One initiated woman is worth... two : From Polynesia's ‘Island of Women' to America's Alien

Marika Moisseeff (1)

1 LAS - Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale

The author draws a parallel between two myths belonging to two very different cultural settings: traditional Polynesia and present-day USA. The first, presented in Henri Lavondès' PhD, Terre et mer, is based on the Isle of Women motif which, according to Lavondès who collected several versions of it in the Marquesas, is "very widespread in Polynesia and probably elsewhere in the Pacific." (1975: 411). The second myth is composed of the four American movies dedicated to the battle between Lieutenant Ripley and her extraterrestrial enemy, Alien. Both these narratives describe a process of female initiation allowing women to assume and survive their reproductive role : pregnancy and childbirth. Their 'moral', however, is very different. In both cases childbirth is shown to be potentially lethal. Both narratives address the same scandalous human problem which is the asymmetry of men's and women's procreative roles. A comparative analysis of these two Marquesan and North-American myths reveal a number of structural inversions that shed light on the distinctive ways in which so-called traditional and contemporary Western societies deal with maternity and, therefore, with male/female relationships.

Mots clés: myth; procreation; science-fiction; Polynesia; Island of Women; Alien; gender

Domaines: Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Marika Moisseeff. One initiated woman is worth... two : From Polynesia's ‘Island of Women' to America's Alien. Serge Dunis. Sexual Snakes, Winged Maidens and Sky Gods: Myth in the Pacific, An Essay in Cultural Transparency, Editions Haere Po, pp.141-154, 2008. ⟨halshs-00444575⟩