Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters Making Likenesses in Time, Trade, and Ritual Reconfigurations

The book offers a new theory of what mimesis is and how it operates and theorizes mimesis in new contexts: in relation to history, historiography, cultural psychology, art production, tourism, colonialism, and other transcultural encounters. The book offers a unified view of mimesis in eight different cultures. Prior studies (Taussig and Harrison for example) examine mimesis mainly in one culture. As is evident in the Table of Contents, the book approaches mimesis through a great range of topics and cases. The book provides answers to the controversial anthropological question as to what degree cultures are invented or authentic. This book is unique in asking how cultural residues in many forms reflect conversations in images between foreign visitors and indigenous peoples. It also asks how, through mimesis in a wide range of mediums, the colonized “look back” from their own frames of reference, retain authorship, and incorporate or define themselves against layers of history, locale factions, or foreign others.