Help me, o Internets; I don't know where to start.

[swan_tower]

So I know you all are still waiting for The Tropic of Serpents to come out, but backstage, we're already ramping up for the third book of the series. And you know what that means: research!

. . . on a topic I don't know at all. A large portion of the third book, you see, will take place in an area based on the Polynesian Islands. My knowledge of Polynesian culture pretty much consists of "tourism in Hawai'i," which, y'know. Not so much. The sole book in my library on the topic is Pacific Mythology, which is an encyclopedia-style overview of the entire Pacific, Polynesian and otherwise.

So where do I start? Does anybody out there have recommendations for good early histories (pre-European contact, though not necessarily pre-other-people contact), "daily life in ancient Hawai'i" type books, local mythology 101, etc?

I also could use recommendations of appropriate music. I make heavy use of playlists to set my brain in the right gear, but I have zilch in the way of stuff from that particular milieu. I don't even know what it sounds like, beyond "stereotypical hula tunes." Traditional folk music, movie scores that draw on that kind of sound, all of those things are good.

Help me, o Internets. I'm dead in the water here.

Comments

[starlady]

I can tell you from the professional side that the historiography of Hawai'i is fucked up in various ways, i.e. virtually no one has actually bothered to learn Hawai'ian. And the people who have can't get book contracts because they're not white. So this is an area in which I would give serious side-eye to academic publications and recommend you also seek out less scholarly sources.

That said, the University of Hawai'i at Manoa is one of the leading places for Pacific history (at least from what I know from the field perspective, and let me stress that the field perspective may not be that great) and I would expect the publications by their faculty to be half-decent: http://manoa.hawaii.edu/history/people?q=node/17 If you can find the book that Noelani Arista wrote an intro to (listed on her page here: http://manoa.hawaii.edu/history/node/51) that sounds like it might be good. (I might also be able to get you her dissertation, which won a major AHA award.) She might be a good person to email, too. I would also recommend asking people like Kate Elliott and/or her daughter what kind of stuff they use to teach in schools there.

[swan_tower]

I shouldn't have mentioned Hawai'i; everybody's fixating on that specifically. :-P I'm interested in Polynesia more broadly -- can't be more specific until I know more -- and the history per se doesn't matter to me, since I'm not writing historical fiction. What I need is a sense of broad patterns and interesting details in Polynesian culture, so I have a starting point for worldbuilding.

Having said that, thank you for the recs. :-)