Eye of the Goof

Here is the third installment of Vintage Oceania, and the final set of photographs from my 1921 issue of National Geographic. These images were culled from an article entitled The Islands of Polynesia, and I have to admit that I don't find them quite as compelling as the Easter Island photographs. There are a few nice shots of the murals on tribal council huts, but unfortunately, no masks or tikis.

However, there were plenty of those pictures of native women that National Geographic has always been notorious for, and it's highly amusing to think that my father was probably looking at these very photographs back in the 1920s with a flashlight while hiding underneath his covers in bed. I'm not interested in making this site an even bigger target for bizarre search-engine hits than it already is, but I couldn't resist scanning in this rather silly photograph of a Nauru woman (NSFW, or 21st-century sensibilities either) getting ready to do the Dance of the Fish. The accompanying text reads:

"The Dance of the Fish must be a joyous one for its participants. The finny decorations range in color from rainbow to scarlet, blue, yellow, black, and green, and are eaten when the dance is finished."

Of course, the first thing that pops into my mind when I think of dancing and fish is this (828KB AVI).