ABSTRACT: Where the Naked Women Are: The Influence of Tahiti and the State of Nature on Secularization in the Enlightment, explores the Enlightenment as a historical moment of globalization by analyzing the impact of cross-cultural encounters between Europe and the South Pacific on the process of secularization. As some modern scholarship suggests, there is a frequently overlooked need to consider the influence of global dimensions on the major currents of Enlightenment thought. This thesis attempts to do so in order to understand the connection between the Enlightenment’s revaluation of religion and the state of nature as means of critiquing society. This analysis intends to demonstrate how the idealization of Tahiti both in and as a result of its paradisiacal portrayal in travel journals documenting interactions with the island, was used by philosophers to support secular arguments. The voyages of Louis-Antione de Bougainville and James Cook to Tahiti and their detailed accounts of Tahitian life represented natives living in conditions which were very close to the state of nature. Their descriptions of the island and islanders were remarkably similar to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conceptualization of the state of nature, which notably claimed that religion was unnecessary in determining morality or contributing to human flourishing. The popularity of accounts of Tahiti among the growing reading public in Europe, likely as a result of the freedom from the social restrictions and corrupting qualities of the West that Tahiti symbolized, seemed to contribute to the European reception of Rousseau’s claims. This use of accounts of Tahiti by philosophers to find a link between the island and Rousseau’s state of nature is demonstrated by Denis Diderot’s “Supplement to the Voyages of Bougainville.” Finally, this thesis attempts to show the impact accounts of Tahiti and Rousseau’s conception of man in the state of nature had on the development of secularization during the Enlightenment.
