Hierarchy and Humanity in Polynesia

Hierarchy and humanity in Polynesia Marshall Sahlins The hero of the Maori legend undergoes a ritual to remove the tapu of death, permitting him to pass out of the state of mourning. Playing the priestly part, his father’s brother stuffs cooked food into the mouths of the images, then recites an incantation that ends: Be thou [god] undermost, While I am uppermost. Give me your mana to strike down. Close tight your spirit-devouring teeth Close tight your man-devouring teeth (Shortland 1882:62). The propitiation is the god’s defeat. But then, cooked food, because it has lost its reproductive cum divine nature, is notoriously polluting. In Polynesian societies, men approach the divine with a curious mixture of submission and hubris, as in the successive phases of a sacrificial procedure that will in the end put the god at a distance and allow men to appropriate nature to their own benefit. I should perhaps say “expropriate”. In the beginning, “everything is full of Jove.” The universe is a gigantic kin, a genealogy. Natural means of human existence are forms or descendants of the god, and social production is a kind of cannibalism generalise. Therefore, the sacrifice involves such deceptions as a pollution in the guise of a propitiation or the symbolic exchange of first-things in return for the whole land. The advantages won from the life-giving gods, however, can only be provisional and are eventually tragical. People die. Hawaiians and New Zealand Maori are at the extremes, north and south, of the Central Polynesian languages and cultures. Yet their cosmic schemes resemble each other closely, to the extent that the divine dramatis personae have the same names as well as analogous functions. The principal difference between them is hierarchy: “The main acting units of Hawaiian mythology are chiefs (or chiefs as em bodiments of qualities belonging to particular genealogical lines),” as Schrempp (manuscript) writes, “while the main acting units of Maori mythology are corporate tribal groups.” I try to show this by compar ing certain relations of Maori agriculture with the Hawaiian New Year 195 196 Marshall Sahlins (Makahiki) Festival, which I argue is the same thing transposed to the register of kingship. I begin by talking about what is common to both: the general cosmic system of production. My mentors for Maori are particularly Johansen (1954, 1958) and Jean Smith (1974); forHawai‘i, Valeri (in press). The great Hawaiian creation chant Kumulipo — “Beginning [-in-] deep-darkness” — marks the origin of the universe by the appearance of the Pleiades (Beckwith 1972). In the annual ceremonial cycle, the rising of the Pleiades at sunset in late autumn signifies the beginning of the Hawaiian year: the rebirth of nature presided over by the fertilising god Lono, who returns at this time from the spiritual domain or homeland of Kahiki. Yet in the Kumulipo chant, neither Lono nor any other determinate god had presided over the Creation. As in many Maori cosmogonies, the world begins in and as generative-spirit-in- itself. This self-reproductive power — or what is the same thing in a stative form, autonomous being — is perhaps the essence of atua ‘Polynesian divinity’. During the long ‘night’ of world-spirit, the epochs of ‘darkness’ or pō in Hawaiian and Maori alike, the work of the universe is a project of sexual reproduction, of which the main entities are themselves figurations. Maori generate the Sky-Father (Rangi) and Earth-Mother (Papa) out of Nothingness (Kore) through a genealogy of Beings whose succession seems to describe human procreation: that is, from Conception to Increase, Swelling, Thought, Memory, Con sciousness, Desire. Alternatively the earliest stages of creation are figured as forms of vegetal growth. Polynesian theology is perhaps the purest expression of an ancestral cult, not because one’s progenitors are gods but because procreation is divine. In the Hawaiian Kumulipo chant, only after the seven initial ages of natural generation are the gods as such born — as siblings to man kind. God and man appear together, locked in fraternal strife over the means of their reproduction — their older sister. Begun in the eighth epoch of creation, this struggle makes the transition from the pō ‘night’ of self-generation to the ao ‘day’ of humankind. Indeed, the struggle is presented as the condition of the possibility of human life in a world in which the lifegiving powers are divine. The end of the eighth chant thus celebrates a victory: Man spread about now, man was here now; It was day [ ao\ (Beckwith 1972:98). The older sister of god and man, La‘ila‘i, is the first-born to all the eras of previous creation. By Hawaiian theory, as first-born La‘ila‘i is the legitimate heir to creation, while as woman she is uniquely able to transform divine into human existence. The issue in her brothers’ struggle to possess her is accordingly cosmological in scope and political in form. The action engages the first two brothers. Described in certain genealogies as twins, they are identified directly in the chant as “Ki‘i, a man” and “Kāne, a god”. But sincek ii means ‘image’ and kdne means ‘man’ (in the sense of male), everything has already been said: the first Hierarchy and humanity in Polynesia 197 god is ‘man’ and the first man is ‘god’. Accordingly, in the chant the ontological rank of god and man is reversed by La‘ila‘i’s actions. She “sits sidewise”, meaning she takes a second husband, Ki‘i. She descends from heaven and a union with the god, and her children by the man Ki‘i are born before her children by the god Kāne. Thus the descendants of the man are senior: There was whispering, lip-smacking and clucking, Smacking, tut-tutting, head-shaking, Sulking, sullenness, silence, Kane kept silence refused to speak, Sullen, angry, resentful With the woman for her progeny . She slept with Ki‘i, Kane suspected the first-born, became jealous . Kane was angry and jealous because he slept last with her, His descendants would henceforth belong to the younger line, The children of the elder would be lord: First through La‘ila‘i, first through Ki‘i, Child of the two bom in the heavens there Came forth (Beckwith 1972:106). In the succeeding generations, the victory of the human line is secured by the repeated marriages of the sons of men to the daughters of gods, to the extent that the divinity of Kāne is totally absorbed by the heirs of Ki‘i. It is the paradigmatic model of Hawaiian politics of usurpation. The same eternal and cosmic triad is at work in the legends of Hawaiian kingship: displacement of the senior and sacred prince by an upstart younger brother, mediated by the capture of the royal wife (see Valeri and Kaeppler this volume). But this is a characteristically Hawaiian, thus hierarchical, version of a general Polynesian idea of the human condition: that men are compelled to secure their own existence by inflicting a defeat upon the god, appropriating thus the female power — the bearing earth. The Maori myth of the divine children of Rangi and Papa, Sky- Father and Earth-Mother, is the classical Polynesian statement of this promethean contest (Grey 1855; White 1855, 1897). Locked together in a primordial coupling that left no space or light for their progeny, Heaven and Earth were divided by Tāne, parent and body of trees, who in an act likened to an original parricide stood upon his head, pressed against the Earth-Mother and rent the Sky-Father from her embrace. Tāne is also parent of mankind, or more exactly of the first woman, and by pushing Rangi to a distance he made it possible for his human descendants to enter a world of light ( ao mdrama) and to inherit the Earth (Papa). However, it was man’s death or more pre cisely a human sacrifice that fixed the Heavens in place. The fierce brother of Tāne, and also ancestor of men, Tū-mata-uenga slays a minor deity Kaupeka (the name means ‘Offering’) and uses his body to make the adzes that cut the poles that propped the Heavens up. That was the world that Tū built, and the Polynesian paradigm of the 198 Marshall Sahlins sacrifice. The attribution of a victim identified with the sacrifier distances the god from nature — or transposes divinity from the immanent to the invisible (Valeri in p ress) — so that mankind can safely consume the world. Such separation of Heaven and Earth or ao and p ō “is the proper substance of creation”, Johansen says, “what makes the world fit to live in for a Maori” (1954:85). If the price of this separation is reciprocally human life, we should not forget it was first achieved by means of a cosmic crime. Maori speak of Tāne’s exploit as “an act of rebellion on the part of the children toward their parents, as the first act of disobedience, the first wrong committed” (Best 1924, vol. 1:96). Tāne’s heroic crime brought death, too, in a generic way, as an attribute of human life. This world is te ao matemate ‘the day of death’. For events led to the creation of woman, who appears as the origin of misfortune as well as the means of life. Agent of the transfor mation between divine and human, ta p u and n o a ‘free’, woman is the mediator also of the relation between life and death. By such means Tāne had already lost his ta p u ,a ritual demise, since in the course of pushing away the Heavens he was forced to pollute himself by putting his head — which is sacred — in the Earth — which is female.

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