Idol Worship, Easter Island, from the Holidays series (N80) for Duke brand cigarettes 1890

Around 1900, W. Duke, Sons & Co. produced this chromolithograph trade card as part of a series of “Holidays” for their Duke brand cigarettes. Though labelled “Idol Worship, Easter Island,” the scene depicts a fantasy of exotic ritual that bears little relation to the cultural practices of the island’s inhabitants, the Rapa Nui. Trade cards like this one were popular advertising tools, collected and traded by consumers. They offer insight into the cultural values and biases of the period in which they were made. Here, we see the romanticizing and misrepresentation of non-Western cultures, typical of Western advertising at the time, and, indeed, of much ethnographic representation. The image reinforces a sense of Western superiority by depicting a fabricated, primitive ritual, and also participates in colonial exploitation by marketing an addictive consumer product. To better understand such historical images, one can turn to archives of advertising history, studies of colonial representation, and the history of anthropology, as well as to the oral and written histories of the Rapa Nui people themselves. Such avenues of research allow us to interpret the meaning of the artwork as contingent on its specific social and institutional context.