An Essay on Imagery and Imagined Geographies of the Pacific Islands

This was written during my Geography degree, but I feel it has strong links to marketing through its discussion of images’ strong influence on our perception of the world, particularly spaces and people we have never come into direct contact with. It largely considers the imagery used surrounding the Pacific Islands, comparing illustrations of accounts from 18th century voyages to photographs in modern day tourist brochures.

The question:

To what extent are the images of islands that illustrated accounts of 18th century European voyages similar to those that dominate 21st century tourist brochures and travel literature, and to what extent different, and what can we infer about the contemporary attitudes to nature?

Islands have long inspired the imaginations of mainland populations, encouraging the “wildest fantasies and concepts” (Reijnders,2011:15) due to their isolation, which creates an instinctive sense of ‘otherness’. The tropical islands of the Pacific have particularly fired this imagination: the “desire to locate the imagined earthly paradise in the real geographical present” (Haun,2008:44) reaches as far back to Ancient Greeks contemplating a ‘Terra Australis’ that would “balance the continents in the northern hemisphere” (Withey,1989:24), but it is since European ‘discovery’ of the islands that they came to dominate mainland imagination. Their distance from mainland ‘hubs’ has meant much imagination is built upon the accounts of others, with accompanying images being particularly influential in the process.

To compare island images from the contexts the question provides, this essay will focus largely on the Pacific islands, as they provide the richest source of materials from which to draw comparisons. There will also be a bias towards Western (which should be taken to mean developed mainland countries in the West), and in particular European, perceptions of the islands, again due to their dominance in producing and consuming images in the two specified contexts. The underlying attitudes to nature discussed, therefore, will be largely Western, which I recognise to be unrepresentative of global attitudes to nature, but perhaps a necessary limitation.

The images and accounts brought back from eighteenth century voyages to the Pacific islands largely followed the era’s Romanticism, conveying paradisiacal bliss in both lush nature and simple yet noble inhabitants. Even in Cook’s scientific approach to dispel myths from Bougainville’s voyages, similar themes continued and were compounded in European imagination of the islands (Smith,1992). Despite competing notions of ignoble savages and ‘Paradise Lost’ emerging in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the desire to locate a utopian paradise in the Pacific islands survived and now dominates the tourist industry’s portrayal of them (figure 1). This essay will discuss the extent to which these eras’ depictions of islands overlap, considering the inevitable differences of such diverse times and contexts, and finally draw these themes into a discussion on contemporary thought surrounding nature.

Throughout history images have been influential in formulating discourse, being “arresting and easily circulated” (Edmond,1997:32), and often more easily adoptable into one’s understanding than textual counterparts. However, creating an image requires composing a representation of a single, frozen frame of time, making the condensing of complex situations, and thus an element of subjectivity, inevitable. The aspects of a scene the artist – whether eighteenth century painter or present day photographer – chooses to highlight or ignore reflects not only their own understanding of the island, but also the various demands and desires of the subjects and audience, creating a complex network of producers and consumers (Douglas,1999).

It is this subjectivity, however, that makes images so crucial in deconstructing and analysing imaginations surrounding islands and their inhabitants, and therefore the attitudes towards nature that permeate them.

Above all, the concept of Othering permeates most frameworks of understanding surrounding islands. In both nature and culture, the “difference projection” (Hollinshead,1998b:121) of the Pacific islands in particular surround their construction as the antithesis of and escape from ‘modern’ life. Depicted as an ‘earthly Paradise’, eighteenth century explorers found them to be the perfect opposite to the “harsh repressive urban and industrial landscape” developing in rapidly industrialising Europe (Connell,2003:556). The inhabitants of these Eden-like landscapes were also seen as a welcome contrast, displaying a dignity and nobility in their primitive state, as they had not yet been alienated from nature and thus corrupted by the “artificiality” of civilisation (Outram,1995:50). Championed by Rousseau in his construction of the ‘noble savage’, island inhabitants represented everything the West had lost in its obsession with modernisation and progress (Lafreniere,2007). Since then, relentless ‘progression’ has further strengthened the islands’ value as “timeless places” indulging Western “nostalgia for the worlds we have ‘lost’” (Connell,2003:574). In this construction of the islands, tourists demand islands in their pre-colonial state, following historical notions of romanticism and nostalgia by focussing on virtues of purity and traditionalism in both nature and culture.

However, to deliver this image, some editing of reality is needed. The images presented to mainland populations rarely accurately depict what is found on the islands, but rather selectively emphasise or dampen aspects according to the audience’s expectations and desires. Eighteenth century accounts of the Pacific “were characterised by absences and silences”, and “those silences were selective, matching the expectations of voyagers and those at home alike” (Connell,2003:557). For instance, James Webber on Cook’s third voyage to the Pacific portrayed islanders as peacefully welcoming Europeans (figure 3), who in turn offered “gifts of civilisation” (Smith,1992:205), whilst failing to include the regular violent encounters and struggles for power. Alternatively, it could mean ‘editing out’ islanders altogether like William Hodges on Cook’s second voyage (figure 4), as to focus on “the stage set and never the players” enabled an imagination of empty landscapes waiting to be utilised, without having to consider the troublesome violence and exploitation of its inhabitants (Haun,2008:145).

A similar process of editing is needed to achieve today’s tourist imagination of islands. Erasing all change from the past three centuries is clearly impossible, thus images marketing the islands in their ‘authentic’ or ‘natural’ state must be highly selective, presenting a small, frozen frame of a “mythologised, nostalgic version of pre-modern rural life” (Salazar,2011:12) whilst denying much of the islands’ contemporary reality.

The motivation behind this editing and selective silence is often attributed to catering to the images’ audience, giving them what they want and operating on what ‘sells’ best. Artists on eighteenth century voyages often ‘worked up’ their ethnographic plein air field sketches upon return, introducing allegorical themes to the images in order to cater to the European demand for the sensational, and incorporating “conventional superstructures” of “neo-classical, picturesque and romantic” elements (figure 5) to ground the scenes into European frameworks of understanding (Smith,1992:180).

This process was extended beyond even the artists’ control as engravings of the images were made for mass production. This involved both a simplification due to technical limitation and editing based on the engravers’ interpretations of the images, or even deliberate editing, such as Giovanni Ciripiani editing out most of the undesirable traits of Sydney Parkinson’s ethnographic drawings of islanders (Smith,1992). Today, although there may no longer be technical limitations to mass production, images of islands are nonetheless simplified and compacted into something that can be “packaged and sold” to mass markets (Keesing,1989:32). This often involves reducing diversity within and amongst islands into one homogenous concept of ‘authenticity’ and simplicity, an example of which being the Polynesian Cultural Centre in Hawaii, where the spatial proximity of sections representing different islands and cultures seems to suggest homogeneity (Webb,1994).

It could be argued that behind this motivation to produce what Western audiences want (and essentially buy) lies a desire to establish a dominant Western narrative of the islands, ultimately denying islanders’ agency over their own representation in order to preserve both our fantasy of and power over the islands. Audiences will desire and accept images that ‘fit’ the framework of understanding the West has built of themselves and others. This is evident in the very notion of European ‘discovery’ of the Pacific islands, proving the Eurocentric mindset of the voyages, and the subsequent naming of them and all life found there, as if only by recognising them by European standards were they granted validity (Haun,2008). The islands presented a potential threat to Europe’s understanding of the world, their position in it, and indeed what it meant to be human as islanders displayed such closeness to nature. They were therefore simplified “according to the limits and constraints of European understanding” (Smith,1992:9), and seen as tools to gain “commercial and geopolitical advantage” (Spate:1988:55) to reassert European dominance. The admiration – and subsequent romantic depictions – explorers had for islanders depended on their acceptance of European sovereignty and willingness to mould to the narrow romanticised role forced upon them, perhaps demoting islanders to ‘animal’ status to create a binary that shaped and reaffirmed Europeans’ superior status of humanity and civilisation (Fudge,2006).

Evidence of this ongoing colonial discourse can be found today, the power structure now so entrenched that it could be argued that a completely objective portrayal of the islands is impossible. The tourist industry’s representation of islands is overwhelmingly determined by non-island inhabitants, therefore the images will inevitably be influenced by subconscious “socio-cultural frameworks” that emerge “not from the realm of concrete everyday experience” but “collectively held images” shaped by “historically inherited stereotypes (…) myths and fantasies” (Salazar,2011:9). These images will then further entrench this narrow portrayal of reality.

Indeed, the very act of marketing islands as if they had ‘returned’ to pre-colonial states opens an opportunity for Western dominance. The choice of ‘original’ or ‘natural’ state alone is contestable, as is the feasibility of ‘restoring’ a place’s ‘authenticity’ once it is deemed lost. This is particularly the case when the restoration process is based on huge assumptions of a pre-colonial state which, by definition, Westerners cannot know.

Western influence in this ‘restoration’ is highly politicised, limiting islander agency in establishing their own narratives and interpretations of the islands. The limited meanings and roles ‘approved’ by the West can have further impact as islanders internalise the “distorted mirror” of the tourist gaze (Linnekin,1997:216) and “become ‘other’ to their own selves” (Jolly,1992:53). This psychological limitation can have tangible effect, as the quest for ‘authenticity’ discourages any modernisation or development, which is paradoxically seen as something desirable on mainland, but a threat to island purity. Islands are “locked into a permanent pristine paradise” (Echtner & Prasad,2003:674), which is seen to be their only valuable identity, and thus forced into dependency on tourism and subsequently the West. We insist on depictions of primitiveness, as to accept the islands as anything other than “static, timeless and unchanging” (Morgan & Pritchard,1998:242) would be to accept the possibility of islands modernising and narrowing the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

One should not, however, discount islanders’ agency and role they play in the construction of their islands to be marketed to tourists. Wanting to modernise and develop via the profits of tourism may lead islanders to reason that preserving small pockets of ‘traditional’ nature and culture is desirable, even if it is not in fact an authentic representation. A performance of immobility might be seen as necessary in achieving a more mobile future. Therefore, being complicit in the “perpetuation of biased global tourism imaginaries” (Salazar,2011:12) does not make islanders helpless ‘cogs’ in the system, trapped in a state of primitiveness against their will, they are instead using their desirable novelty to participate and strengthen their role in the global economy.

Beyond economic reasons, islanders embracing their distinctiveness from Western mainland populations could also be seen to be reclaiming their culture and establishing autonomy and agency. They perhaps turn the process of ‘restoration’ forced upon them into one of reinvention. This involves a mixture of pre-colonial and contemporary cultural aspects – islanders may edit and alter the past when ‘rebuilding’ it as much as non-islanders. For example, in Hawaii the Ikaika logo of a warrior helmet (figure 8) has become a “symbol of Hawaiian identity” despite its modern recreation bearing “little resemblance to its indigenous cultural standing”, showing the creative potential in this space of redefinition and creolisation (Linnekin,1997:239).

Creativity and compromise is needed here, as returning to a completely accurate pre-colonial state would be, of course, undesirable as well as impossible to islanders. Aspects of Western culture have become completely absorbed into and creolised with island culture, creating traditions and belief systems that are entirely unique to and owned by islanders. For example, Christianity brought by Western missionaries “may appear today as more quintessentially a Pacific than a Western faith” due to its extensive adaptation and development over the centuries (Jolly,1992:53). Therefore, to ‘remove’ or ‘edit out’ these elements of island life in order to achieve authenticity based on definitions of non-islanders feels highly contradictory.

This editing is also becoming increasingly unrealistic. Although it is still possible to selectively construct images showing a narrow frame of ‘frozen time’, the reality of the islands is increasingly difficult to ignore or suppress in today’s interconnected world. “Tourism imaginaries do not exist in a vacuum, but have to contend with other circulating images and ideas” (Salazar,2011:10), and consumers of the carefully selected images in travel literature will inevitably be more aware of their inaccuracy than eighteenth century consumers of voyage accounts.

A widening of sources from which imaginations can be constructed will allow an expansion of our framework of understanding surrounding islands, meaning we are more willing to accept images of islands depicting something other than paradisiacal bliss. This shift in cultural lens may change how we approach islands altogether, meaning those who actually get the chance to see the islands first hand have broader expectations than artificial performances of ‘authenticity’, and want to experience the true, contemporary reality of the islands.

However, despite this increased awareness of alternative meanings and narratives of islands, I remain cautious in arguing that the contemporary perception of islands is completely disconnected to past imaginations. Indeed, parallels from figures 9–11 can be drawn to less romanticised narratives from eighteenth century voyages, such as Easter Island’s ecological disaster making it ‘Paradise Lost’ in Cook’s accounts, whilst Vanuata’s ‘ignoble savages’ caused a construction of danger (Cook in Beaglehole,1961). Regardless of angle, the idea of islands and their inhabitants being the ‘Other’ to mainland Westerners remains consistent, and continues to permeate our conceptual framework today.

Attempts to preserve or restore islands and their inhabitants to their ‘natural’ state reflects our perception of the divide between nature and civilisation, and incomprehension of the natural being compatible with the modern. This binary reaches back to Renaissance humanism, and particularly strengthened in the Enlightenment era (Atkins,2012); nature was abstracted from the human realm of civilisation, so the latter could objectively measure, record, and subsequently control the former. Even in the era of Romanticism, where nature was seen to have an intrinsic value beyond its utility to humans, distance from civilisation continued to be seen as necessary for a landscape to be truly ‘natural’, thus ‘museumising’ nature as something separate (Garrett,2008). Note that I use the term civilisation rather than humans, as it is clear in imaginations of islands that humans in a primitive state are acceptable in a natural setting, simultaneously admired and othered due to their proximity to nature (Fudge,2006). The long running fascination held for islands, then, perhaps stems from our belief that they represent everything we feel we have lost in our quest for modernisation, untouched by the physical and moral degradation so long associated with it.

The nostalgia felt for primitive state, however, does not necessarily translate into a desire to return to it ourselves. Salazar (2011:9) uses Appaduri’s (1996) “armchair” or “imagined” nostalgia to describe this, along with Rosaldo’s (1993) “imperialist nostalgia” describing how “people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed”. Those on mainland hubs of civilisation recognise the impossibility and even undesirability to returning to a primitive state, but perhaps draw comfort from imagining distant places to still retain the simplicity we claim to admire so much (Bissell,2005). This is evident in the paradoxes found in historical and contemporary contact with islands. In the eighteenth century the landscapes and ignoble savages were simultaneously admired and exploited: their resources used to gain advantage in colonial competition. Today, tourists demand experiences of nature and culture ‘untouched’ by modernisation, but from the comfort of luxury resorts, bringing the limits of this desire for authenticity into question.

Dominance and control of islands is therefore needed to maintain these paradoxical relationships with islands, both past and present. The desire to establish mainland dominance over islands and their inhabitants may indeed reflect an entrenched human desire to control all nature – including those humans living in a natural state – and confirming civilisation’s distance and superiority over the natural. The Enlightenment inspired concept of the natural being something humans can study and control can be seen in the construction of islands as laboratories, their isolation as “seemingly complete worlds” (Connell,2003:554) creating microcosms of larger processes, from a social “proving ground for the different theories of colonialism” (Edmond,1997:132) to the environmental and ecological disaster of Easter Island (Bahn & Flenley,1992).

In conclusion, despite widening sources of island accounts available to non-islanders, when discussing contemporary travel literature there is an ongoing process of ‘othering’. This draws on historical frameworks of imagination grounded in the romanticised images of eighteenth century voyages. Images emphasise islands’ difference to the mainland via their natural state, both environmentally and socially, which is simultaneously admired and used to legitimise control. This proves the ongoing influence of long established nature-culture binomials, and the West’s perception of nature as something that is under human control, even in our attempts to preserve or restore it to its true ‘natural’ state. Islanders’ decision to ‘reclaim’ their culture from Western influence and return to a ‘pre-colonial state’ may well be a display of independence, but the ‘packaging’ of this supposed authenticity to sell to Western tourists brings the extent of islanders’ autonomy and agency into question. The tourist industry being dominated by images depicting paradise and ‘escape’ from modernity proves the ongoing narrowness of island narrative the West understands or accepts, showing little development since those very first encounters.

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Image sources

- Figure 1: Jaussi, P. (2013). ‘Heaven on Earth, Aitutaki, Cook Islands’, Just One Way Ticket, viewed 10 April 2014, http://www.justonewayticket.com/2013/12/29/heaven-on-earth-aitutaki-cook-islands/

- Figure 2: Idyllic Islands: Escape to the Islands of your Dreams, viewed 10 April 2014, http://www.goway.com/

- Figures 3 to 5: Smith, B. (1992). Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages. Yale University Press: New Haven and London.

- Figure 6: ‘Map of Polynesian Cultural Centre’, Pacific Island Travel, viewed 10 April 2014, http://www.pacificislandtravel.com/hawaii/about_destin/oahu_polynesiancultcentre.html

- Figure 7: ‘Somoan residents putting on performances of ‘authenticity’ in a modern setting’, Ethnic Media Information New Zealand, viewed 10 April 2014, http://www.eminz.co.nz/Samoan-Community/

- Figure 8: Hawaiin Ikaika with Spears Sticker Decal, Local Kine Hawaii T-Shirts Blog, viewed 10 April 2014, http://localkinehawaii.com/t-shirts/?p=8

- Figure 9: Deadly flash floods hit Solomon Islands, BBC 04/04/14, viewed 10 April 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-26891924

- Figure 11: Bali Worldwide Media Coverage: Front Pages from around Australia Australian Daily Telegraph, viewed 10 April 2014, http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/photos-e6frewxi-1226475798637?page=2