tokatlas
Teacher account

Sailing to Tahiti without instruments

From Oceania and the Pacific·An enduring case

Scholars long argued Polynesian settlement was accidental drift, doubting deliberate navigation across such distances was possible. In 1976 the Hokulea sailed Hawaii to Tahiti guided by Mau Piailug using stars, swells and birds, no compass aboard. The voyage was an experiment whose success rehabilitated an entire knowledge system.

The concepts this raises

Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.

JustificationGrounds of Knowledge
The reasoning that connects evidence to a conclusion. Two knowers can hold the same evidence and be justified in different beliefs if their inferential standards differ. Justification is what separates knowing something from happening to be right about it.
CultureThe Knower's Lens
The shared practices, language and inherited assumptions of a community of knowers. Culture supplies the questions that seem worth asking and the answers that seem obvious, so its influence is hardest to see from inside it.

Where it sits in the knowledge framework

Methods and tools
The practices, conventions, instruments and forms of reasoning through which knowledge here is actually made, together with the assumptions those methods build in and what they are structurally unable to detect.

Areas of knowledge

Themes

The same ideas, somewhere else

Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.