[lit-ideas] Re: Help Please
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 17:42:28 -0800
I wonder if anyone with connections to Anthropology--John are you
there?--can help me with what seemed at one time to be a straightforward
question: are grass skirts native to Hawaii? Put "grass skirts origins"
into Google and you get sites that offer to sell you "genuine" grass skirts
for your very own Luau. Encyclopedias have not been helpful.
I have established that grass skirts were among the items collected from
Fiji and Samoa by the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838-42. Illustrations
show Maori men in grass skirts. But I can find no early illustrations from
showing Hawaiian people in grass skirts; men and women are depicted wearing
two versions of loincloths.
I have confirmed that there were in fact native Hawaiian grasses emoloa
(Erogrostis variablis) and pili (Heteropogon contours). (I had wondered if
all grass in Hawaii was introduced. The following website suggests that
most were introduced.)
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/1999/99_09_16.html
Could it be that the Hawaiian grass skirt is a parallel invention to the
contemporary version of the kilt, an imagined thing that has caught the
public's imagination? What, one wonders, are the literary and philosophical
implications?
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
