Polynesian Culture Quotes

There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background. We know also and as a consequence that any theory which makes the taboo rules ... intelligible just as they are without any reference to their history is necessarily a false theory... why should we think about [the theories of] analytic moral philosophers such as Moore, Ross, Prichard, Stevenson, Hare and the rest in any different way? ... Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo?

The archaeologist attached to the Bayard Dominick’s Marquesan team had reported in 1925 that the Marquesas offered “few opportunities for archaeological research.” But in 1956, a new expedition set out to reexamine the possibilities in these islands at the eastern edge of the Polynesian Triangle. An energetic Columbia University graduate student named Robert Suggs was sent ahead to reconnoiter, and he quickly discovered that the previous generation had gotten it all wrong. Everywhere he looked, he saw archaeological potential. “We were seldom out of sight of some relic of the ancient Marquesan culture,” he writes. “Through all the valleys were scattered clusters of ruined house platforms. . . . Overgrown with weeds, half tumbled down beneath the weight of toppled trees and the pressure of the inexorable palm roots, these ancient village sites were sources of stone axes, carved stone pestles, skulls, and other sundry curios.” There were ceremonial plazas “hundreds of feet long” and, high on the cliffs above the deep valleys, “burial caves containing the remains of the population of centuries past.” The coup de grâce came when Suggs and his guide followed up on a report of a large number of “pig bones” in the dunes at a place called Ha‘atuatua. This windswept expanse of scrub and sand lies on the exposed eastern corner of Nuku Hiva. A decade earlier, in 1946, a tidal wave had cut away part of the beach, and since then bones and other artifacts had been washing out of the dunes. Not knowing quite what to expect, Suggs and his guide rode over on horseback. When they came out of the “hibiscus tangle” at the back of the beach and “caught sight of the debris washing down the slope,” he writes, “I nearly fell out of the saddle.” The bones that were scattered all along the slope and on the beach below were not pig bones but human bones! Ribs, vertebrae, thigh bones, bits of skull vault, and innumerable hand and foot bones were everywhere. At the edge of the bank a bleached female skull rested upside down, almost entirely exposed. Where the bank had been cut away, a dark horizontal band about two feet thick could be seen between layers of clean white sand. Embedded in this band were bits of charcoal and saucers of ash, fragments of pearl shell, stone and coral tools, and large fitted stones that appeared to be part of a buried pavement. They had discovered the remains of an entire village, complete with postholes, cooking pits, courtyards, and burials. The time was too short to explore the site fully, but the very next year, Suggs and his wife returned to examine it. There

The transition from egalitarian small-scale societies to archaic states did not happen as soon as people settled down in farming villages. Polynesians colonized Hawaii around 800 CE, and it took around eight centuries for archaic states to emerge.144 What’s more, the Polynesians already had a lot of the cultural elements needed to develop a centralized, hierarchical society. Because agriculture arrived on the Pacific islands around 1500 BCE,145 the overall period of “gestation” for archaic states seems to be something like 3,000 years. In other areas of the globe the period between the adoption of agriculture and the rise of the first states was even longer. The

There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background. We know also and as a consequence that any theory which makes the taboo rules … intelligible just as they are without any reference to their history is necessarily a false theory... why should we think about [the theories of] analytic moral philosophers such as Moore, Ross, Prichard, Stevenson, Hare and the rest in any different way? … Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo?

In the face of overwhelming evidence, many anthropologists now believe that primitive cultures began with a belief in one supreme God.1 The Polynesian people have shown this to be true in their culture.

There is another reason little is known about ‘Io; the name of this God of the Polynesians was too sacred to be mentioned openly. This was also true of the Israelites’ God, Yahweh. This is why the Israelites also called their God by periphrases, like Elohim (God Almighty) or Adonai (Lord). This is not unusual. The ancient name of the One True God of Aneityum (New Hebrides), Nigeria, the Yezidis (Turkey), the Incas, the Navaho and other ancient cultures also were not openly mentioned.16 The priests of Polynesia were under oath not to tell of the most sacred things, and the penalty for breaking this oath was death. The Polynesian authority, E. Handy, says that it is doubtful that the common folk were even allowed to know the true name of the Supreme Being.17 This was not an unusual situation. In ancient Babylon at one time, the priests were monotheistic and the people were polytheistic as it was in Polynesia.18 This was also the situation with the ancient Chinese, Nigerians, Incas, and other peoples. It is easy then to understand why there is only a vague knowledge of the Supreme God in Hawaii.

Another intriguing proposition is that such similarities are evidence of a truly ancient mythological substrate, a “Laurasian” mythology, spanning the cultures of Eurasia, North Africa, Oceania, and the Americas and going back far beyond the traceable beginnings of either Polynesian or Indo-European culture, as far back perhaps as twenty thousand years.

There are not now, as Forster suggested, two great varieties of people in the Pacific: there is one quite homogeneous group in the central and eastern Pacific (Polynesians), and, thanks to the incredibly long time they have had to diversify, a hugely complex and heterogeneous mix of peoples and cultures in the Melanesian islands to the west.