The origin would be the Malay word barang, ‘thing, object, goods, article, commodity, luggage’, adopted by Tongans who would have heard it from Tasman’s crew in 1643 (Geraghty and Tent 2001). The word is well attested to in 17^th century Malay. There were, most probably, Malay-speaking crew members on Tasman’s ships. In those years the Dutch sailors themselves had adopted a number of local Malay words in their everyday language. Thus it is highly probable that, in 1643, the Tongans heard from the Dutch that the gifts handed over to them (cloth, beads, iron tools, etc.) were ‘barang’. The phonological transformation to *pala(n)gi, vala(n)gi in the West-Polynesia-and-Fiji region is regular (ibid. : 190-9). One unsolved problem rests with the reduplication of pa-, but there are several possible explanations (ibid. : 199-200). One may also raise the question: did the story of our word papāla(n)gi begin with Tasman and not with LeMaire (or even the Spaniards in the Tuamotus, since we cannot exclude the possibility that the word was coined by Polynesians themselves)? While it is correct that the Tongans whom Cook met seemed to have mentioned only Tasman’s passage, it is reasonable to assume that the impacts of events at sea during LeMaire’s pasage (the killings and the handing over of various ‘trinkets’) would have induced the inhabitants to coin a word for the creatures they encountered. Could the ‘barang hypothesis’ be applied retrospectively to the 1616 events?

Irrespective of the Tasman/LeMaire question, the strongest argument for the ‘barang hypothesis’ is the existence of several passages, in early and late European journals and in early word-lists, that indicate without a doubt that our word papāla(n)gi was used locally to refer to a variety of European goods (ibid.: 192-4):

—‘European cloth’ (explicitly distinguished from local cloth) : Tonga (four recordings by Cook’s companions in 1773 for *pālāngho, palangee, babba’langa, papalangee, one by Malaspina in 1793 for *papaa-langui, one by Labillardière, 1793, for *papalangui) and Samoa (19th-century missionaries’ dictionary for āpāpālagi, āpapalagi); there is also this rather odd translation offered by Cook in 1777: ‘that two ships, (‘Towacka no papalangie’) like ours had once been at the island. For what reason I know not, but they call our Ships Towacka no papalangie and us Tangata no papalangie; that is cloth ships and cloth men’ (Beaglehole 1955-67, III: 178). Whether Cook was right or wrong in his translation of that phrase (see below), it is clear that he knew of a Tongan word *papalangie referring to ‘cloth’. It is possible that the Fijian word vāvālagi should also be included as an example for the gloss of ‘European cloth’ (the case rests on an interpretation of a poetic text related to an event of 1800) (Geraghty and Tent 2001: 195-7).

—‘European manufactures, goods’ (including cloth): Tonga (Mariner, Dumont d’Urville): *papalagi, papa langui.

—‘broken glass’: Tuvalu; ‘beads’: Rotuma, for (respectively) pāpalagi and papalagi (from dictionaries).

—‘iron’: Marquesas: three references, from 1773 to 1840 for *papa’annëë, pappa ane, papa-ani; metal: Nukuoro/Kapingamarangi and Mokil for (respectively) baalanga and pahrang (ibid.: 193-4). From the Marquesan case, the authors are able to suggest that this word spread in Eastern Polynesia in a truncated form and resulted in all the papā, papa’a, papa’ā and popa’ā forms that are used to designate the ‘Europeans’ (ibid.: 200).

By the early nineteenth century everywhere in Western Polynesia and Fiji papāla(n)gi is recorded as referring also or only to Europeans as persons and to the place of origin of Europeans (ibid.: 171-5). It is not difficult to agree with the authors that, by that time, the meaning of the word had expanded from ‘European goods (given in first contacts)’ to Europeans themselves and to their world. It is important to note, however, that this extension had already taken place by the time of Cook’s voyages. The translation given by Cook as ‘cloth ships’ and ‘cloth men’ is not accurate. Although it is presented by Geraghty and Tent in the opening of their analysis, certainly to attract the reader’s attention to an etymology based on ‘cloth’ (ibid.: 172), it cannot account for what Cook heard as *Towacka no papalangie and *Tangata no papalangie. As I have said, the presence of ‘no’ obliges us to understand that the Tongans were talking of the boats and the people ‘originating from the Papalangie’. Whatever they imagined this Papalangie to be, it could not have been just ‘cloth’. They could not have meant ‘the people originating from the cloth’. Rather, the meaning had to be something like the ‘boats of the people of the place of these [wonderful] goods’ and, in the second case, ‘the people of the place of these goods’. Considering this argument, it is remarkable that Mariner tells us that in Tonga the word papalagi, as he heard it in the years 1806 to 1808, meant ‘White people, Europeans’ (and, in one occurrence, the ‘place of origin of the Europeans’) as well as ‘European manufactures such as cloth, linen, etc.’); the same remark is made by Dumont d’Urville in 1827 (Geraghty and Tent 2001: 171, 173, 193).

The discussion based on linguistics must rest at this point. The ‘barang etymology hypothesis’ is very appealing, not only for the linguistic reasons that the authors presented in detail and that I have summarised here, but also for anthropological reasons.

All the previous chapters which analysed the scene of first contacts in Polynesia have shown us the extent to which, on each side of the encounter, the interpretation of the nature of the Other rested on the interpretation of the gifts offered by this Other. The interpretation of the nature of the objects given and the interpretation of the reasons and the manner of giving them were critical to any conclusion or understanding that was reached regarding the people involved. The three main categories of European objects that produced a rich variety of Polynesian interpretations during the first encounters were of course cloth, glass beads and iron tools—i.e. the three specific (early or evolved) meanings of our word papāla(n)gi noted by Geraghty and Tent. That the whole linguistic story may have begun around the gifts of cloth on Tongan shores is indeed a particularly welcome example of what we have seen in the previous chapter on the role of cloth in first contacts in Polynesia.

Still, the ‘barang etymology’ is only a hypothesis. The only certitude is that (i) if the origin is a Polynesian one, it is papa+lagi with a reference to the ‘sky’, and (ii) if the origin is foreign, the ‘barang hypothesis’ is a very appealing possibility.

More generally, Geraghty and Tent’s analysis is another strong illustration of the benefits of the multidisciplinary method that is required for all ethnohistorical Polynesian studies (Kirch and Green 2001),^[8] at least when the anthropological discussion takes into account the two sides of the encounter, just as the linguistic approach must do. But, at some point, our two analysts of the etymology of papāla(n)gi have forgotten this imperative.

Geraghty and Tent’s data as well as data provided in dictionaries show that, if indeed the origin is the word barang, the early meaning of ‘European cloth or goods’ had been forgotten by Polynesian speakers of the early 19th century, perhaps even as early as the late 18th century or even earlier. The Samoan and other occurrences of papālagi in documents of the early (and later) 19th century never refer to meanings such as ‘cloth’ or ‘goods’, and we know that in Samoa other words were used to refer to European goods and to European and indigenous cloth (’oloa, ’ie, ’ie toga, etc.).^[9] We cannot know if the double meaning of both ‘European people’ and ‘European goods’, noted for Tongan usage by Mariner and Dumont d’Urville, was still explicit and transparent for Tongan speakers or whether the two European observers had simply noted two meanings for what they heard as the same phonological unit. It is clear, however, that by 1840 in Samoa the double meaning for a single word of this sort did not exist (Turner who wrote many pages on gifts of cloth and who commented on the ‘sky-bursters’ would have noted this strange coincidence). This implies that by that time, a word papālagi, ‘Europeans’, was used without any known etymology (if the origin were the 17th-century barang, there was no memory of it) and there was room, therefore, for an indigenous folk etymology of the word papālagi as ‘the people [or the side, or the people of the side] of the sky’, based on papa+lagi.

Geraghty and Tent do not raise the issue in this way. After having noted the very early meanings of ‘cloth, goods’ and the later meaning of ‘Europeans’, and after commenting that such a semantic extension is easily understandable, they remark that in European writings from the 1790s (e.g., George Vason in Tonga) onwards up until the present, it was first proposed and then assumed (by early voyagers and residents, later by missionaries and scholars, some of them linguists) that the etymology of papāla(n)gi is something like ‘people of the sky’; or in adjective form ‘pertaining to people of the sky’. Indeed, all these writers proposed etymologies of this kind. In the Samoan case, it was ‘sky-bursters’. The idea of ‘bursting’ proved to be entirely Eurocentric. Geraghty and Tent now assume that the notion of ‘sky’ is also a purely European invention and what is more, that it can only be so. They suggest that the first such invention could have been made by Vason in 1797 in Tonga (Geraghty and Tent 2001: 173).

Given this assumption, they then question why Europeans invented such ‘spurious etymologies implying that the Polynesians and Fijians viewed Europeans as gods’. Leaving to ‘historians’ to find out why such etymologies have become ‘so overwhelmingly popular in the literature of the past two centuries’ (ibid.: 203), they still attempt an answer to why the etymology was proposed in the first place. They claim that the obvious reason is ‘the European presumption of superiority’ (which made Europeans think that the indigenous population had seen them as gods) and add that ‘a case in point is Captain James Cook’. Suddenly departing the linguistic ground, Geraghty and Tent raise the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate, refer to the claim that ‘Cook being an incarnation of Lono is a Western inspired-myth’ and open a discussion on the prevailing ‘misunderstanding’ which makes numerous scholars, among them ‘Beaglehole, Malo… and Sahlins’, assume that ‘early European visitors were deified’ (ibid.: 185-9).

In developing this argument, the authors commit two errors. First, they repeat the very same misinterpretation of Marshall Sahlins’s position that was made by Obeyesekere and others. We know now from chapter 9 the biases and ambiguities that have accumulated around this idea of ‘deification’ and the mistranslations of atua. It is regrettable that Geraghty and Tent found the need to refer to the critiques of Sahlins by Obeyesekere (1992) and Bergendorff (et al. 1988) in order to dismiss any discussion of etymologies of papālagi as people of ‘the sky’. It is all the more curious that they themselves offer the same critique I made with regard to the word atua, when they discuss the example of the Fijian word kalou (Geraghty and Tent 2001: 186). Europeans of the time as well as some contemporary scholars did indeed misunderstand the meaning of atua, kalou, etc. This does not mean that one should disregard the fact that indigenous people did apply these terms to Europeans or that one should not try to understand what they meant by doing so.

The second error Geraghty and Tent commit is that by ascribing the ‘sky’ etymologies to a Western-inspired myth of first contacts with Polynesians, they dispossess the Polynesians of their own (possible) interpretation of the word papālagi, once the first meaning had been forgotten or obscured through the process of semantic expansion (from ‘European goods’ to ‘Europeans’). It may very well be that Vason was the first to see the morpheme lagi with the meaning ‘sky’ in the word, or it may not. It is certainly true that the idea of ‘bursting through (the sky)’ was invented by LMS missionaries. But would that invention have been adopted by Samoans so easily if the Samoans themselves had not heard in the component lagi the meaning ‘sky’? Geraghty and Tent are neglecting the Polynesian and Fijian ideas that were expressed repeatedly during first contacts, namely that the Europeans, whatever their nature, travelled by ‘boats of/originating from Tagaroa’ and that they had passed ‘near the sun’.^[10] When residents such as Vason or Mariner, who were linguistically well integrated into the local population, assumed the presence of a reference to the ‘sky’ in the word papālagi when used by indigenous speakers, as the missionaries did in Samoa (even if the latter added the mistaken meaning of ‘bursting through’), it is highly probable that they had discussed this point with their local friends. This, in turn, implies that their interlocutors did not contradict them on this point.

I think we can maintain the hypothesis that an indigenous (and not only European) folk etymology of the word papāla(n)gi as somehow referring to the ‘sky’ may have been operating since the early 19th century and probably earlier. We can leave open the discussion as to how much this indigenous interpretation appeared within a dialogue held locally with the first European visitors and residents, and later the first missionaries, all of whom had indeed, as Christians, a ‘sky’-oriented cosmology and who, from the late 19th century onwards, became prone, erroneously, to attribute to the inhabitants a view of the ‘divinity’ of the first Europeans. The critical point is, however, that the two sides of this dialogue did not mean the same thing at all when talking of ‘lagi’ and ‘Sky’ and of ‘atua’ and ‘God’. Not only their views of the cosmos, but their entire conception of time and space were very different (Tcherkézoff 1998b).

In sum, the discussion of the ethno-historical-linguistic uses of papālagi should not be linked to the biased Bergendorff-Obeyesekere discussion of the ‘divinity of Captain Cook’. In the same way that the Polynesians applied the word atua to Europeans they may very well have reinterpreted papālagi on the basis of the component –lagi, with or without the influence of external teachers; or they may have coined the word from the start, using the two morphemes papa+lagi (since the ‘barang hypothesis’, attractive as it is, is still only a hypothesis). Raising the possibility that they could have done so by no means amounts to adopting the position which Obeyesekere sees as ‘the Western myth of the Europeans’ “divinity”’ (and one where Sahlins never happened to stand).