Dictionary:

tiki

  (tē'kē)

1. Tiki Mythology. A male figure in Polynesian myth, sometimes identified as the first man.
2. A wooden or stone image of a Polynesian god.
3. A Maori figurine representing an ancestor, often intricately carved from greenstone and worn about the neck as a talisman.

[Maori.]

Art and religion, past and present combine in the Polynesian figure of the tiki. It is a stone or wood carving in simplified human shape, sometimes small enough to be worn as an ornament, sometimes so large as to tower over a human visitor. In the Marquesas, tikis were carved on bowls and dishes, clubs and canoe paddles, as well made into separate statues and amulets. The typical tiki is a powerful figure with hands clasped over its stomach, a large flat nose, round eyes, and an elliptical mouth. Tiki is said to be the ancestor and creator of humans.

English speakers first learned of tikis from accounts of Captain James Cook's eighteenth-century expeditions to the South Pacific, where tikis are mentioned as early as 1777. Two centuries later, in a twist of cultural history, tikis conquered California. In their new habitat they may be tacky, but tiki is now alive and well among the natives of the west coast of the United States.

The first wave of the tiki invasion came between 1945 and 1965, when bars and family rooms added bamboo and copies of the Polynesian stone tikis. The second wave is now. "In the United States," explained a 1996 article by Richard von Busack in a Silicon Valley newspaper, "tiki can refer to a whole range of popular ersatz exotica that some aficionados claim represents a form of suburban rebellion. Throughout the valley, look hard enough and you can find old bachelor apartments with names like The Palms and Moana Lei. These relics are adorned with features that turn up again and again: dead sockets that once held colored floodlights, surrounded by unkillable palms; the Tiki Rooms for cocktail parties; the peculiar lagoon-like curve of the kidney-shaped swimming pool." There are collectors of the tiki mugs that were once given out by tiki bars, and there is a "suburban art" movement called Polynesian Pop.

The original tiki came to the English language from two Malayo-Polynesian languages: Maori, spoken in present day New Zealand, and Marquesan, spoken in the Marquesas Islands by about 10,000 people nowadays. Marquesan is a close relative also of Tongan, Samoan, Tahitian, and Hawaiian, and along with them shares the honor of introducing to English words like tapa (1823, cloth) and mahi-mahi (1943, fish).

This article is about the large Polynesian carvings in humanoid form. For other uses see Tiki (disambiguation).

A Māori man retouches the painted tattoo on a carved wooden tiki at Whakarewarewa Model Village, New Zealand, 1905.

In Central Eastern Polynesian cultures of the Pacific Ocean, tiki is a name given to large carvings of humanoid form. These carvings often serve to mark the boundaries of sacred or significant sites. The word appears as tiki in New Zealand Māori, Cook Islands Māori, Tuamotuan, and Marquesan; as ti'i in Tahitian, and as ki'i in Hawaiian. The word has not been recorded from the languages of Western Polynesia or of Rapanui (Easter Island).

See also

• Tiki culture
• Hei-tiki, Māori neck pendants, sometimes erroneously called tiki
• Tiki, the first man in Māori mythology
• Moai, a monolithic human figure on Easter Island, erroneously called tiki

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