Word: tapa
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Another exhibit shows bark cloth (tapa). The Pacific islanders made it by pounding the fibrous inner bark of certain trees. So did Indians in Nicaragua and Mexico. The cloth of both hemispheres is the same papery stuff, and the wood and stone pounding tools the two peoples used (shown in the exhibit) are so similar that they might have been made by the same...
...Californian named Truman Bailey could take the commission's bows. Back in 1942 he had found that the only decent Peruvian artifacts were buried in museums. Most stores sold shoddy, cast silverware and tritely patterned blankets. Bailey, who had acquired a ripe background digging the best teakwood and tapa cloth out of Java and Oceania, knew exactly what to do: hit out for the sources of pre-Columbian handicrafts and discover the lost techniques...
...Venereal disease is unknown among the natives; the major commanding the force saw to it that only healthy soldiers went ashore. Life is pleasant, with plenty of tropical fruits and vegetables; wild pigs occasionally provide fresh meat. Love is taboo until after sundown, then the unattached girls doff their tapa-cloth shirts, shake out their grass skirts and smile fondly about them...
Hulas call for words as well as music. The dancer sings them, is free to improvise or repeat. She gives the accompanying musicians their cues, establishes the time with her swaying hips. Different dances require different costumes. Huapala wore grass skirts, tapa gowns, the Mother Hubbard cloak introduced by missionaries. She described in words and gestures the districts of Hawaii, the torments of despised loves, the varieties of Hawaiian fish. Connoisseurs were interested in her seated dances wherein she swayed from the waist, wriggled sinuous arms, clicked a pair of pebbles called ili ili. Mikel Hanapi, dressed in a cape...
Films used in Professor Dixon's course on Oceanica depict the intimate lives and habits of the Polynesians, Melanesians, and inhabitants of the East Indies. Tribal dances and customs such as fire walking in the Fiji Islands, and tatooing and tapa making in Samoa, are shown in detail...