| Abstrakt: |
This article questions the limits of reductive models of spatial orientation (e.g., land/sea or front/back dichotomies) given growing evidence of the manifold organization of space in culture and cognition. In a Pacific context, this work affirms the necessity of attending to the multiplicity of spatial models at play in the thoroughly contextually complex dynamics of even putatively straightforward everyday moments. Noting that too close attention to certain cultural models, however efficacious in their explanatory and interpretive function, can overshadow the dynamics of multiple-encoding of lived space, this article also suggests that attention be paid not only to how spatial cultures provide toolkits that orient persons and foster efficient navigation of environmental paths and social moments, but also to how active and present cultures of space can disorient persons who may in fact be competent possessors of cultural knowledge. Finally, it observes that the stakes for careful accounting for space in Polynesia are extraordinarily high as languages such as Mangarevan in French Polynesia's Gambier islands are now under intense local and regional challenges to everyday use and long-term survival in the ethnographic context of language change and language loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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