Moerenhout also reported good-humoredly that his Tahitian paddlers, at first struck dumb with astonishment at this outburst, had exploded into fits of laughter.
At length, the traveling party reached the village where the old priest lived. After sleep and a meal, the two men sat down to a recording session, with the priest recounting what he knew and Moerenhout taking dictation. The process was laborious: the old priest, who spoke from memory, “could only recite consecutively while declaiming” as Moerenhout struggled to write everything down. Although he had a fair command of Tahitian, there was much that Moerenhout failed to understand. The very first song the old priest recited was completely lost on him, and even with the chants he did comprehend, he was obliged to make the old man say them over and over, for “it was only by dint of some repetitions that I succeeded in getting on to paper the details.” All of this was tiring for the old priest, whose memory sometimes betrayed him, and it took several sessions for Moerenhout to compile a coherent, if still partial, account.
At the heart of the priest’s narration was the creation myth, the first lines of which had been sent to Moerenhout on the banana leaf:
He was (or there was); Taaroa was his name;
He stood in the void (or the immensity);
no land, no sky
no sea, no men;
Taaroa called, but nothing replied to him;
And alone existing he changed himself into the universe;
His pivots, axes or orbits, that is Taaroa;
the rocks, the bases, that is he;
Taaroa is the sand, the atoms or elements.
That is how he himself is called.
At first, Moerenhout wrote, he was puzzled by this chant, not because of its inherent obscurity but because he felt that its “extreme elevation” was not consistent with the state of Tahitian society as he himself had experienced it. The old priest’s cosmogony was too elegant, too abstract, too metaphysical, he felt, to be the work of a “primitive” people like the Polynesians. Some of the concepts expressed—a beginning in darkness, a deity who is both cause and effect, “at the same time the matter and the mover of all matter”—called to mind the language of a Zoroaster, a Pythagoras, and compared “advantageously” with “the most sublime” creation stories of other nations. It could only be the work, he concluded, of some ancient civilization, a fragment of something from remotest antiquity that “had crossed the centuries of barbarism,” only to be rediscovered like a potsherd or a flake of sharpened stone. Who these ancient people were was unknowable, however, since all their glories—their science and their cities, their writing and their art—had been destroyed by the waters of a great primeval flood.
HERE, THEN, WE have a glimpse of the next great chapter in the quest to decode the origins of the Polynesians. Moerenhout’s logic was, of course, flawed—the islanders were not a remnant of some ancient civilization that had been washed away in a great deluge—but his approach represents a whole new way of thinking about who they might be. Cook and Banks had observed in the 1770s that it was almost impossible to understand anything of what was told to them about Polynesian arcana. But by the 1820s or ’30s, this was no longer the case. As more and more outsiders began to settle in the region, Polynesians and Europeans gradually became fluent enough in one another’s languages to converse on difficult, even esoteric, subjects. Polynesians could begin to communicate something of what they believed, including their own ideas about where they had come from. And Europeans, newly taken with the idea of origins in general and fascinated by this window into Polynesian thought, could begin to get answers to the questions they most wanted to ask. If, for sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europeans, the Pacific had presented itself as a great geographical puzzle, for those in the nineteenth century the enigma lay in trying to make sense of what Polynesians said.
A World Without Writing
Polynesian Oral Traditions
Tuamotuan chart of the origin of the world, from “The Tuamotuan creation charts by Paiore” by Kenneth P. Emory, Journal of the Polynesian Society (1939).
THE POLYNESIAN SOCIETY, UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND.
IT SOMETIMES SEEMS, on the face of it, as though it should have been easy for Europeans to get answers to their questions once they were able to converse with the inhabitants of Polynesia. Why not, after all, just ask them who they were? But the answers that Polynesians gave were confusing to Europeans: they were not framed with the right sort of knowledge, and did not address the right points or provide the sort of information that Europeans were after. It is easy to forget just how different people once were from one another. But at a fundamental level, these were cultures with very dissimilar ways of thinking, and, at least in the beginning, every piece of information that passed between them had to be traded across this epistemological gap.
One important difference was that, until the nineteenth century, everything Polynesians knew—or, indeed, had ever known—had to be transmitted by word of mouth. This was true not only of practical knowledge, like sailing directions or boat-building techniques or the uses of various plants and animals, but of family and tribal histories, genealogies, legends, folktales, and myths, all of which were stored in the memories of individuals whose responsibility it was to maintain this knowledge and who handed it down from generation to generation.
It is almost impossible to imagine such a world today: one without books or calendars or accounts, never mind the Internet, one in which nothing has ever been documented and all the information that can be possessed is held in the minds of a few. But literacy has emerged only in the past five or six thousand years, and for most of human history this was how knowledge was stored and communicated. The advent of writing is often seen as one of the watershed developments in human history, and it can be argued that the presence or absence of writing shapes cultures in fundamental ways—some would even say it shapes consciousness itself. But even if that is too great a claim, it is certainly true that the ability to document what is known changes the way knowledge is constructed, including the kinds of information that can be transmitted and the shape that information takes.
In an oral culture, the single most important consideration is the conservation of essential knowledge, and many of the most distinctive characteristics of oral traditions are qualities that make them easier to remember. Oral traditions are often chanted or sung and exhibit distinctive rhythmical or rhetorical qualities that make them easier to retain. They often contain formulaic elements; the Homeric epithets—wily Odysseus, the wine-dark sea—are classic examples. They are frequently marked by a high degree of redundancy and repetition, particularly around significant concepts and ritual behavior—which is why in Homer there is so much pouring of water and wine and burning of thighbones wrapped in fat. By the same token, anything that becomes culturally unimportant can easily disappear. Although oral traditions often seem focused on the past, they are actually quite present-centered. In an oral culture, only what matters to the living is retained.
Historically, when people from literate cultures came into contact with people from oral ones, the former were often astonished by how much the latter could recall. This was certainly true in the nineteenth-century Pacific, where Europeans reported prodigious feats of memory on the part of Polynesians. One Māori man from New Zealand was reported as having dictated eleven volumes of traditional material entirely from memory, “and that at a very advanced age”; another was able to recite the genealogical descent of every member of his tribe going back thirty-four generations; a third dictated a genealogy consisting of nearly two thousand names. Still, there is an upper limit to what any single person can remember, and modern studies of nonliterate cultures have shown that even the most remarkable feats of memorization are not exact. Unlike writing, which fixes words in a given sequence, oral traditions can never be said to be “archival.” They are fluid and mutable and change over time, both accidentally—in the way that anything repeated over
and over again changes—and strategically, in response to people’s evolving experience and needs.
This means that there are no canonical versions, no truest or most correct account of the creation of the universe, or the origin of fire, or the snaring and slowing of the sun. Instead there exist a multitude of variants, which differ not only from archipelago to archipelago but from island to island, tribe to tribe, even priest to priest. Efforts to document these traditions, such as those undertaken by Europeans in the nineteenth-century Pacific, can therefore never capture more than a slice or cross section of the whole. A written account—compiled at a particular moment in a particular place from a particular person or group of people—is by definition neither definitive nor complete. And one consequence of reducing oral traditions to written texts is the fixing of particular versions, which then tend to become canonical with the passage of time—a point that many Polynesian chiefs and priests appreciated.
AS THE NUMBER of oral cultures in the world has diminished, interest in them has grown, and one of the most intriguing questions is whether there might be such a thing as an oral way of seeing, a worldview common to oral peoples that might be different in some generalizable way from the worldview of people in cultures with writing. One idea that seems intuitively correct is that knowledge in an oral culture remains “close to the living human lifeworld,” that is, embodied in the world of experience and things.
In a famous study from the 1930s that seems to support this idea, nonliterate subjects from remote regions of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan were asked to identify a series of geometric figures. Instead of using abstract terms like “circle” or “square,” they referred to familiar objects: “A circle would be called a plate, sieve, bucket, watch, or moon; a square would be called a mirror, door, house, apricot-drying board.” In another experiment, informants were asked to group four objects, three of which belonged to a single category. They consistently analyzed the objects not in terms of the categories that the researchers had in mind but in terms of practical situations—how one might actually use the objects in the real world. Presented with pictures of a hammer, saw, log, and hatchet, one informant said, “They’re all alike. The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces. If one of these has to go, I’d throw out the hatchet. It doesn’t do as good a job as a saw.” When it was suggested that the hammer, saw, and hatchet belonged together because they were all tools and that the log belonged to a different category, the informant replied, “Yes, but even if we have the tools, we still need wood—otherwise we can’t build anything.” Not only is the knowledge organized in terms of real-life situations, but the situations themselves imply action, and so the whole cluster of ideas is embedded in a kind of story. The wood and the tools are not just things; they are things that someone is going to use. They matter because they are part of a human drama about building something that someone actually needs.
Of course, many people, reading this, will immediately think of some practically minded person they know who would have responded exactly like the Uzbek carpenter. (I myself am married to such a person.) But the point is not that such thought patterns disappeared with the advent of writing. On the contrary, many of the characteristics we associate with oral narratives—dramatic storytelling, situational thinking, concrete detail—are central to the way people communicate in literate societies (and essential to good writing, as any creative writing teacher will tell you). But there are other things we take for granted that did not and could not have existed in a world without writing, ways of organizing information that involve too many sequential stages to be held entirely in the mind.
In a world without writing, there are no inventories or statistics; in fact, writing, so far as anyone knows, was invented in order to make accurate lists of commodities like she-goats and oxen and amphorae of wine. There is no “abstractly sequential, classificatory, explanatory examination of phenomena,” no definitions or comprehensive descriptions, no abstract categorization or stated truths. Whole bodies of thought, like geometry, rhetoric, algebra, symbolic logic—indeed, higher mathematics generally—and most of what we call science are impossible in a world without writing. This is not to say that oral peoples do not possess technical knowledge or think abstractly, or that they do not employ “science-like elements of empiricism” in order to solve complex problems. But simply that, by enabling the abstraction of information from its context—distancing the knower from the known—writing may create the conditions for a worldview that privileges objectivity.
Edward S. C. Handy, an anthropologist who spent time in the Marquesas in the 1920s, argued that what he called “subjective and objective reactions”—visions, dreams, divinations, as well as a knowledge of what we would call “verifiable facts”—were “unified” in the minds of the Marquesans, and that from their point of view, no useful distinction could be drawn between them. It is of course possible that Handy was reading into the situation some sense of what he believed Marquesans ought to be like. But there is an interesting story, recorded in New Zealand in 1897 by the linguist and scholar Edward Tregear, that seems to corroborate Handy’s observation.
Tregear was an Englishman who immigrated to New Zealand in the 1860s and found work as a surveyor on the colonial frontier, a circumstance that brought him into contact with many Māori people. He had had a good early education: as a child he had learned both Latin and Greek, and he soon became conversationally fluent in Māori. He eventually went on to become something of a European authority on Polynesian languages, publishing the massive Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary in 1891 and co-founding the Polynesian Society, the preeminent scholarly society for the study of Polynesian cultures in the twentieth century.
One day, wrote Tregear, he was walking along the banks of the Waikato River with a Māori acquaintance when the man volunteered to show him something that “no white man has ever yet seen.” The Māori, whose name was not recorded, guided Tregear away from the riverbank and up a narrow valley until they reached a large conical stone about thirty feet tall. “That is my ancestor, Raukawa,” he said. “He was a giant; he leapt across the Waikato River at the place where Cambridge now stands.”
Tregear recorded that he wanted to understand exactly what his friend meant. “Do you want me to know that this stone was set up in memory of your ancestor and made sacred for him?” he asked. “No,” said the Māori, “this is my ancestor himself.” But Tregear was not satisfied with this answer. “You must know that you are talking nonsense,” he said. “You mean that the stone has been named for Raukawa, or else, perhaps, that your giant forefather was turned into stone by the gods and the petrified hero stands in this spot.” “No,” said the Māori. “That is Raukawa and the red mark”—a patch of red ocher about twenty feet up—“is the place where he was mortally wounded.” Tregear described himself as having been unable to follow the logic of his friend’s thought, but he also felt sure that the man was telling him the truth and that he appeared to believe “in some queer idea of personality in the stone.”
There are many examples in Polynesian traditions of thinking that seems to flow along similar lines—stories, for example, in which an island is described as a fish, or a fish is also a type of stone. Europeans have generally understood such statements to be metaphorical, but Polynesians have often insisted that they were true. Such claims presented a problem for Europeans, whose idea of truth precluded the possibility of a stone being a man or an island being a fish. But Polynesians had their own problems with European categories and with the kinds of stories that Europeans told.
One early missionary report from Tahiti recounted the islanders’ reaction to a dialogue that one of the missionaries had composed. The story, which had been written as an instructional text, involved two imaginary Tahitians, Oomera and Taro, one of whom had just returned from a visit to England with much to relate about his experiences there. Tahitian readers were interested in this, though they were critical of the way the ch
aracters interacted, inquiring after the details of each other’s domestic affairs in a manner that was considered unbecoming. In general, however, they accepted the story of Oomera and Taro—until it was revealed to be a work of fiction. At this point, wrote the missionary, “the enquiry became general—Who was Oomera and who was Taro? where did they live?” When the Tahitians were told that the dialogue was invented, that it was “an allegory constructed as a vehicle for truth,” they were disgusted. “It is a lying book,” they said.
Missionary attempts to translate The Pilgrim’s Progress into Tahitian were similarly confounded. The Tahitians described it as “a very dark book,” not because of its emphasis on the wages of sin but because it “did not relate to any person but was entirely a ‘parau faau,’ figurative account. That is, a tale without foundation.” To the missionaries, the problem was the Tahitians’ failure to grasp the allegory’s message. “They appear destitute of such doubts and fears,” wrote one. “They cannot view sin in its true light, nor feel its burden.” But the Tahitians were focused on something else entirely; in their contempt for the very idea of fiction, they could not see the point of allegory as a form.
Europeans and Polynesians, it would seem, had very different ideas about the purpose of narratives and the relative meanings of “falsehood” and “truth.” For Polynesians, stories that were “made up” were both immoral, as lies, and useless from a practical point of view, containing no trustworthy information. Europeans, on the other hand, considered many Polynesian stories to be either false or incomprehensible because they were inconsistent with the laws of nature and the physical world. The “truth” of what Tregear’s Māori friend told him—that the man, his ancestor Raukawa, and the rock were all part of the same living continuum—could not be squared with the kind of “truth” that Tregear—who saw the Māori as alive, the ancestor as dead, and the rock as inanimate—could accept or understand.
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