Culture of Tahiti

Located at Punaauia is the Musée de Tahiti et des Îles (Museum of Tahiti and the Island). It is an ethnographic museum that was founded in 1974 to conserve and restore Polynesian artifacts and cultural practices.

The Robert Wan Pearl Museum is the world's only museum dedicated to pearls. The Papeete Market also sells local arts and crafts.

Dance

One of the most widely recognized images of the islands is the world famous Tahitian dance. The 'ote'a, sometimes written as otea, is a traditional dance from Tahiti, where the dancers, standing in several rows, execute different figures. This dance, easily recognized by its fast hip-shaking, and grass skirts is often confused with the Hawaiian hula, a generally slower more graceful dance which focuses more on the hands and story telling than the hips.

The ʻōteʻa is one of the few dances which already existed in pre-European times as a male dance. On the other hand, the hura (Tahitian vernacular for hula), a dance for women, has disappeared, and the couple's dance 'upa'upa is likewise gone but may have reemerged as the tamure. Nowadays, however, the ʻōteʻa can be danced by men (ʻōteʻa tāne), by women (ʻōteʻa vahine), or by both genders (ʻōteʻa ʻāmui = united ʻō.). The dance is with music only, drums, but no singing. The drum can be one of the different types of the tōʻere, a laying log of wood with a longitudinal slit, which is struck by one or two sticks. Or it can be the pahu, the ancient Tahitian standing drum covered with a shark skin and struck by the hands or with sticks