Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2020. xi, 512 pp. (B&W photos, coloured photos.) US$45.00, paper. ISBN 9781869409296.
As an anthropologist with deep ties to the Maori community and who has dedicated her life to Maori studies, Dame Anne Salmond is ideally positioned to navigate the historical passages between indigenous Maori and Enlightenment Europeans as “experiments across worlds.” Her ethnography instantiates such an experiment to further Maori and European relational thought. This purpose is explained in the preface and first chapter, where Salmond aligns her work with the “ontological turn” in anthropology, “ontological worlds” being underlying patterns of reality that differ between groups of people. Salmond introduces the Maori hau as the “breath of life” that emerged cosmogonically and animates and drives the entire world in relational space/time spiral vortices that confound Cartesian dualisms. She poetically interweaves Maori linguistic terms and anthropological notions of relation, reciprocity, and dynamic kinship network. Chapter 2, “Tupaia’s Cave,” describes Captain James Cook’s first encounter with Maori, guided by famed Society Island priest Tupaia, that went violently awry until Tupaia’s intelligence and Cook’s humanism fostered amicable exchanges. Hierarchical grids were assumed in the Endeavor’s “Enlightenment sideshow” scientific activities, albeit mitigated by European relational notions of equilibrium and exchange. Salmond herself finds fragments of Tupaia’s cave drawings depicting the Maori space/time vortex in whose darkness animated artifacts can disappear and reemerge. In collaboration with indigenous Hauiti people, Salmond and her daughter Amiria then foster the restoration and recovery of ancestral art objects from European museums. Chapter 3 recounts the struggle between Maori and European missionary ideas of death around the passing of Maori chief Ruatara. The humane efforts of missionaries that likely saved Ruatara’s life aboard European ships also evident in New Zealand nonetheless existed in a cosmic hierarchy governed by a Christian “analytical logician” God whose divisions created Manichean struggles with Maori. Missionary preconceptions were challenged by experience, relational thinking, and Maori practices, but Europeans confronted Maori tapu restrictions protecting Ruatara on his death bed; Ruatara’s heir removed them and negotiated Maori’s first land sale to missionaries, and thus Ruatara’s dying evinced loss of mana through tapu violation and a failed, unbalanced exchange with Europeans. Chapter 4 recounts Maori warfare, missionary infighting over commercial activities, the selling of muskets, attitudes regarding cannibalism, and Maori acceptance of many gods, including the Christian one, in a relativist “multi-verse.” Chapter 5 recounts the meetings and exchanges between Maori chiefs and European leaders, particularly Hongi and King George IV, from whom Maori learned of missionary pretensions and inferior status and of European warcraft, inspiring Hongi to disregard missionary admonitions and arm his people, and resulted in the mayhem for which Maori became known. Chapter 6 chronicles Maori disrespect for missionaries and their possessions, Hongi’s wars, the fracturing of missionaries and of missionary Kendall’s family, his liaison with a Maori woman among Hongi’s kin and his deep study of Maori cosmology. The shipwreck misfortune of the most obstinate missionary, which Maori “ontology” had foreseen, and Hongi’s and Kendall’s declines and deaths lead Salmond to conclude Kendall’s and Hongi’s ambivalences had not enabled them to cross worlds despite their deep friendship. Chapters 7 and 8 detail the events, personages, and debates that led to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and the “ontological clash” between different ideas of hierarchy—with and without top-down governance—and in English and Maori translations of the treaty, the latter of which did not cede sovereignty, leading to the “ontological impasse” at the heart of the New Zealand state.
Chapter 9 begins part 2 with chapters on rivers, land, sea, and people. First considering the treaty recognition of the Whaganui River as a living being, Salmond contrasts the Maori “cosmo-logic” of the life-giving, binding power of the river that situates people as its ancestral descendants with Euro-American “stadial thinking” that sees people as guardians of “natural” material resources over which they have dominion, assuming private ownership of water rights though not of water itself. Maori professionals have adopted “modernist ontological styles” to assert Maori property claims across “worlds,” such “ontological braiding” being perfectly consistent with the shifting networks of Maori “ways of being” but nevertheless entailing “ontological submission” to foreign notions of privatized ownership. Maori conception roughly resonates with Euro-American relational thinking; these views intermingle, like salt and fresh waters at river mouths, to transform legal processes and fundamental presuppositions about the earth to hopefully combine with “cutting-edge environmental science” and address environmental degradation. Divisive debates between tribal chiefs about the origin of sweet potato undermine European authoritative monolithic accounts yet all presume the participatory intertwining of ancestors, kin people, and land enacted in seasonal movements. These practices clashed with European expropriations of “waste” land and enforcement of individual property rights that led to the Land Wars, massive land depredation, and Maori kin group fragmentation, some land loss being remedied by the Waitangi Tribunal’s balancing of modernist and Maori understandings. The same “ontological collision” took place between the Maori Moana/sea and New Zealand maritime property regimes and economic zones, with the same expropriations, substantial ecological consequences, and similar positive, mutually transformative experiments across worlds. In the late nineteenth century, high-status Maori women began reasserting their agency after being disempowered by working-class English laws and norms; this process is hardly complete.
An instant classic, Tears of Rangi is pure reading pleasure. However, it employs “ontology” in various ways and the thesis of separate, inter-braiding “worlds” is difficult to maintain: indigenous Maori differences over competing metaphysical stories are subsumed in shared “ontologies” that clash with the European assumptions with which they intertwine. Though Maori entanglements with cosmos, ancestors, chiefs, kin, land, and sea are indeed ontological, indigenous and European “onto-logics” or “ways of thinking” are epistemological and entail mythical and cosmological speculative metaphysical theories, ultimately comprising a version of cultural relativism. The argument supporting Kendall—that Maori “ontological terms” are untranslatable because they presuppose a reality at odds with English ideas—is incongruent with Salmond’s seamless integration of those terms with classical anthropological concepts, which is itself questionable. Combining magical realism with ontological being in the world, as an experiment across worlds, Tears of Rangi is a complete success; as with any successful experiment, it raises as many theoretical questions as it resolves.
Doug Dalton
Longwood University, Farmville