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. 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. Mai's experience is closely entwined with Captain James Cook's three voyages to the South Pacific, revealing the evolution in the British contact with Polynesia from exotic collection to utilitarian imposition. The critics of Mai's gifts were right: these European artifacts would fail to civilize Polynesia. But their utilitarian rationale was wrong: an object's civilizing capacity does not correlate with its apparent utility. Unable to accept the relative value of their culture's objects, Europeans blame the primitive Other for the failure of their civilizing mission.
