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This book is a comprehensive description of the grammar of Rapa Nui, the Polynesian language spoken on Easter Island. After an introductory chapter, the grammar deals with phonology, word classes, the noun phrase, possession, the verb phrase, verbal and nonverbal clauses, mood and negation, and clause combinations. The phonology of Rapa Nui reveals certain issues of typological interest, such as the existence of strict conditions on the phonological shape of words, word-final devoicing, and reduplication patterns motivated by metrical constraints. For Polynesian languages, the distinction between nouns and verbs in the lexicon has often been denied; in this grammar it is argued that this distinction is needed for Rapa Nui. Rapa Nui has sometimes been characterised as an ergative language; this grammar shows that it is unambiguously accusative. Subject and object marking depend on an interplay of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors. Other distinctive features of the language include the existence of a ‘neutral’ aspect marker, a serial verb construction, the emergence of copula verbs, a possessive-relative construction, and a tendency to maximise the use of the nominal domain. Rapa Nui’s relationship to the other Polynesian languages is a recurring theme in this grammar; the relationship to Tahitian (which has profoundly influenced Rapa Nui) especially deserves attention. The grammar is supplemented with a number of interlinear texts, two maps and a subject index.
"This richly illustrated book of the history, culture, and art of Easter Island is the first to examine in detail the island's vernacular architecture, often overshadowed by its giant stone statues"--Provided by publisher.
"The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Oceania presents the archaeology, linguistics, environment and human biology of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. First colonized 50,000 years ago, Oceania witnessed the independent invention of agriculture, the construction of Easter Island's statues, and the development of the word's last archaic states."--Provided by publisher.
Rapa Nui, one of the world’s most isolated island societies and home to the notable moai, has been at the centre of a tense debate for the past decade. Some see it as the site of a dramatic cultural collapse occurring before Western contact, where a self-inflicted ecocide was brought on by the exhaustion of resources. Others argue that the introduction of Western pathogens and the slave raids of 1862 were to blame for the near extinction of the otherwise resilient Rapa Nui people. Cultural and Environmental Change on Rapa Nui brings together the latest studies by prominent Rapa Nui researchers from all over the world to explore the island’s past and present, from its discovery by Polynesians, through the first documented contact with Western culture in 1722, to the 20th century. The exiting new volume looks beyond the moai to examine such questions as: was there was a cultural collapse; how did the Rapa Nui react to Westerners; and what responses did the Rapa Nui develop to adjust to naturally- or humanly-induced environmental change? This volume will appeal to scholars and professionals in the fields of history, archaeology and ecology, as well as anyone with an interest in the challenges of sustainable resource management, and the contentious history of Rapa Nui itself.
In this groundbreaking study, Riet Delsing narrates the colonization of the Pacific island of Rapa Nui and its indigenous inhabitants. The annexation of the island by Chile, in the heydays of world imperialism, places the small Latin American country in a unique position in the history of global colonialism. The analysis of this ongoing colonization process constitutes a “missing link” in Pacific Islands studies and facilitates future comparisons with other colonial adventures in the Pacific by the United States (Hawai‘i, American Samoa), France (Tahiti), and New Zealand (Maori and Cook Islands). The first part of the book surveys the history of the Chile–Rapa Nui relationship from its beginning in the 1880s until the present. Delsing delineates the Rapanui people’s agency along with their cultural logic, showing their resilience and will to remain Rapanui— indigenous Pacific islanders rather than an ethnic minority forcefully integrated into the Chilean nation-state. In the second part, the author describes the Rapanui’s contemporary emphasis on the revitalization of their language, traditional concepts about land tenure, a unique corpus of material and performative culture, renewed contact with other Pacific island cultures, and creative acts of resistance against Chilean colonialism. Emergent in her analysis is the effect of Rapa Nui’s vibrant tourist industry—commodification of Rapanui difference is creating the possibility to loosen economic and political ties with Chile. Drawing on statements of several Rapanui, she concludes that over the past few decades they have acquired a different kind of interpretive power, based on which they are making choices that serve them as a people on the road to cultural and political self-determination. Contemporary Rapa Nui is thus a modern, articulated place, marked by spirited identity politics that show the resilience and adaptability of the indigenous people who inhabit this island.
The monumental statues of Easter Island, both so magisterial and so forlorn, gazing out in their imposing rows over the island’s barren landscape, have been the source of great mystery ever since the island was first discovered by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. How could the ancient people who inhabited this tiny speck of land, the most remote in the vast expanse of the Pacific islands, have built such monumental works? No such astonishing numbers of massive statues are found anywhere else in the Pacific. How could the islanders possibly have moved so many multi-ton monoliths from the quarry inland, where they were carved, to their posts along the coastline? And most intriguing and vexing of all, if the island once boasted a culture developed and sophisticated enough to have produced such marvelous edifices, what happened to that culture? Why was the island the Europeans encountered a sparsely populated wasteland? The prevailing accounts of the island’s history tell a story of self-inflicted devastation: a glaring case of eco-suicide. The island was dominated by a powerful chiefdom that promulgated a cult of statue making, exercising a ruthless hold on the island’s people and rapaciously destroying the environment, cutting down a lush palm forest that once blanketed the island in order to construct contraptions for moving more and more statues, which grew larger and larger. As the population swelled in order to sustain the statue cult, growing well beyond the island’s agricultural capacity, a vicious cycle of warfare broke out between opposing groups, and the culture ultimately suffered a dramatic collapse. When Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo began carrying out archaeological studies on the island in 2001, they fully expected to find evidence supporting these accounts. Instead, revelation after revelation uncovered a very different truth. In this lively and fascinating account of Hunt and Lipo’s definitive solution to the mystery of what really happened on the island, they introduce the striking series of archaeological discoveries they made, and the path-breaking findings of others, which led them to compelling new answers to the most perplexing questions about the history of the island. Far from irresponsible environmental destroyers, they show, the Easter Islanders were remarkably inventive environmental stewards, devising ingenious methods to enhance the island’s agricultural capacity. They did not devastate the palm forest, and the culture did not descend into brutal violence. Perhaps most surprising of all, the making and moving of their enormous statutes did not require a bloated population or tax their precious resources; their statue building was actually integral to their ability to achieve a delicate balance of sustainability. The Easter Islanders, it turns out, offer us an impressive record of masterful environmental management rich with lessons for confronting the daunting environmental challenges of our own time. Shattering the conventional wisdom, Hunt and Lipo’s ironclad case for a radically different understanding of the story of this most mysterious place is scientific discovery at its very best.
On a long stretch of green coast in the South Pacific, hundreds of enormous, impassive stone heads stand guard against the ravages of time, war, and disease that have attempted over the centuries to conquer Easter Island. Steven Roger Fischer offers the first English-language history of Easter Island in Island at the End of the World, a fascinating chronicle of adversity, triumph, and the enduring monumentality of the island's stone guards. A small canoe with Polynesians brought the first humans to Easter Island in 700 CE, and when boat travel in the South Pacific drastically decreased around 1500, the Easter Islanders were forced to adapt in order to survive their isolation. Adaptation, Fischer asserts, was a continuous thread in the life of Easter Island: the first European visitors, who viewed the awe-inspiring monolithic busts in 1722, set off hundreds of years of violent warfare, trade, and disease—from the smallpox, wars, and Great Death that decimated the island to the late nineteenth-century Catholic missionaries who tried to "save" it to a despotic Frenchman who declared sole claim of the island and was soon killed by the remaining 111 islanders. The rituals, leaders, and religions of the Easter Islanders evolved with all of these events, and Fischer is just as attentive to the island's cultural developments as he is to its foreign invasions. Bringing his history into the modern era, Fischer examines the colonization and annexation of Easter Island by Chile, including the Rapanui people's push for civil rights in 1964 and 1965, by which they gained full citizenship and freedom of movement on the island. As travel to and interest in the island rapidly expand, Island at the End of the World is an essential history of this mysterious site.
This book is the first comprehensive documentation of Rongorongo, Easter Island's enigmatic script and Oceania's only known pre-twentieth-century writing system. The author tells the full history of rongorongo's exciting discovery and the many attempts at a decipherment and provides full transcriptions of all the 25 surviving rongorongo inscriptions along with detailed photographs of nearly every incised artifact.