Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | O | Oceania

Heroic history and chiefly chapels in 19th Century Tahiti.

Article Excerpt
INTRODUCTION

On Tuesday, 11 May, 1819 almost the entire Christian population of Tahiti -between five and six thousand people--assembled in the recently completed Royal Mission Chapel, a monumental building constructed under the direction the ari'i (high chief), Pomare. The length of two football fields, this Polynesian equivalent to the Great Pyramid was almost certainly the largest built structure in Oceania and one of the longest churches in the world (it was 200 ft longer than Winchester Cathedral). Here is how one missionary from the London Missionary Society described it:

It is 712 feet long by 54 wide. The ridgepole or middle is supported by 36 massay pillars of the breadfruit tree. The outside posts all round the house are 280. It has 133 windows of sliding shutters and 29 doors. The ends are of a semicircular form. There are three square pulpits about 260 feet apart from one another; those toward each extremity being about 100 feet from the ends of the house. It is filled with forms, except an area before each pulpit, and laid with dry grass. The rafters are covered with a fine kind of fringed matting which is bound on with cords of various colours in a very neat manner; and the ends of the matting are left hanging down like the flags in St. Paul's Cathedral (The Religious Intelligencer, Oct 7, 1820: 5)

The huge congregation, 'clean and dressed in their best', had gathered for a service to mark the opening of the chapel. Pomare, dressed in a white shirt, a woven mat wrapped around his waist and a tiputa (poncho) decorated with red and yellow feathers around his shoulders, met the LMS missionaries on the eastern side of the building and accompanied them inside. Pomare sat at the end of the house while the missionaries took up their positions, one at each of the three pulpits from which they delivered, simultaneously, three different sermons. The missionary concluded:

The scene was striking beyond description. No confusion ensued from the three speakers preaching all at once in the same house as they were at such a great distance from one another (ibid).

Three years before, all the marae (ritual enclosures where offerings had been made to ancestral deities) had been destroyed and within a year of this destruction around 70 local churches had been erected to replace them (The Religious Intelligencer, 8 Aug. 1818: 3; 3 Oct. 1818: 3). These, together with the Royal Mission Chapel, now materialised a transformed political field, more integrated than it had been previously.

In an earlier article (Sissons 2007) I described a subsequent re-materialisation of the political field in Rarotonga during the period 1823-1830 which was also pursued through marae destruction and church construction. I was unaware of Pomare's large chapel at the time of writing and so assumed a Rarotongan chapel built in 1824, containing two pulpits and originally intended to be 600 feet long, was without precedent. It is now obvious that Rarotongan leaders had learned of Pomare's chapel from their Tahitian evangelists and that they built their own in conscious imitation of his. This article, then, is a prequel to the Rarotongan one. Focusing on the Tahitian precedents I seek to develop further the idea that conversion to Christianity entailed (and perhaps required) the re-materialisation of a political field. But I do so here via an interrogation of Sahlins' notion of heroic history. Tahiti, like Rarotonga and other Polynesian societies can be described as a 'heroic polity' in that the social whole was understood to be embodied in the person of the chief, his or her actions assuming a culturally magnified significance as history. I propose that when heroic history is viewed as a materialising and re-materialising process the relationship between chiefly and collective agency can be seen in a clearer light.

By 'materialising and re-materialising' I mean the way in which social relations are produced and reproduced through changing forms of material culture. Materialisation is simply the involvement of material culture in the practice and conceptualisation of social relations. It is the process whereby forms of material culture become places or objects with which, within which around which, and/or in terms of which social relations are enacted and thought. Marae and chapels were examples of such forms in Tahiti. So too were the images of deities and the sacred feathers that materialised a political order through their locations, distributions and movements. I argue that, when viewed through the lens of materialisation, Tahitian heroic history can be understood as a particular form of collective history--an expansive history that proceeded both from above and below. If the chief embodied the collectivity, then the actions of the collectivity--in this case destroying marae and building churches--were also those of the chief. A saying I learned from elders of the Maori tribe, Tuhoe, makes a related point, although somewhat more colourfully: Ma nga raho ka tu te ure (through the actions of the testicles the penis stands upright).

HEROIC HISTORY

When, in 1985, Marshall Sahlins first suggested the broad category, 'heroic polities' he was under no illusion as to its long-term durability. A 'fine regard for variations' was, he wrote, missing from his account, without which the concept could be of only limited value. Since then, a number of anthropologists, notably Lutkehaus (1990), Mosko (1992a; 1992b), and Rumsey (2000), have explored and critiqued the notion of heroic history in relation to Melanesian leadership and notions of personhood, and Sahlins himself has sought to develop the idea theoretically (Sahlins 2000) and in relation to Fijian History (Sahlins 2004). But, apart from Sahlins' own work, there has been very little comparative analysis of heroic history in Polynesia where the concept arguably has its greatest utility. This is particularly unfortunate given Sahlins' initial caution over his concept's general applicability and his recognition of the need for greater empirical support. One aim of this article, then, is to con tribute to a finer regard for variation in our understanding of heroic history in Polynesia.

Sahlins has argued that the chiefly polities of Fiji, Tonga and Hawai'i were 'heroic systems' in that chiefs embodied the social totality in their being and actions:

... the heroic system involves a certain mode of historical production, a kind of historical practice. One aspect of this practice ... is the sense of history as incorporated in the chiefly person and expressed in his current action ... Embodying and making history, ruling...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!