POLYNESIAN CULTURE

the beliefs and practices of the indigenous peoples of those Pacific Islands grouped as Polynesia. They include the island groups of Samoa (American Samoa and Samoa [formerly Western Samoa]), the Cook Islands, French Polynesia (Tahiti and the other Society Islands, the Marquesas Islands, the Austral Islands, and the Tuamotu Archipelago), the island of Niue, the islands of Tokelau, Tuvalu (formerly the Ellice Islands), the islands of Tonga and of Wallis and Futuna, the Hawaiian Islands, Pitcairn Island, and Easter Island. New Zealand's original inhabitants, the Maori, are also Polynesian, and Fiji is sometimes included in Polynesia because of the proportion of its population that is Polynesian. The physical environment of the islands of the Polynesian triangle is not as favourable for human habitation as it might at first seem and certainly presented difficulties when the ancestors of the Polynesians entered the area from the west, well before the beginning of the Christian Era. The islands were devoid of much that was needed for human habitation. Most of the food and useful plants and all of the domestic fowl and animals had to be transported by the settlers. Since that time, the physical environment has continued to exert a marked influence on the nature and extent of the evolution of Polynesian cultures. The popular image of Polynesian cultures suggests an almost blissfully simple and easy way of life, devoid of harsh extremes of any type, played out on islands of great beauty and natural abundance. But the image, a product of popular literature and the motion-picture and tourist industries, is wide of the mark. Traditional Polynesian cultures were complex, highly specialized, and diversified, and the environment was not always benign. The principal characteristic of Polynesian cultures is an effective adaptation to and mastery of the ocean environment in which they have flourished. This mastery did not extend merely to the technology involved in ship building, to the techniques of navigation, and to other obvious nautical aspects of the culture but permeated social organization, religion, food production, and most other facets of the culture. The Polynesians could not only sail the seas, but socially they could cope with the human problems of shipwreck, split families, and the sudden loss of large portions of the social group. In short, the cultures were well-equipped to handle the numerous hazards that they had to face in the beautiful but actually quite hostile Pacific environment. Another important characteristic of Polynesian cultures was a high degree of conservatism and traditional orientation and the rather detailed structuring that placed every person in a well-defined relationship to society and to the universe. This conservatism is apparent even in a rapid examination of Polynesian materials from islands separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, whose populations had been separated from the common Polynesian stock two or three millennia in the past. The similarity between such items as stone adzes and fishhooks is most remarkable. The same is true for kinship terms, plant names, and much of the rest of the technical vocabulary of the cultures, as well as for art motifs and medical preparations. The ornate and voluminous genealogies, chants, legends, songs, and spells that were passed down and elaborated through the generations show a profound reverence for the past. The traditions of Polynesian cultures provided a definition of an individual's relation to his society and to all of nature. The creation myths told of the origin of the world, setting forth the order of precedence of Earth, sky, and sea and all the phenomena thereof, including man and woman. The genealogies fixed the individual tightly into the typically aristocratic Polynesian social order. Other legends interpreted natural phenomena, while historical accounts often described, with varying amounts of mythological embroidery, the migrations of a people before they arrived at the island on which they were located, their adventures on the way, and the development of the culture following settlement. The Polynesians were unusually well-oriented, as would be expected of a nautical culture, to the entirety of nature. Their languages abound with terminology for stars, currents, winds, landforms, and directions and include a large number of grammatical elements indicating, for example, direction of motion implied by verbs, including movement toward or away from the speaker, relative positions of objects with reference to the speaker, and direction of movement along a seashore-inland axis. Polynesian cultures displayed a thoroughly realistic and practical exploitation of the environment but at the same time exhibited a profound interest in the supernatural. This interest was directly related to the general interest in systematization and structure, the supernatural being for the Polynesian another portion of reality, albeit less manageable, that had to be structured and coped with. Violence and cruelty were ever-present elements of Polynesian cultures. This is reflected in their oral literature and in all aspects of traditional life. Custom controlled and repressed direct physical expression of aggression within the kin group and the tribe up to a point, but there were definite limits beyond which only violence could restore status or assuage injured pride. Punishments for transgressing rules of behaviour toward chiefs and high priests or for violating various rituals incorporated ritual sacrifice and cannibalism as major features. Intertribal warfare was extemely common, particularly when population pressure had built up and land and resources were limited. Perhaps the most publicized, and accordingly overrated, aspect of Polynesian culture is its sensuality: as in many other aspects of life, the Polynesians generally took a very direct, realistic, and quite physical approach to gratification of the senses. But there was no abnormal focus or concentration on any aspect of sensual gratification such as is seen in many other cultures where, for example, eating, drinking, or sex have become the object of great cultural elaboration. This lack of elaboration may be due in part to limitations imposed by the environment. The flora of Polynesia did not, for example, provide a very good basis for elaboration of cuisine, as the number of edible plants was rather restricted, and there was a dearth of spices. In general, however, this balanced approach to sensual gratification seems to be just another reflection of the Polynesian straightforward approach to the world. Polynesian culture, for example, is generally thought to have been characterized by extreme sexual promiscuity, but such is not the case. Definite restrictions were placed on sexual behaviour, though the limits of acceptable behaviour were indeed wider than in many other cultures of the world. Children were permitted freedom of sexual expression; from puberty on, sexual activity was strongly encouraged, limited only by incest restrictions (which were not stringent) and considerations of social prestige. Parents would become concerned if daughters were not sought after for sexual favours, and premarital pregnancy only enhanced a girl's attractiveness. Public intercourse was engaged in during certain religious festivals and crisis rite ceremonies as a means to promote general fertility. There was, however, no pathological elaboration of sex for its own sake. Polynesian art, for example, is strikingly devoid of sexual content. There are occasional references made to sexual activity in native Polynesian oral literature, but many of these have to do with creative acts of the Polynesian gods, for the Polynesians saw the process of the creation of the universe as having taken place in a manner similar to human procreation. There is no corpus of Polynesian literature analogous to pornography. Additional reading The following works treat the development of Polynesian cultures: Irving Goldman, Ancient Polynesian Society (1970); Jesse D. Jennings (ed.), The Prehistory of Polynesia (1979); Robert Borofsky, Making History: Pukapukan and Anthropological Construction of Knowledge (1987); Patrick Vinton Kirch, The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms (1984); and Antony Hooper and Judith Huntsman (eds.), Transformations of Polynesian Culture (1985).