Singing and Survival

This history and ethnography of music on the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Isla de Pascua) highlights not just cultural survival, but cultural thriving, through the decimation of a population, centuries of imperialist exploitation, and their aftermath. Rapa Nui is known to outsiders primarily through the mystery of its stone statues or moai, and the myth of ecocide that wrongly blames its ancient population for destroying the environment and thereby itself. To counter this myth, Dan Bendrups emphasizes that the ancient Rapa Nui people did not die of self-induced ecocide, but on the contrary survived and developed a thriving culture despite the far greater threats they faced from colonial exploitation. In the nineteenth century, it was slave raiding and smallpox, not environmental destruction, that decimated the island’s population. Yet, again, the Rapa Nui survived. Even so, the myth of their disappearance persists, having affected even Bendrups, at least before...

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Ethnology · Mythology · Population · Singing · Sociology · Thriving · Classics · Demography · History · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies