Cruising French Polynesia: Tahiti, Bora Bora, and the Tuamotus

Charles Urbanowicz

Charlie Urbanowicz has been traveling throughout the Pacific for more than 50 years.  In 1972, after completing his research in the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga, he received the Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Oregon and began his teaching career at the University of Minnesota.  In 1973 Dr. Urbanowicz joined the Department of Anthropology at California State University, Chico, and retired in December 2009.  During his tenure at Chico he was recognized as one of the five "Master teachers" of the university.  Charlie has published several items in numerous professional journals and has chapters in all three volumes of the pioneering publication entitled Hosts and Guests:  The Anthropology of Tourism (1977, 1989, & 2001).  In addition to on-going Pacific research on Peoples and Cultures of the Pacific as well as World War II, since 2004 Charlie has made presentations on forty Pacific cruises including two Smithsonian Journeys through French Polynesia.

Charlie holds life membership in The Polynesian Society (University of Auckland) and is also a member of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania.  His Pacific travels and research has taken him to numerous island nations, as well as Australia, China, Chile, Ecuador, Japan, New Zealand, and Peru.

Lindsay Whaley

Lindsay Whaley received a PhD in Linguistics in the State University of New York, Buffalo. He is an expert on the Tungusic languages of northern China and is known internationally for his work in language typology, which involves determining why some properties of language are common while others are rare. He is widely recognized as one of the foremost experts in the world on language death and language revitalization. One of his current projects examines patterns of language and culture change in the Arctic and the Pacific Islands, where climate change has had significant impact on small subsistence-based communities. This work has included fieldwork in several Arctic communities, as well as Easter Island and Tonga. On this cruise, Lindsay will talk about how the languages of the Pacific give us a good picture of how the Pacific Islands were populated by humans and some of the unique cultural challenges that currently are being confronted by Polynesian peoples.