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Kon-Tiki

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Kon-Tiki

tale of raft trip taken to prove sea-borne migration of peoples and culture. [Pacific Hist.: Kon-Tiki]

Kon-Tiki

primitive raft used by Thor Heyerdahl to cross from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands (1947). [World Hist.: Kon-Tiki; NCE, 1238–1239]
See: Journey
Allusions—Cultural, Literary, Biblical, and Historical: A Thematic Dictionary. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Kon-Tiki

 

(named after the god of the Incas), the name of a raft made of balsa wood, with a reed sail, which was modeled on ancient Peruvian rafts. In 1947 the Norwegian ethnologist T. Heyerdahl and five companions, taking advantage of favorable currents and trade winds, spent 101 days aboard the KonTiki (approximately 100 sq m in area), sailing the 8,000 km from Callao (Peru) to the Tuamotu Islands in the Pacific Ocean in order to demonstrate the possibility that Polynesia might have been settled from the east. The raft is preserved in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo (Norway).

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive
Kon-Tiki captures all the danger, excitement and sheer natural beauty of a true man-versus-nature.
The Contemporary World Cinema line-up reportedly brings some of this year's most poignant tales to Doha including Malik Bendjelloul's Searching for Sugar Man, winner of 'The World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary' at this year's Sundance Film Festival; Umut Day-'s Kuma which opened the Berlinale's Panorama section this year; Valentino's Ghost by Michael Singh, which premiered at the 2012 Venice International Film Festival; Dominga Sotomayor's Thursday Till Sunday, winner of the 'Tiger Award' at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and 'Everybody in our Family' by Radu Jude; Joachim Roenning and Espen Sandberg's Kon-Tiki .
18/20 CLIENTELE: Being slap-bang in the city centre means that inevitably Kon-Tiki attracts a little bit of everything, from scantily-clad revellers to students, rugby fans, suited and booted professionals and everything in between.
The team at Skagen, who manage the AAA rated Kon-Tiki fund, believe Asia will lead global economic growth and that global imbalances will continue to be reduced by increasing consumption in emerging markets and raised savings rates in industrialised countries.
Consisting of mostly new material, the volume's 26 essays include discussions of Hemingway's early illness narratives and the lyric dimensions of "Now I Lay Me;" silence, hospitals, and anesthesia in A Farewell to Arms; masculinity, disability, and guilt in The Sun Also Rises; war, gender, and Hemingway; word play in A Farewell to Arms; cubism, conservation, and the suspension of identification in In Our Time; recurrence in Hemingway and Cezanne; Men without Women as composite novel; money, marriage, and self-censorship in For Whom the Bell Tolls; Hemingway's sacred landscapes; Hemingway, primitivism, and identity; and Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki and Hemingway's return to primitivism.
Except for one of Thor Heyerdahl's adventures in Kon-Tiki, nearly all of the stories are from the present era; hence, no war stories, but plenty of yachting action.
But it is Willis's experiences rafting, inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition, that Pearson chronicles with particular relish.
Polynesian pop fed off of Thor Heyerdahl's adventure aboard the raft "Kon-Tiki" and the 1958 film "South Pacific." The craze leveled off and became just another oddball part of Americana through the 1960s, growing odder, more tired and dusty as the years unfolded.
WHO says that horses who drift like the proverbial Kon-Tiki never win?
THOR HEYERDAHL - Skip-pered the raft Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia in 1947 to prove ancient cultures could have done the same.'
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