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The Polynesian Society is a non-profit organization based at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Founded in 1892, the Society’s aim was the scholarly study of past and present New Zealand Māori and other Pacific Island peoples and cultures. It has pursued this aim primarily through the Journal of the Polynesian Society, a quarterly publication begun at the Society’s inception and enduring to the present.

The early issues of the Journal contain a rich repository of indigenous texts and traditions contributed by Pacific peoples, as well as by missionaries and other sojourners, often published in local languages with English translations. Among the scholars who have long contributed articles to the Journal are social/cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, linguists and physical/biological anthropologists working in Micronesia and Melanesia, as well as Polynesia. More recently they have been joined by sociologists, political scientists, economists and other scholars .

Early editors of the Journal of the Polynesian Society were S. Percy Smith, W.H. Skinner and Elsdon Best. Since the mid-1950s most editors have been associated with the Anthropology Department of the University of Auckland, among them Jack Golson, Bruce G. Biggs, Murray Groves, Antony Hooper, Mervyn McLean, Geoff Irwin, Richard Moyle and Judith Huntsman, who is the present editor

The University of Auckland Library and the Polynesian Society have collaborated in initiating the Online Journal. The project will progressively digitise the first 100 years of the Journal, from 1892-1991.

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