Race, Gender, and 'Foreign Exchange' in Samoan Performing Arts

Bibliographic Data

ID2144659
AuthorsJeannette Mageo (0000-0001-9522-1794, Russian State Agrarian Correspondence University, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume20
Issue3
Pages269-289
Publication date2010-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnthropological Forum (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0066-4677 • E-ISSN: 1469-2902
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00664677.2010.515294
OpenAlexW2089607507
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited21

Through an investigation of Samoan performing arts, I argue that artistic innovation is intentional, but not fully conscious in the linguistic sense. Performance artists grapple with disturbing shared experiences neither they, nor their cultural consociates, can get into words, but that artists render through a play of figures. By reframing figures and the cultural models they symbolise, artists think and feel through cultural memories in ways that germinate social, psychological, and artistic change. This capacity is particularly useful in historical periods of abrupt transition, as the colonial era was in the Pacific. The performances I review are wonderfully coordinated, collective endeavours in which players and audience together, within the quotation marks of play, consider interactions between foreign males and local females and their implications for models of race and gender

Aesthetics · Art · Cognitive reframing · Cultural exchange · Linguistics · Race (biology) · Samoan · Sociology · The arts · Visual arts · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Gender Studies · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Psychology · Social Psychology