Toponymy in the Society Islands (French Polynesia)
It is fruitful to highlight and categorize the socio-cultural logics on which the names of islands, territories, and parts of land are based in a traditional Polynesian context. This type of study easily contributes to explaining the unity of Polynesian cultures, from the observation of the recurrence of the toponyms, reproduced in the course of the migrations from West to East. The significance of a culture of the sea is also expressed through the assimilation of certain places to the parts of a canoe, and through the symbolic apprehension of the islands as fish. This article focuses on the Society Islands, through the question of the change of names for the islands, the links between anthroponyms and toponyms, and the reasons for giving names to parts of land that are sometimes very small. Also detailed are the results of a field study in Huahine, where more than six hundred place names were recorded. Often descriptive (geomorphological particularities, vegetation, sources), they also account for the old socio-political organization of the island, which clearly bore the stamp of the ancient culture of navigation.