ABSTRACT
A portable organ, an electrical machine, puppets, fireworks, a suit of armor, a jack-in-a-box. Those were some of the European gifts that Mai, a Polynesian visitor to England, took back with him to the South Seas. Scrutinized through the lens of their supposed utilitarian and civilizing value, the choice of these objects was immediately ridiculed: what could such frivolous novelty items bring to the primitive Other? Through the case study of Mai and his European possessions, I will explore the circulation of objects between Europe and Polynesia in the late eighteenth century. The interrogation of the problematic place of the curiosity item offers a starting point to the analysis of late eighteenth-century views on cross-cultural contact and European expansion in new territories. In more precise terms, Mai’s objects, which herald the beginning of nineteenth-century colonial empires, are the tangible crux between commercial and civilizing ideals.
