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An Introduction to Polynesian Anthropology

Polynesian Culture

Polynesian Culture

The ancestors of the Polynesians did not enter Polynesia empty handed or empty headed. They carried with them a good assortment of food plants and domestic animals from one tropical region to another. They brought with them a knowledge of certain techniques and handcrafts suited to dealing with the raw material provided by a tropical environment. They were led by able chiefs and guided in certain directions by priests skilled in observing and interpreting natural phenomena. The people were in family groups, which expanded into tribes claiming a common ancestry and ruled by chiefs who succeeded by primogeniture in the male line. They deified worthy ancestors and appointed gods to deal with the various needs and activities of life. The gods were placated and induced to render assistance in mundane affairs by material offerings made by the people and ritual conducted by the priests.

The fundamentals of this culture were established in the first group of volcanic islands encountered on the eastward movement from the Gilbert Islands, where the voyagers left the Micronesian chain. The group is now known as the page 14Society Islands and, as I have stated, it formed the geographical center of the island world the newcomers were destined to occupy. The Society Islands are divided into a leeward and a windward group, and it was upon an island in the leeward, or easterly, group that the temporal and spiritual heads of the expedition settled. The island was named Havaii (Hawaiki) evidently after some previous home in the west. This island, afterwards named Raiatea, formed the center of the cultural development which spread throughout the group. In later years, Tahiti, because of its greater size and fertility, developed greater temporal power, but priority of prestige in chiefly rank and priestly sanctity remained with Raiatea.

Traditional narratives record early expeditions that reached and settled in Hawaii in the north and New Zealand in the south. Both expeditions were without domestic animals and cultivated food plants. Thus, if the theory is correct that the foods came from Melanesia through Samoa, it is possible that the two expeditions left central Polynesia before the animals and plants arrived from the west. These early settlers in the north and south had to search for vegetable foods in the local flora, and nature, though generous with fish and fowl, offered few edible plants.

With the continued development of culture in the Society Islands, there was also the natural increase in population. Rivalry in chieftainship and disputes over land, women, and food led to quarrels and battles. Expeditions to explore the seas and to "fish up" new lands had taken place and many of the outlying islands had been reported. Settlement expeditions took place wherein large voyaging canoes with adequate provisions and water carried family groups with their women and children to seek new homes along the sea paths radiating from the central hub of Havaii (Raiatea) and Tahiti. They carried with them the material goods, domestic animals, and food plants which were present in the center. They also took with them the form of social organization and religion that had developed at their time of leaving. Thus, in the course of time, between perhaps the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, habitable Polynesia became inhabited.

Though a more or less common culture was carried from the center and superimposed upon the simpler one in the groups already inhabited, the later culture adopted much from the earlier one in the direction of local knowledge, adjustment to changed environment, and adaptation to different raw material. These changes occurred particularly in the arts and crafts. Pandanus was the general material for making mats and superior satchels, but as pandanus did not grow in either Easter Island or New Zealand, substitute local material was sought for and experimented with. In Easter Island, the people used rushes (Scirpus riparius), which were indigenous, and the outer skin of the trunks of banana plants, which they had introduced. The mats made of rushes were not plaited, but the rushes were sewn together with bast fiber, an entirely page 15new process used nowhere else in Polynesia. The baskets were made of rushes and banana bark by the process of plaiting in which the main technical details were similar to general Polynesian techniques with some slight differences in plaiting the rim. The banana plant is widespread throughout Polynesia, but the Easter Islanders were the only people to use the bark for plaiting material. In New Zealand, the local plant popularly termed flax (Phormium tenax) was used as a substitute for pandanus in both mats and baskets. As the material was harder and stiffer than pandanus, the plaiting technique employed had to be changed in certain details, such as the join in mats, to suit the difference in material. This is only one example of the many changes and developments which took place in the different island groups. Change and development also continued in the Society Islands after the period of dispersal.

Mistakes have been made in past studies and general works in assuming that Polynesian culture as a whole was homogeneous to the extent that information gathered in one island applied equally well to all the other islands. Thus, Lewis Morgan, on learning that brother-and-sister marriage occurred in Hawaii, took it for granted that it prevailed throughout Polynesia and, as a result of an unchecked assumption, held that Polynesian culture was in the low stage of promiscuity as regards the relationship between the sexes. Further investigation would have revealed that brother-and-sister marriage as an institution was present only in Hawaii and that it was a late development among the highest chiefly families to preserve the purity of their lineage. Similarly, Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, on finding that the power of the sister's son and brother-and-sister avoidance were present in Samoa and Tonga, assumed that they were present throughout Polynesia and advanced the hypothesis that the similar customs which were present in Melanesia had been derived from Polynesians who passed through Melanesia. The two customs do not exist in the rest of Polynesia, hence it is more feasible to conclude that the customs were Melanesian and diffused to Samoa and Tonga from Fiji.

At the time that the island cultures were functioning in their purity, when first contact was made with white foreigners, there was no one Polynesian culture. The only period when there could have been a common culture was when the people were living in one island group before dispersal took place. After that, each island or island group went on developing its own culture, and while some fundamental elements of an early common culture were retained or only slightly changed, the various groups specialized in different directions and reached peaks not shared with others. If we use the term Polynesian culture as applied to the culture which was functioning at the time of European contact, it should be realized that such a term is an abstraction referring to common features or general similarities that underlie the local differences in culture within Polynesia. Any one island may be taken as an introduction, but it cannot be regarded as establishing a general pattern. Neither can any cultural page 16elements from any island be applied to another on the assumption of a common pattern, but confirmation or denial must be sought locally in each island. When the Polynesian area as a whole is compared, similarities and differences will be observed. It may then be argued that the similarities belong to an earlier common stage and that the differences indicate later local developments.