A people in the latter stages of contamination by the civilising mission, a people consumed by the European society Gauguin thought he had left behind.
In the early 1990s he described himself as an “advocate of civilisation, definer of civilisation, teacher of the rules of civilisation… leader (possibly) of the civilising forces.”
However, this confirmed my first opinion, that a people who could so far civilise brute animals, must needs excel in wisdom all the nations of the world.
They civilise their food by cooking it and they also civilised the food in a sense by cutting it into small pieces and making it very elegant and by banishing the brutality of knives to the kitchen.