Intimate Strangers

Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters

Vanessa Smith (University of Sydney)

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Hardback

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English

Cambridge University Press
28 October 2010

Australasian & Pacific history; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900; Colonialism & imperialism; Geographical discovery & exploration

Series: Critical Perspectives on Empire

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.

By: Vanessa Smith (University of Sydney)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 160mm, Spine: 19mm
Weight: 650g
ISBN: 9780521437516
ISBN 10: 0521437512
Series: Critical Perspectives on Empire
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 28 October 2010
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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).

Reviews for Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters

Advance praise: Friendship' looms large in stories of early encounters in the Pacific, but up until now has been unanalysed, and seemed unanalysable. This is a genuinely cross-disciplinary study, animated by an impressive understanding of anthropological sources and early voyage texts; it gives us a fresh understanding of foundational moments in the modern history of empire and global interaction.' Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge 'Drawing on an exceptionally wide range of recent and historical sources this richly interdisciplinary book explores the meanings of friendship in the Pacific in a series of lively and lucidly argued studies. Smith's challenging case for the centrality of personal emotional commerce to early European interactions in the Pacific islands is an important and exciting contribution to Empire studies.' Harriet Guest, University of York