In this article, I apply ideas from Foucault, Lefebvre, and Soja about thirdspace, or space beyond dualisms, to an understanding of'Tahiti" as a complex, intertwined place. For most Tahitians, a sense of place is rooted in land, which individuals describe as a nurturing mother. Genealogical ties to land define personal identities and social relationships. For the world at large, however, the perception of Tahiti is based on seductive, mass‐mediated, touristic images. The perpeiuation of these images, whose origins go back two‐hundred years, has become increasingly enmeshed in the economic and political agendas of the French colonial government. The resumption of nuclear testing in French Polynesia in 1995‐96 and the subsequent rioting by Tahitians, which disseminated negative images throughout the world, provide a setting for an analysis of Tahiti that moves beyond dualisms. Tahiti is understood instead as an intertwined thirdspace, equally real and imagined, immediate and mediated, [place, colonialism, imagery, tourism, nuclear testing]
Two exhibits, the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History (1971) and Traveling the Pacific at the Field Museum of Natural History (1989), are compared. Foucault's concept of heterotopia is used to examine why, in spite of major recent changes in museum philosophy and technology, the subtexts of the two exhibits remain remarkably similar. Both confuse spatial distance with temporal flow, creating an incoherent framework of disjunctive orders.
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