Chapter 9. ‘On the boat of Tangaroa’. Humanity and divinity in Polynesian-European first contacts: a reconsideration^[1]

The story of the first encounters between Polynesians and Europeans has, until now, only been told by Europeans, or more generally by Westerners. That is why, too often, it is subject to two main qualifications. First of all the perspective from which the encounters are viewed is one-sided. The ‘discovery’ in question is made by voyagers who set sail one day from the Thames, or from the coast of Brittany, for the Pacific. But what was the other significant discovery that resulted from these voyages, the discovery that the Polynesians were forced to make at the same time? Samoan voices from this time cannot speak to us now, but in Part One I have tried to provide some answers to the question of the nature of the Samoan response to first contacts using an ethnohistorical methodology. This involves critically re-reading the European narratives and looking at both the early and the contemporary ethnographic accounts for clarification and confirmation.

But there is a second qualification. Too often the objective or analytical viewpoint is just as one-sided. The analytical grid applied to the observations contained in the accounts from this period, whether these come from Polynesians or Europeans, is based on the assumption that all the protagonists had exactly the same thought processes as those of Westerners of the modern period (1750-1970) when they conceived possible relationships to the Other, namely as a relationship of either exclusion or assimilation. What risks being overlooked here is that the Polynesians at that time had adopted a different model of alterity and identity which allowed the integration of every sort of difference into the social structure as a whole by assigning each one to a particular hierarchical level of the same encompassing whole.

For the Westerner, everything comes down to mutually exclusive alternatives, the binary logic of ‘either/or’: man or beast; divine or human; civilised or savage; pristine ‘state of nature’ (the Noble Savage, typical example: the Polynesians) or fallen humanity living in a state of misery (typical example: the Patagonians in Tierra del Fuego, the ‘Hottentots’ in southern Africa, or the ‘New-Hollanders’ [Australians] in the 18th-century versions of Dampier, Buffon, de Brosses, Bougainville or Forster). But for the Polynesians everything was a question of integration and of the relationship between a whole and its different parts, as contradictory as the relationship of identity might seem. A god was an invisible whole and every visible manifestation of this god was a partial form of that whole. A chief was thus a partial form of a god. A new creature could just as easily be a visible form of the divine or meaningless and virtually non-existent.

Which of these two poles did the Polynesian interpretation of the European Others tend towards? It turns out that when the Europeans appeared on the scene particular attention was paid to the colour of their skin. The ‘whiteness’ of their skin seemed to take its luminosity from the light of the sun. And there were all the things that came with that whiteness: their boats, their weapons, their tools and, last but not least, their clothes. Therefore the place that the Europeans were assigned was with the gods rather than with the meaningless creatures. Western Polynesia provides a particularly good example. In Samoa, if the newcomers, whose whiteness of skin seemed to have something of the nature of the sunlight, were considered as partial forms of the ‘luminous’ superhuman world, men whose skin was black (inhabitants of the Solomon Islands for example) who appeared much later (they were brought to Samoa during the 19th century by German colonisers to work on the plantations) were described as ‘black living things’, where the term ‘living things’ (mea ola) applies to the whole of the biosphere and, significantly, makes no distinction between men and animals.^[2] The two kinds of strangers were each designated as ‘other’ in relation to Samoan identity, but differently other, occupying quite different places in the Samoan conception of alterity.

In these first contacts, there were indeed two discoveries operating simultaneously, as we saw in Part One. But we must also understand that the looks and perceptions that intersected during these first contacts each stemmed from a very different vision of the Other. On one side—for the Polynesians—it was a question of the level of integration into one encompassing whole (the cosmos). I shall give a number of different examples in the following pages where I concentrate on the Polynesian perspective. On the other side—for the Europeans—everything was black or white, the same or different, good or bad, from their ‘world’ or from ‘another world’. Thus Europeans were most likely to assimilate Polynesians whom they judged ‘good’ (before 1787) and ‘almost as white as Europeans’, and to deny similar human status to Melanesians, ‘black as Negroes’, and thought to be incapable of establishing ‘civilised’ societies. But that is another story, the whole misconception by which Western scientists misconstrued ‘Oceania’ as peopled by ‘two races’ (Tcherkézoff 2003a). What also needs to be recovered is the nature of the Polynesian construction—as well as misconstruing—of Europeans.

One thing is certain: the islanders did not simply take the newcomers for ‘men’, ta(n)gata, and nothing more. At least, they did not use this word. They used words that were applicable to gods, spirits, and ritual objects (atua, tupua; kalou in the Fijian archipelago) or alternatively, when they spoke of ‘men’, they added ‘men who belong to, or come from, the Papālagi’ (Tongan words collected by Cook in 1777; see chapter 11 for discussion of the meaning of the term Papālagi). This was because the Polynesians only knew men like themselves (those who inhabited all the Polynesian archipelagos and the Fijian islands as well as part of Micronesia). Something else is certain as well: in most cases, the islanders did not see the newcomers as monsters who needed to be cast out or destroyed as quickly as possible. There was in fact a desire to integrate them and to capture some of their powers, since the predominant interpretation placed these new arrivals on the side of the ‘sun’, as we shall see. In a civilisation where, for the pre-Christian period, we can talk about a sun cult (Tcherkézoff 2003b: chapter 1), such a desire was quite understandable.

Neither just ‘men’, nor meaningless creatures, nor monsters: this was the taxonomic dilemma posed by the newcomers. The only possibility, therefore, was to make use of the other categories that already existed: gods who created the world, local gods, ancestors, spirits like ghosts, sprites and goblins, and so on. But there was no category that corresponded exactly to what the Polynesians had before their very eyes. Integration therefore involved a simultaneous process of intellectual inquiry and taxonomic innovation.

One famous case has been studied in great detail, that of the arrival of Captain Cook in Hawaii in 1778. Marshall Sahlins has shown how James Cook was taken for a manifestation, but one that was partial and new, of the Hawaiian god Lono: an ‘image of Lono’, a ‘body’ (kino) of Lono, a visible aspect of an encompassing principle Lono, a ‘refraction of the inclusive Lono’ (Sahlins 1981, 1985a, 1989: 384-5). The archival sources make this quite clear: Cook was called ‘Lono’ on a number of occasions by the Hawaiians and he was manipulated in ceremonies in the same way that certain images of Lono were normally manipulated in the rites of the ceremonial cycle devoted to this god. In sum, Cook was taken ‘for Lono’. But what we need to understand is this: he was taken for a visible and therefore partial manifestation of Lono. No doubt it was a manifestation that was somewhat unexpected, but the logic of the whole to its parts that regulates the relationship between the divine encompassing principle as invisible and its visible forms allows, by definition, for the possibility of an infinite variety of visible manifestations.

To say that Cook was taken for a god can be confusing to those who are not aware of the fluidity of the Polynesian pantheon. Every ‘god’ in the pantheon is a partial form of the beginning of the world and of the great demiurge, at the same time as it already contains the seeds of all human forms to come. Furthermore, these gods become manifest in the form of images. Lono would traverse the main island each year at exactly the same time in the guise of a large white barkcloth decorated in a special way. Sahlins has shown that Captain Cook was another of these images of Lono: ‘Cook indeed became the image of Lono, a duplicate of the crosspiece icon (constructed of wood staves) which is the appearance of the god’ (1985a: 105). When the rite was over the image was destroyed. And when Cook returned to the island outside this ritual period, he too was destroyed. But ‘Lono’ is immortal, by definition, and each year he would reappear in a new form. And so it was that having killed Captain Cook-image-of-Lono the Hawaiians asked the English to tell them the date that Cook would come back to visit them.

Sahlins’s book Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981), whose title is rich in layers of meaning, was published some years ago now. There, and in other texts that had appeared earlier, and subsequently, Sahlins has developed his exposition of this particular case (1979, 1985a: chapters 1, 3, 4, 5). This Hawaiian assimilation of Captain Cook was a ‘historical metaphor’. It had serious consequences. Sahlins explained the ritual acts performed on Cook by the Hawaiians after they had led him into a temple, and the fate that they had in store for him when he and his expedition, having left the archipelago as Lono did each year after the ceremonies of the New Year, returned unexpectedly (to repair a mast). This return of Lono at a date when, in the normal course of events, he would have retired again to the island of the dead, leaving the main ceremonial role to the king, servant of the god Kū, amounted to a provocation in relation to Kū. It caused a battle in which Cook died. But this metaphor Cook=Lono, with the historical consequences that ensued, namely the death of Cook, immediately became a ‘mythical reality’. The Hawaiians hoped that Cook ‘would return soon’ and put this question of his return to the Europeans who landed there after him. At the same time, Cook’s incorporation into the Hawaiian superhuman realm set up the interpretive framework that Hawaiians built around the newcomers and their objects during the visits of the other European expeditions which were not slow in following. A new reality modified the whole of the Hawaiian interpretative structure, even if that structure remained ‘mythical’.

Discussion about the various convergences between Cook’s stay in Hawaii and the ritual cycle built around the god Lono is a matter for those with specialist knowledge of the Hawaiian sources (Sahlins 1989, 1991). A number of significant issues are open for discussion here. A more general but nonetheless quite spurious debate has arisen in relation to a purportedly radical critique of Sahlins’s position. According to this critique, to claim that the Hawaiians were unintelligent enough to believe that a group of men, albeit of quite different appearance, were their gods who were returning to them and for once were appearing before them in flesh and blood, is the kind of proposition revealing yet again that the social sciences are nothing but a Western ethnocentric discourse. Because, as the argument goes, this amounts to affirming once again that non-Westerners are just overgrown children who, driven by pre-logical thinking that is mystical and irrational, will, at the drop of a hat, jump to conclusions that are patently absurd. Only a Westerner could demonstrate such contempt, thereby prolonging the economic and ideological imperialism of the past two centuries.

An anthropologist of Sri Lankan origin, Gananath Obeyesekere, who teaches in the United States but has never done work in Oceania or written about this field of research, has become the champion of this position by claiming that his status as a non-Westerner has allowed him to perceive and reveal this Western manner of ‘mythifying’ other cultures. In 1992 he published The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European mythmaking in the Pacific. For Obeyesekere, Sahlins’s theory about a deification of Cook by the Hawaiians is yet another example of the countless fantasies that Europeans have conceived about Pacific peoples and all such exotic ‘natives’. Sahlins’s analysis is just an extension of the manner in which Westerners have always condescendingly interpreted the cultural representations of exotic peoples. Moreover, the critic, on the grounds that he is of Asian origin, claims to be in a better position to analyse Polynesian history than a Westerner.^[3]

It is clear that we have to reject the notion that Obeyesekere could have, a priori, a point of view closer to the ‘native’ one just because he is not a Westerner. Have we reached the point where it is birth certificates that confer or withhold the right to talk about cultures other than our own? How starkly Obeyesekere’s treatment of this episode of Polynesian history represents a new version of Orientalism! Indeed, Obeyesekere invokes the history of India and Southeast Asia to define his position in relation to the Polynesian case. To support his argument he calls upon the absence of facts similar to the situation as Sahlins reconstructed it—or, that is, as Obeyesekere (over)interprets Sahlins’s reconstruction. No Eastern history source indicates, he says, that men mistook other men for gods:

This position has nothing to do with the historical anthropology of Polynesia. Rather it relates solely to the concerns of the members of certain Western intellectual milieux^[4] who, as in Obeyesekere’s case, demonstrate their inability to conceive of cultural difference without wanting to assimilate and reduce that difference. Because of course the notion of ‘divinity’ they have in mind is that of the Christian West—or of a certain Orientalism in which ‘Eastern religions’ are redefined and forced into the mould of Western binary logic (human or divine). How can one seriously mount an argument by making a comparison of this sort? For several millennia the history of this South Asian region of the world has been one of migrations, conquests, and the appearance of peoples speaking an unknown language. The idea of the existence of different peoples had long been a familiar one throughout the region. But, at the same time, the Hawaiians, like all the inhabitants of Eastern Polynesia, had only seen and known men like themselves, neighbouring peoples whose languages were closely related, since the settlement of their islands by the Eastern Polynesians a thousand years ago, and after the Western Polynesians (and the Eastern Fijians) had colonised the previously uninhabited western islands one or two thousand years earlier. It is therefore necessary to accept the hypothesis that, in the Polynesian case, the appearance of creatures who were totally different has given rise to particular interpretations and responses that were drawn from the non-human world.

We must also inquire into the way in which the Polynesians conceived the non-human. The logic operating here was not necessarily based on that of distinctive opposition. We can see Obeyesekere’s sleight of hand in placing on the same level of equivalence a fact reported by Sahlins and attested to in the relevant documents—‘they called him Lono’—and an abrupt summary of Sahlins’s analysis—‘he was their god Lono’—, as if this latter statement of identity were self-evident and did not demand precisely that the Polynesian relationship to the divine (‘to be a god’) be differentiated from other similar relationships in other cultures. Obeyesekere is unaware that in this broad Polynesian terrain the notion of atua—which signifies ‘god’ but also, if I may offer a definition, ‘every person or thing presenting a mysterious aspect and to which one attributes the productive power of mana’—has no more to do with the Western-Christian notion of ‘divine’ than it has to do with the gods of India or Southeast Asia. But we still need to use the word ‘god’ for Lono, Kū, Tangaroa, and so on as there is not another more appropriate term. Furthermore, Obeyesekere does not seem to realise that the Hawaiians, like all the peoples of the earth, only knew their gods through the ‘images’ that they themselves made of them for their rituals. The interpretation of Cook’s arrival was subject to this same way of thinking. Thus the sails of the European boats bore a strong resemblance to the image of the god Lono which was carried around to be displayed throughout the island during the ritual (the white barkcloth fixed to a wooden frame).

There is no point in devoting any more attention to this critique of Obeyesekere’s. But it does serve to remind us once again of the extent to which Western scientific thought falls so easily into the trap of dichotomous thinking: exclusion/assimilation (Tcherkézoff 1987). Some exclude: in Obeyesekere’s view that would be Sahlins’s attitude. Others assimilate: that is in fact Obeyesekere’s attitude when he forcibly assimilates Polynesian cosmology to a Western (or ‘Oriental’) one in which the divine is irrevocably cut off from the human world, as it is for Westerners or in what Westerners call ‘Oriental’ thought (this category being itself constructed by Westerners in what is a mixture of straightforward oppositions and naive assimilations to a Western model).

Let us leave all of this aside and try to rediscover what happened in that last third of the 18th century when this scenario was being played out. I am going to refer here to other cases than the Hawaiian one and use as supporting evidence what we already know from the Samoan example.

These cases reveal that the Polynesians asked themselves more questions than they formulated answers, just as the Amerindians did two and a half centuries earlier when facing the Spanish conquest. Sometimes the answer that was given to these questions was ambiguous. When we look more closely at the linguistic forms used at the time to formulate ideas about the newcomers, we can see that the Europeans were indeed taken for superhuman beings—there is no doubt about it—but as envoys and representatives, in a rather new form, of the great creator (often the god in question was Tangaroa). The newness of the form was no obstacle: Tangaroa (literally ‘the Unlimited’) had unlimited powers of innovation. The newcomers were neither gods nor ancestors properly speaking, then, but a partial form of these higher powers.