Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeNuméros119Dossier Polynésie française, atou...L’artisanat traditionnel en Polyn...

Dossier Polynésie française, atouts et handicaps

L’artisanat traditionnel en Polynésie française : de l’économie touristique à l’élaboration des identités insulaires

Olivier Ginolin
p. 172-184

Abstracts

For two decades, French Polynesia’s authorities continually concentrated their efforts on the development of tourism in Tahiti as well as in the archipelagos. With the construction of luxury reception facilities, the constantly rising number of visitors have created a great demand of folk activities of all kinds. Among them, one is revealing particularly well the dynamics that go through the contemporaneous Polynesian society: the traditional craft industry. For a long time it remained a marginal economic sector and this until the beginning of the 1980’s, it has since then significantly developed, getting out of the domestic sphere to become, in a short time, a major economic concern for the nearly 10 000 artisans registered on the whole territory. Parallel to the rise of this new market of curios, since the autonomy of the Territory, Polynesia experiences a voluntarist cultural policy that tends to include in the territory’s patrimony some activities that have been redefined as traditional. The recovering traditional craft industry will from then on be considered as full cultural activity. The traditional craft industry has become in a few years the epicentre of the connection between two dynamics: one, exogenous and economic, partly generated by the tourists’ demand and a second one, endogenous and cultural, that grants to craft items new prerogatives, conveying new values, as well as an expression of the emerging insular identities.

Top of page

References

Bibliographical reference

Olivier Ginolin, “L’artisanat traditionnel en Polynésie française : de l’économie touristique à l’élaboration des identités insulaires”Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 119 | 2004, 172-184.

Electronic reference

Olivier Ginolin, “L’artisanat traditionnel en Polynésie française : de l’économie touristique à l’élaboration des identités insulaires”Journal de la Société des Océanistes [Online], 119 | Année 2004-2, Online since 01 December 2007, connection on 19 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jso/155; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/jso.155

Top of page

About the author

Olivier Ginolin

Allocataire de recherche en anthropologie culturelle, musée de l’Homme/IRD, oginolin@noos.fr

Top of page

Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search