The study examines how place meanings have been recontested, recontextualised and renewed through the Cook Islands’ coral churches continued use. The study supports earlier scholarship and local perspectives suggesting that churches were conceptualised and constructed as the island’s “new marae,” their presence physically restating tribal rights to land.

How is space constituted and made manifest in the cultural and philosophical context of Samoan society? And how can a primordial concept of space be constituted in the architecture of the fale (house) and then reconstituted as a cultural phenomenon, stretching from pre-contact times in Samoa to the present, in the diaspora? This study undertakes...

In ancient Hawai'i, elites employed ideology as a way of acquiring and stabilising political and economic power. Material evidence of this is found in the numerous temples throughout the islands and in the formalised rules for constructing elite households. Ethnohistoric literature describes Hawaiian households as a collection of buildings with specific functional purposes. By segregating...