Abstract
In 1893, Samoan princess Fa’amusami Malietoa, daughter of King Malietoa Laupepa, posed in traditional ceremonial garb for photographer John Davis, who worked for her father in Apia, Samoa. Around 1910, this same photograph was repurposed as a commercially sold postcard, inscribed “A Samoan Dancing Girl,” the sitter’s identity and the portrait’s original context lost. This photograph will serve as a case study addressing the uses and reuses of photographs of young Samoan women, which will investigate how misinterpretations of the social roles of young Samoan women contributed to misunderstandings of such images. I will argue that many photographs or postcards that seem to be simple examples of exoticization may actually be repurposed portraits of Samoan women of high status, originally made to commemorate their important social roles.
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Notes
- 1.
I wish to advise readers that this chapter includes images of deceased individuals, including those of indigenous peoples of Samoa, and other material which may offend some readers. Allison Nordström notes the use of a portrait of Fa’amusami on a Muir and Moodie postcard from New Zealand, c.1910 and on prints held by museums in the USA; Allison Nordström, “Paradise Recycled: Photographs of Samoa in Changing Contexts,” Exposure 28.3 (1992): 10 and 11–12. Max Quanchi discusses this image in two conference papers, “The Imaging of Samoa in illustrated magazines and serial encyclopedia in the early 20th century,” paper presented at 15th Pacific History Association Conference, NUS, Samoa, Apia, Samoa, 2; and “A Single Visual History of Oceania, New Zealand and Australia,” paper presented at A History of New Zealand Photography, University of Otago, Dunedin, 9. In the former he thanks Max Shekleton for informing him about this example, which is in Shekleton’s private collection, Noumea.
- 2.
In certain instances, Western women were awarded this status, for example, Margaret Mead and artist Aletta Lewis. See Jeanette Mageo, “Zones of Ambiguity and Identity Politics in Samoa,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2008): 63.
- 3.
Davis was born in London in 1831 and moved to Sydney, Australia, in 1854, opening his studio in Apia in 1873, on the island of Upolu in Samoa. Nicole Peduzzi notes, “John Davis was the first photographer to arrive in Samoa. … When, in the 1880s, Davis also became postmaster in Apia, he was well informed about all the ships coming and leaving; this considerably helped him to sell and distribute his photographic material and postcards”; Nicole Peduzzi, “Travelling Miniatures: Kerry and Co.’s Postcards of the Pacific, 1893 to 1917,” (PhD Diss, University of East Anglia, 2011), 199 n. 129; cites Allison Nordström, “Popular Photography of Samoa: Production, Dissemination, and Use,” in Picturing Paradise: Colonial Photography of Samoa, 1875–1925, ed. Casey Blanton (Daytona Beach: Southeast Museum of Photography, 1995), 27–29. Apia was one of two towns in Samoa with European and American communities. Nordstrom, “Paradise Recycled,” 8.
- 4.
It is also reproduced in Casey Blanton, ed., Picturing Paradise: colonial photography of Samoa 1875–1925 (Daytona Beach: Southeast Museum of Photography, 1995), illustration 29, p. 71. Max Quanchi points out that “the naming of portraits in the Pacific was often random and usually confused given names, titles and honorific, as well as being regularly misspelt,” in Max Quanchi, “A Single Visual History of Oceania, New Zealand and Australia,” 11. The same is true of irregularities in spelling of Samoan words. Fa’amu is also often spelled “Faamu.” Similarly, taupou is often spelled taupo. I have preserved the original spellings in quotes.
- 5.
Peduzzi, “Travelling Miniatures,” 228.
- 6.
R.P. Gilson and J.W. Davidson, Samoa 1830 to 1900: The Politics of a Multi-Cultural Community. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 318.
- 7.
Nordström, “Paradise Recycled,” 11.
- 8.
Mageo, “Zones,” 68.
- 9.
Mageo, “Zones,” 65.
- 10.
Paul Shankman, “Virginity and Veracity: Rereading Historical Sources in the Mead-Freeman Controversy,” Ethnohistory 53:3 (Summer 2006): 488, citing Augustin Krämer, The Samoan Islands [Die Samoa-Inseln], trans. Theodore Verhaaren, (Honolulu: University of Hawa’ii Press, 1994 [1902]) Vol. 1, 46–47n.
- 11.
Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 4th ed. (New York: Pearson, 2014), 219.
- 12.
Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 219.
- 13.
Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 218, citing A. Safroni-Middleton, South Seas Foam: The Romantic Adventures of a Modern Don Quixote in the Southern Seas (New York: George H. Duran Co., 1920), 228–229.
- 14.
Tony Brunt, To Walk Under Palm Trees: The Germans in Samoa—Snapshots from Albums, Part 1 (Auckland: published by the author; initial print run paid for by Samoa Historical and Cultural Trust, 2016), 240. Brunt is a New Zealand journalist whose information about the Tattersall plates comes from interviews with Samoans associated with the Tattersall family, including Momoe Malietoa von Reiche, 2014.
- 15.
While “Polynesian” is a very broad term, I am using it to reflect the reception of such images in the West, where difference Polynesian cultures may not have been readily recognized. In regard to particular images, however, I will be more specific.
- 16.
Nordström, Picturing Paradise, 11, fn 2.
- 17.
Nordström, Picturing Paradise, 11, fn 2.
- 18.
Peduzzi, “Travelling Miniatures,” 197–198.
- 19.
The work of historians of visual culture such as Sander Gilman, in his writing on Saartje Baartman, and Mallek Alloula, in his book Colonial Harem, has been criticised for re-inscribing exploitation of colonial subjects by reproducing images that are the product of exploitative relationships between image maker and the subject(s). It is my intention in this chapter that, while showing images that are artefacts from such situations, I hope to provide context, history, and criticism that will limit such reinscriptions in order to reach towards the subjectivity and agency of the photographs’ subjects. This is especially relevant in the case of photographs whose original intentions were not for commercial exploitation.
- 20.
There is a Tattersall photo titled, “Some of the turtles killed for Vao’s wedding feast,” published in H.J. Moors, With Stevenson in Samoa (Boston: Small, Maynard and Co., 1910), reproduced in Nordström, “Paradise Recycled,” 11.
- 21.
Beatrice Grimshaw, In the Strange South Seas (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1907), frontispiece.
- 22.
Mrs. E. J. Ormsbee, “Samoa—Its People and their Customs,” in The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U. S. A., 1893, ed. Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle (Chicago, IL: Monarch Book Company, 1894), 590–596. From Mary Mark Ockerbloom, A Celebration of Women Writers, accessed 8 February 2020, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/eagle/congress/ormsbee.html.
- 23.
See, for example, Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 47.
- 24.
New Zealand Herald, Volume XIII, Issue 4634, 20 September 1876, 2. https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/new-zealand-herald/1876/09/20/2.
- 25.
The Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser, 7 July 1894, 3. https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/samoa-times-and-south-sea-advertiser/1894/07/07/3
- 26.
Brunt, “To Walk Under Palm Trees,” 236.
- 27.
Peduzzi, “Travelling Miniatures,” 228.
- 28.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima Letters, Being Correspondence Addressed by Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, November 1890–1894 (London: Methuen, 1895), 166–167.
- 29.
For example, Oszkár Vojnich, The Island-World of the Pacific, trans. Arthur B. Yolland (Budapest: Pallas Literary Pub. Co., 1909), 314; S. Percy Smith, “Hawaiki: The Whence of the Maori,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 7 (1898): 161; George Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians: Their Life-histories Described (London: Macmillan and Co., 1910), 120.
- 30.
Shankman, “The History of Samoan Sexual Conduct and the Mead-Freeman Controversy,” American Anthropologist New Series 98.3 (Sept. 1996): 556.
- 31.
Mageo, “Zones,” 65, cites Augustin Krämer, The Samoan Islands, trans. Theodore Verhaaren (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, [1902] 1995), 2:366–381; William Thomas Pritchard, Polynesian Reminiscences (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), 78; John B. Stair, Old Samoa (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1897), 133–134; Napoloene A. Tuiteleleapaga, Samoa Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (New York: Todd and Honeywell, 1980), 68–69; John Williams, The Samoan Journals of John Williams, ed. Richard M. Moyle (Canberra: Australian National University Press, [1830–1832] 1984), 247–248.
- 32.
Mageo, “Zones,” 69.
- 33.
Mageo, “Zones,” 67.
- 34.
Mageo, “Zones,” 67
- 35.
Mageo, “Zones,” 69.
- 36.
Mageo, “Zones,” 70. This also affected boys; as all girls began to be treated as taupou , the burden of manual labour, and the girls’ protection, fell on boys, resulting in their sense of a loss of status.
- 37.
Serge Tcherkézoff, ‘First Contacts’ in Polynesia: The Samoan Case, 1722–1848; Western Misunderstandings about Sexuality and Divinity (Canberra: The Australian National University E Press, 2004) 168.
- 38.
Felix M. Keesing, “The Taupou System of Samoa: A Study of Institutional Change,” Oceania 8 1 (1937): 4.
- 39.
Smith, “Hawaiki,” 161.
- 40.
Mageo, “Zones,” 68.
- 41.
Robert Louis Stevenson, A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (Swanston Edition, 1912), 29, accessed 13 February 2019, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/536/536-h/536-h.htm.
- 42.
Nordström, “Picturing Paradise,” 27.
- 43.
William Churchill, “Samoan Types of Beauty,” The Cosmopolitan 27 (1899): 248.
- 44.
Lina Boegli, Forward: Letters Written on a Trip Around the World (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1904), 142.
- 45.
Boegli, Forward, 144.
- 46.
This is not correct; Laupepa had several daughters by three different wives.
- 47.
Churchill, “Samoan Types of Beauty,” 248–249.
- 48.
Rev. R. Wardlaw Thompson, “A Sunday at Malua,” The Sunday at Home: A Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading (1898/99): 727.
- 49.
“The Dance,” The Times of India, 30 May 1907, 11. As told by Mr. and Mrs. W. A. Grebst.
- 50.
Joseph Driscoll, “Samoa Pledges Firm Alliance,” New York Herald Tribune, 8 November 1943, 18.
- 51.
“The Dance,” The Times of India; 30 May 1907. 11.
- 52.
Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 42.
- 53.
A. Marata Tamaira, “From Full Dusk to Full Tusk: Reimagining the ‘Dusky Maiden’ through the Visual Arts,” The Contemporary Pacific 22.1 (2010): 7, citing Louis Antoine de Bouganville, A Voyage Round the World, trans. John Reinhold Forster (New York: Da Capo Press, 1967), 218.
- 54.
Tamaira, “From Full Dusk,” 7, citing Bouganville, A Voyage Round the World, 219.
- 55.
Tcherkézoff, “First Contacts,” 29.
- 56.
Tcherkézoff, “First Contacts,” 28–29.
- 57.
Tcherkézoff, “First Contacts,” 23.
- 58.
However, he found Samoa distinctly wanting in comparison to the beauty he had appreciated in Tahiti; Tcherkézoff, “First Contacts,” 25 and 27.
- 59.
J.C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 191; cites J.C. Beaglehole, ed., The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery. The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776–1780, Part 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 116. Italics in original.
- 60.
Tamaira, “From Full Dusk,” 13, citing J.C. Beaglehole, ed., The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery. The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776–1780, Part 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1076.
- 61.
Tamaira, “From Full Dusk,” 11.
- 62.
Miriam Kahn, “Tahiti: The Ripples of a Myth on the Shores of the Imagination,” History and Anthropology 14.4 (2003): 310.
- 63.
Tamaira, “From Full Dusk,” 11.
- 64.
According to the ship’s surgeon, David Samwell. Tamaira, “From Full Dusk,” 13, citing Beaglehole, The Journals of Captain James Cook Part 2, 1076.
- 65.
Patty O’Brien, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 82.
- 66.
Smith, European Vision, 49.
- 67.
Smith, European Vision, 42.
- 68.
Smith, European Vision, 329.
- 69.
Smith, European Vision, 42.
- 70.
Quanchi, “A Single Visual History,” 12.
- 71.
Peduzzi, “Travelling Miniatures,” 228–229, citing von Reiche, “Letter from Apia,” in Blanton, Picturing Paradise, 69–71.
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Howie, E. (2022). Island Queens: Appropriated Portraits of Royal Samoan Women. In: Storey, G. (eds) Memorialising Premodern Monarchs. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84130-0_4
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