Johann Reinhold Forster’s Tahitian Mythography

Record summary

Johann Reinhold Forster’s Observations Made during a Voyage round the World, based on Cook’s second voyage, includes discussions of Tahitian religion, social customs, oral traditions and ideas about the natural world. It is an identifiable early attempt to organize Pacific mythology within European comparative philosophy and natural history. The work can support research into transmission, translation and the creation of “mythology” as a scholarly category. Its evidence is uneven, often secondhand, and shaped by Enlightenment theories that may obscure Indigenous distinctions between genealogy, ritual, history and sacred narrative.