Oceania

Offering a fresh look at Oceanic art that incorporates new scholarship and perspectives from Indigenous voices, this book is an essential resource on the diverse nations and communities of the Pacific Islands.

Made up of the multiple island communities contained within Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, Oceania is known for works of art and ritual objects that tell a wealth of stories about origins, ancestral power, performance, and initiation. Diverging from the traditional approaches that categorize Oceanic art by region, this book considers the connections between all Austronesian-speaking peoples, whose ancestral homes span Southeast Asia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and the island archipelagoes of the North and East Pacific. A focus on the objects themselves – from elaborately carved ancestral figures in ceremonial houses to ritual regalia such as towering slit drums, skull reliquaries, and dazzling turtle-shell masks – provides an intimate look at Oceania as a whole with support from multidisciplinary research in art history, ethnography, and archaeology. Underscoring the powerful interplay between the ocean, the land, and the spiritual and ancestral realms, "The Shape of Time" illuminates the great artistic achievements of Pacific Islanders across hundreds of years through insightful new scholarship, stunning photography, and Indigenous perspectives.