced by a fantasy based on this French misperception. This volume takes a very detailed look at traditional Tahitian culture and society and provides a realistic description of what happened on Tahiti when Europeans encountered the people who lived there. Bolyanatz provides a very readable history of South Pacific exploration and Enlightenment thinking. Anyone interested in the development of Enlightenment thought and the way it has developed since the 18th century will enjoy this book.

Contrary to conventional anthropological understanding, descent groups need not always be wealth- or office-transmitting groups, but can be principally feast-sponsoring groups. Sursurunga matrilineages are activated by individual's combined participation in feasting events, but individual's reasons for participating in feasts vary and often have little to do with matrilineal group membership.

This study of Sursurunga mortuary feasting shows that the analysis of groups-in this case, matrilineal descent groups-is best conducted by attention to the reasons that the individuals who comprise those groups act as they do. The salience of group membership cannot be seen as simply the blueprint for social life, but also as the outcome of social life.