Traditional Seafaring in Oceania

In this book, Hunter H. Fine establishes a fuller understanding about the ways in which our everyday practices can illuminate aspects of power, representation, social advocacy, and truth.

Over four thousand years ago Austronesian seafarers embarked from the Asian mainland settling maritime Southeast Asia before sailing east and west aboard outrigger canoes to the many islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. These circulatory voyages resulted in a shared network of practices and knowledge stretching across a third of the globe. Through frameworks of learning, the descendants of these seafaring cultures still engage in and teach these practices today, particularly in Micronesia. The voyages themselves and the many practices that made them possible are considered in this book as embodied forms of writing and theory. Many elements such as plant harvest, vessel construction, social concepts, and ways of spatial orientation are part of everyday life throughout maritime Southeast Asia and Oceania while others, such as open-sea voyaging and traditional navigational are marked as public performances of social advocacy.

In Traditional Seafaring in Oceania, the author outlines a critical theory based primarily on two sets of knowledge: traditional seafaring in Oceania and poststructuralist rhetorical theory to A) illustrate how this Indigenous body of knowledge forms the foundations for contemporary catamaran sailing, outrigger paddling, surfing, and beaching practices, B) examine how this knowledge has functioned as domestic and international forms of social advocacy and resistance, and C) note how the various practices discussed work together to provide an epistemological alternative to Western modernity/coloniality.