This is a short monograph from a series about world history in the Middle Ages. When we step away from Europe, how do the Middles Ages shape our understanding of history? Madi Williams takes this question as a jumping-off point to contrast the basic beliefs and ways of knowing in Polynesia against those in Europe. It’s a good concept for a book, but the examination is not easy-going. Polynesian cultures were pre-literate and left few archaeological records. What written accounts we do have were largely gathered by Europeans in the colonial period. They didn’t always properly contextualise what they heard and saw:

At first, Māori knowledge was accepted unquestioningly and was viewed as being true in the Western sense... early Europeans scholars placed their own units of measurement onto a different knowledge system, which led to significant inaccuracies. (27)

Ethnologists such as Percy Smith viewed oral tradition as a method of literal record-keeping. It was an imprecise method to be sure, but one which only needed the right interpretation to begin evincing factual truths about the past: simply paste together the various strands of legend and then interpolate backwards by means of a summer vacation to Rarotonga, and you too will you have your very own Great Fleet theory.

After the ethnologists came a period of methodological hardening. Polynesian sources were unreasonably scrutinised and systematically ignored. All the useful bits had supposedly already been absorbed into the mainstream histories, which now doubted that Polynesians even had the ability to intentionally discover and settle these far-flung islands. Any oral accounts which hadn’t yet been written down were considered to be of minimal value—little bubbles of garbled myth and superstition, the air pockets of an already-drowned culture.

To avoid the conceptual mistakes of historians past, Madi Williams structures her book around themes rather than time periods. There are three: migration, adaptation, and cultural complexity. Polynesian cultures are full of stories of discovery and exploration. Heroic figures make daring journeys to bring back tools or forbidden knowledge or other cultural innovations, often violating prior taboos in the process. Upon settling new lands, they adapt old knowledge, re-contextualising the old culture to fit the new environmental and material circumstances. Finally, new patterns of living emerge in their own right, such as the complexification of agricultural methods suited to the unique flora of New Zealand.

Madi Williams successfully uses pūrakau to draw out aspects of Polynesian history only dimly apprehended by the archaeology. For example, she includes a story where fire is used to hunt pouakai, a now-extinct species of eagle. In the story, Ue starts a fire to trap some pouakai, but strong winds fan the flames beyond his control. Many die in the fire; those who seek safety in the caves are suffocated by smoke. This story highlights the fact that Māori were capable of using tools to manipulate their environment. They used fire in hunting, likely also in agriculture and silviculture. They both caused and adapted to ecological change. Society was not static, but dynamic—it developed over time, with consequences for both land and people.

This interweaving of pūrakau is good and enjoyable, but I don’t think Williams fully escapes the (spatial, temporal, cultural) paradigms of prior history. The problem is that when “Polynesian” concepts are apposed next to their “European” alternatives, both are reduced to caricatures. For example, the relation of past to present in Polynesia is oriented according to whakapapa, the descent of one thing from another. Because this takes ontological priority over when something happened, it is less important to communicate an exact timeline of events than the proper relation between them. Time, therefore, can be relative in a Māori account.

Does this difference in cultural priority really open up such a wide, uncrossable gap of meaning? Look close enough and you’ll find plenty of European examples in which the ordering of events into a timeline is not the most important thing. Early Medieval literature is often structured genealogically; books like Gregory of Tours’ Historica Francorum begin with clearly legendary events in Biblical or Greco-Roman times. By linking those cultural memories of the past with the social order of the day, he situates both within the same overarching cosmology. This is not the same thing as whakapapa, but it is not all that different either.

In colonial New Zealand, Catholic missionaries successfully deployed the metaphor of the church-as-tree when preaching to Māori. The tree’s branches linked all of Europe’s holy-men to a single source, justifying religious monopoly to a culture where spiritual expression had been hitherto decentralised. It also explained where the Protestant missionaries fit in, depicting them as drooping, dying branches that curved towards hell. The Catholic church, meanwhile, was the main body of the tree: healthy and ancient, it grew upwards towards heaven in the direction that happened to be cognate with eternity ("ake" means both “upwards” and “in the direction of some distant place connected to here”). The church-as-tree metaphor was both a striking image and a kind of religious whakapapa. It’s an example of two different cultures aligning on similar conceptual metaphors.

(In her thesis The Invention of Papahurihia, Judith Ward suggests that the church-as-tree metaphor might be the source of one of the prophet Papahurihia’s claims, namely that only his followers could ascend the “tree to heaven”.)

All of this is to argue that we aren’t entirely blind or obedient to our psycholinguistic frameworks. There is only so much our frame of reference can highlight—or hide. In the end, one’s point of view is only an aperture for the things he is looking at. In the case of Polynesia, this is a smattering of material objects and long-term social and environmental patterns. There has been a great benefit from the “global turn” in history—including a new-found respect for non-European sources that had been neglected—but in this corner of the world primary evidence from the distant past is frustratingly rare. The cultures of today—while obviously descendants of the cultures of the past, and having retained something of them going forward—cannot simply be introspected for proof of how things were. Polynesian culture has changed to a great extent over the past 400 years, often along contours which are not obvious. This seems to be a hard limit on any anthropological approach; it is still necessary to reconstruct the cultural context of archaeological finds as if “from scratch”.

While it can be good to engage in some methodological purification, there’s a bit too much of it in this book. When Madi Williams finally gets around to the actual history, she is hobbled by having to write within an arbitrary slice of time, 900 - 1600, which isn’t in any way a meaningful division of Polynesian history. She says as much herself, and ends up having to extrapolate backwards from evidence that comes much later. The first artefact she analyses, Tuki Tahua’s map, is from the late 18th century! This book also suffers from lacking detailed explanations of critical concepts like tapu or mana (they are only briefly mentioned). It only focuses on south Polynesia, which might be disappointing for people who wanted to hear about Samoa or Hawai’i. In any case, it would have definitely benefitted from the incorporation, analysis, and comparison of the stories of those places. While it does mention the latest archaeological perspectives, such a light gloss leaves this book feeling short and incomplete. The writings of Atholl Anderson might be a necessary companion.