SCIENCE IN THE SOUTH SEAS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 304, 20 April 1945, Page 16

SCIENCE IN THE SOUTH SEAS

ISLANDS OF DANGER. By Ernest Beagle hole. Progressive Publishing Society, Wellington. OST students of the past culture of the South Sea islanders have wondered, with Dr. Beaglehole, whether the spirit of the island life was half as well portrayed in the stodgy prose of their own scientific monographs as in the vivid pen pictures of masters of words, Robert Louis Stevensén or Herman Melville, say. As Dr. Beaglehole’s private scientific interest is not so much ethnology, as defined above, but rather social anthro--pology, he can afford to be more outspoken than most, and he roundly condemns the ethnologist who is "trained" to dissect ethnological skeletons "and can rarely tell’ us something of the people he has studied, something of the life that gives flesh and blood to the akelen ton he describes." (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) About ten years ago Dr. ekatiteiae accepted a fellowship from the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, which enabled him, with his wife as co-worker, to spend over seven months of 1934-35 on the tiny and isolated atolls of Pukapuka (total area 1250 acres), wihich lie far to the north of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. Here they dutifully applied themselves to the detailed description of fish-hooks, adzes, canoes, clothing, houses, and lashing patterns, and duly added to the Bishop Museum’s Bulletin series Ernest and Pearl Beaglehole’s Ethnology of Pukapuka. But their purpose was wider than the backward-looking objective of museum studies. "For us it was adventure . . . the great adventure of trying to understand the life of a people whose outlook, traditions, and, conventions are the antithesis of our own." Islands of Danger takes its title from the name applied to Pukapuka by its first European discoverer in 1765, and may be regarded as the literary counterpart of the Museum Bulletin, aimed at a wider public. The value of the book is that it sets out to interpret modern Polynesian life, less colourfully than in the adventurous narratives of the voyagers and castaways of over a century ago, less one-sidedly than thgough the distorting spectacles of the pioneer Christian missionaries, more truly than by the recent romantic school with their unclad hula girls dancing by blue lagoons. This is the first time that such a task has been attempted, in such a way, and by an author as well qualified to record objectively, dispassionately, and minutely, his Polynesians (the Pukapukans of the mid nineteen-thirties). Here we have the South Seas debunked; we live the monotonous, strenuous, unromantic life of the coral atoll, with its diet of romance as unattractive, to any but the scientific student, as its physical diet of coconuts, taro, and fish. We plunge back in time to the church-going pattern of mid-Victorian England-Pukapuka was converted in 1857, and has remained fossilized at that level-with family prayers each night, and virtually continuous. services from 6 to 6 on Sundays. We observe the manoeuvres of three Christian sects in competition for the 600 souls of Pukapuka. Clothes have come to stay, Mother Hubbard’s for the women, and trousers for the men, and the descendant of virtually naked ancestors of four generations ago could no more envisage a future without these essential garments than without tobacco or bibles or sew-ing-machines or hot irons or soap. But the Christian Pukapukan still remembers his heathen past, and like most of his relatives, still fears the spirits of his dead. Thus when Apolo died, his Christian soul presumably went by the usual road, but the double or heathen soul remdined to haunt the grave, to bewitch and kill two of his sons who had neglected the old custom of interring with him his treasured pearl-shell fishhooks. The third hastening to do this opened his father’s grave and was no more troubled by the ghost. As the author devotes most of a chapter to the manner in which the Pukapukan eats candy, or analyses why he enjoys an American cigarette, we can scarcely regard as out of focus some

frank notes on his private life. With.a_ super (almost cynical) tolerance Dr.. Beaglehole records everything from the favourite terms of abuse to the manner in which the small children are alleged to spend their time while their elders are away at Church (some of which J find it difficult to believe). As a good social anthropologist he displays his emancipation from the taboos of sex by a rather constant and aggressive emphasis on it. Here I think he is too dependent on his informants for the peccadilloes he delights to record, which must come not only through a formidable language barrier, but from an amiable class of subjects who do not, like the American Indians, defend themselves by charging a fee for their information, but may exact their price nevertheless. As Dr. Beaglehole knew so little of Polynesian dialects on his arrival that he mistook the noises of the local deaf-mute for a speech by the local chief, it was quick work being able within eight months "to listen with easy amusement to the snatches of conversation which came from a house near by, conversation delightfully outrageous in its full-blooded analysis ofa recent wifestealing episode in our village." As Dr. Beaglehole would be the first to admit, the topics chosen reflect his own personal interest in the Pukapukan culture. As these were written down in intervals of his field work, they have a freshness of treatment which is their greatest strength. But this is also their greatest weakness, and justifies the one criticism I feel like making about the bodk. This is, that while the author cleared the way for a popular work of literature, by criticising the backwardlooking student of the dead bones of old Polynesia, he in his turn reveals that dissection is no less dear to him in dealing with the flesh and blood of modern Polyn@ia. While undoubtedly one of the na®st important books on the South Seas, it must still be regarded less as a work of literature than as the diary of a social anthropologist, or rather as his after-dinner discussions with his wife. The book is excellently printed and produced, I suspect under the guiding hand of Dr. J. C. Beaglehole. The few photographs are well taken, but are not particularly relevant to the theme.

R.S.

D.