As a fine mat carries the idea of the permanence and history of a whole social group, it is not surprising that such mats retain the power to give life. Here again we come back to Mauss who had stressed in The Gift that those specific objects of gift exchange were at the same time a ‘property owned’ by the givers’ group and a general ‘talisman’, beneficial to everyone—and certainly to the recipient of the gift—because, being a symbol of a family group, they somehow possess a life-giving power.

Indeed, in Samoa, one can accomplish miracles with mats of this sort. According to the legends, such miracles can be acts of curing, bringing someone back to life, victory at war, and so on. One very tangible miracle can still be observed today: mats provide sanctuary. A person who has committed a murder or a serious insult (the culprit or the chief of the family group to whom the culprit belongs) can save his life by wrapping himself in a mat. To this ritual act are linked numerous legends about the first fine mat that saved the lives of Samoans held prisoner by Tongans (Tcherkézoff 2002). Until the 1950s, a mat or a length of tapa could be used to recover the soul, if a person had been lost at sea for example (or, before 1900, had fallen in battle and been beheaded), thus allowing funeral ceremonies to take place. In such cases, a fine mat or a tapa was spread out near the sea or at the place of battle. The first insect to crawl on it would be said to represent the will of the soul of the dead man to come to his resting place. Some of the legends also mention bones that, wrapped in tapa or mats, have come back to life. Rituals have the same effect (according to accounts from the 1960s). If descendants are bothered too often by the soul of a dead person, they dig up the bones, wash them, and wrap them up again in a tapa or a fine mat. In the neighbouring Tokelau culture, early observers found that an altar used to invoke a divinity took the form of an ‘upright stone wrapped in fine mats’ (Huntsman and Hooper 1996: 146). In Hawaii and Tahiti, tapa wrapped around images of the gods played much the same role (Valeri 1985; Babadzan 1993, 2003).

Fine mats and tapa were, and are, used in Polynesian ritual as efficacious objects, meaning that they may create or reveal—by wrapping-up—the presence of the sacred in a given place. Elsewhere this function may be fulfilled by an animal: pigs in Melanesia; sacred cows in East Africa and India; copper objects on the west coast of North America. In Polynesia it was and is cloth. A good summary of how this operated in Polynesian culture is provided by the custom of the Lau islands (far eastern Fiji) in relation to cloth:

When Europeans appeared on the scene, they unknowingly entered this ‘wrapping-up’ system. In early cross-cultural encounters what Europeans call ‘cloth’ played a prominent and instant role in the interaction between Europeans and Polynesians. Guns and metal tools were also important, as we have already noted, and served to inflict both physical harm and cultural shock. Both sides perpetrated violent acts. When Polynesians attempted to appropriate these guns and tools, Europeans responded by avenging what they perceived to be acts of ‘theft’ and ‘hostility’. Many fights would ensue until, in the 19^th century, guns and tools became common in the islands and objects of trade. By contrast, and despite the considerable misunderstandings involved, cloth became instantly and pacifically an instrument of interaction. Coincidentally, covering the body in layers of cloth was a common sign of status. In the case of the Polynesians, these layers consisted of tapa and mats; in the case of the Europeans, the layers were the shirt, waistcoat, jacket and topcoat that distinguished the captain from the officers and the officers from the rest of the crew. This was a point of connection. The Polynesians recognised the captains, and the Europeans recognised the chiefs, whose bodies were sometimes entirely covered with mats and tapa, whereas their followers were only lightly dressed, and were often bare-chested as a sign of respect for their chief who was heavily dressed (we will discuss the logic behind this contrast below).

Of course, the Europeans did not realise that they had come to a civilisation where the established practice for initiating contact between strangers was to make a presentation of cloth to wrap around the body of the visitor. For instance, in past and contemporary Samoan practice, when a traveller arrives from another village, territory or island, he must offer his ‘services’ (tautua) and present food, or, today, food and money. He presents himself as someone who is ready to serve the local chief. In return he is presented with a fine mat (and money), or elsewhere (as in Tonga) with a gift of tapa. Such reciprocity works on two levels. For his part the host indicates that he considers the incoming stranger is ‘superior’ (malo) by presenting him with his most precious valuables. But the act of presenting cloth is also a means of enveloping and thereby incorporating the stranger. For, as a stranger, the new arrival must be incorporated, and whatever sacred powers he possesses must be domesticated and contained: the ‘untouchable’, tapu, must be made ‘touchable’, noa.

As other studies have indicated (Sahlins 1985a, 1985b; Valeri 1985; Babadzan 1993; Gell 1993: 125-40), Polynesian ritual played upon the duality of the exterior world (Po) that was wild, nocturnal, but vital, since it was the primordial world and as such the source of life; and the interior, domestic and diurnal world of light (Ao). Yet the existence of this diurnal world depended upon the degree to which one had domesticated the sources of light and life. It seems to me that the primary attribute of Polynesian cloth was precisely that it enabled people to capture, contain and release the sacred through procedures of re-covering and uncovering.

These actions served to obscure the source of life and at the same time they revealed its effects. One cannot stare at the sun—just as in the past one could not stare at a sacred chief—for fear of burning one’s eyes. I have discussed the importance of the hierarchy of light and visibility in the Hawaiian case (chapter 9). But there had to be a means for this source of light to be made manifest on earth. This is why cloth was/is so often conceived of by Polynesians as being ‘white’ and ‘luminous’ (in Samoa, fine mats can be called ceremonially mea sina which literally means ‘luminous-white things’).

Thus, in Polynesia, cloth enabled the invisible bodies of the gods to be made manifest. In some other contexts, it revealed women’s wombs, and it provided an analogue for skin. In different regions of the Pacific different permutations of this common symbolic system are accentuated. Bearing in mind that tapa is made from bark, we can recall how, in the Tahitian cosmogony, the appearance of the skin of the first Man—which is what gave shape to what was initially a formless blob—is determined by the various types of barks chosen by the Creator Ta’aroa.^[6] This is why the simple act of wrapping cloth round a stone or an idol or a person transformed them into a manifestation of the gods, rendering them efficacious for ritual or status-oriented acts. This is also why cloth safeguarded life in Samoa: if a culprit was wrapped in fine mats he became untouchable, and if a person was lost at sea, fine mats could be used to bury him or her by proxy. The association between cloth and skin, and acts of dressing and undressing were features of a common symbolic complex.

Here I should emphasise that from the Polynesian point of view the skin covers and obscures the principle of vitality that is carried in the blood.^[7] This principle of vitality is invisible by definition. Blood flowing in the body (the Samoan word is toto) can never be seen. For, when a wound or women’s menstruation makes blood visible, it acquires a different name (palapala). Thus, the vital principle (in Samoa: agaga, mauli) is both invisible by definition and present by definition. Wrapped cloth as a cultural skin, covering the natural one, is itself evidence of this dual and contradictory concept. In some way the use of cloth as an envelope or covering demonstrates that within the body there is indeed, luminous although invisible, a life principle of sacred origin. The act of covering transforms this ideational potentiality into a symbolic social fact.^[8] Once an object or a person is wrapped up in a cloth which is itself defined as a path for the gods (as we saw in the Fijian-Lauan case, see above Bataille-Benguigui), it now becomes certain that sacredness is held there, and it is quite logical that this sacredness remain unseen since it is covered.^[9]

No doubt this is why, in Polynesia, these cloths were and are always presented either rolled up or wrapped around the body. The gift-givers arrive with the cloth wound around them, or with a mat rolled up under one arm. The cloth is spread out and displayed but, above all, the cloth is used to envelop the receiver in turn. The receiver is enveloped, or else the cloth is spread out at his feet or unfurled over the pile of other gifts such as food or tools. Cloth gifts of this kind still occur today throughout Western Polynesia, including the Lau islands in eastern Fiji (Douaire-Marsaudon 1997, Hooper 1982). In the past, the recipient of a gift might have been a god, materialised as a stick or a standing stone, or a chief, or indeed any visitor. The god, the foreign chief, the visitor would have been conceived of by the local people as occupying the dominant position. In rites of welcome, gifts of cloth serve to take into account this superiority and to establish a relationship that is not based on violence but on respect. In other words, these rites facilitate the transformation of an external form of sacredness that is dangerous to touch (tapu, sa, ra’a, mo’a), and render it ‘touchable’ (noa).