THE PACIFIC: Cook Islands

I am constantly amazed by the wide range of scholarly interests of WAISers. William Woo, for years editor of the Saint Louis Dispatch and now Professor of Communication at Stanford, is going to the Cook Islands for a short visit. I assume that he is going to Rarotonga (the capital, at the south end of the chain) for a communications conference. The posting elicited this reply from Margaret Mackenzie:

"My doctoral dissertation (Chicago) was a report of research on Rarotonga. Back in 1971-2 I did fieldwork there for fourteen months: it was a medical anthropological study of the social and cultural aspects of preschool children's health--requested as a result of somewhat serious epidemics the previous year of influenza, measles, and pneumonia. That is a rather typical situation in peoples without centuries to develop immunities when they are exposed to the infections of outsiders. In 1973 I returned for a similar study of preschool children's nutrition done through the South Pacific Commission and the South Pacific committee of the Medical Research Council of New Zealand. The families with whom I lived while I was doing fieldwork became very dear to me indeed. After that, I returned several times until 1989, but only for one other formal research visit to study drinking patterns in 1983, through the Alcohol Research Group at Berkeley. For several years, Rarotongans used to visit me in Berkeley, but now my contacts are by mail and the very occasional telephone call.

The traditional male costume is now almost only seen in concert performances for tourists. In Tonga with its intact monarchy, traditional formal dress has survived much more, and it is coded carefully in terms of hierarchy. Perhaps the Tongan couple have the ritual woven 'aprons' that are worn in the presence of those of eminent rank? [My Tonga couple wear it on Sundays, not because of me, but because, like many Tonga people, they are devout Methodists and are very active in the Methodist Church in San Mateo; he plans to become a minister. RH].

There is a branch of the University of the South Pacific in Avarua (the main town on Rarotonga, where the government sits). The Cook Islands have never fared particularly well with globalisation. Even in 1971, one of my first impressions was that their economy and employment were completely dependent on the copra prices in London, half a world away. Today they have an export industry of tropical fruit that is air freighed to New Zealand and Australia. But the decline of those economies has prompted a reverse migration of Cook Islanders back home. The bottom has recently fallen out of the black pearl market. The country is an at times divisive parliamentary democracy, but New Zealand retains control of its foreign affairs and defence. It also provides financial subsidies, somewhat judgmentally. The people have free entry toNew Zealand and there are more Rarotongans there than at home.

To locate the islands more vividly for you, Rarotonga is 800 miles southwest of Tahiti and 800 miles southsoutheast of Samoa, exactly opposite Honolulu,similarly 23 degrees beyond the equator, which puts it just on the border of the tropics. The Cook group consists of 15 small islands scattered across 850,000 square miles of ocean: Rarotonga is 6 miles long and 5 miles wide. People from the United States may recognize the name of Penrhyn because there was a US landing strip on that atoll during the Second World War. Because the pearl industry is there, the people from that island often used to have the 'pigeon' chests of deep divers. They also have a tradition of complex fibre weaving found today mostly in baskets and hats,not all for tourists. They are eighteen hundred miles northeast of New Zealand, and it is fairly certain that the people who became New Zealand Maori migrated deliberately by canoe south from Rarotonga--these are peoples with a complex knowledge of traditional navigation, revived in recent years. Navigation is one of the arts at the South Pacific Arts Festivals.

European contact was established by the missionary John Williams about 1823; subsequently the Cook Islanders were converted to Christianity as Congregationalists--which is still strong as the CookIslands Christian Church--a troubled process in which their heritages of art were almost entirely destroyed, or taken to Europe to be used asexamples of debauchery to raise money for missionary activities. Their sculpture traditionally had a spiritual aspect associated with their ancient religious rituals, but its references to fertility and creativity in life and in food resources through explicit representation of the male genitalia of the gods, made it appear pornographic in European interpretations. Almost none of the many different sculptural forms remains on Rarotonga. One day almost by happenstance in 1984 I visited the anthropology museum at the University in Florence and I was astounded to see an abundant collection of remarkable Cook Island sculptures; styles that I had seen previously only as illustrations in books. They were bundled in chaotic piles without any provenance. When I used to mention the magnificence of their heritage, my Rarotongan friends several times said to me: "What! Do you wish us to be pagans again?" So they had accepted the denigration of their own past.

The British became the colonial power; about 1888 they transferred the administration to New Zealand. Independence came in 1965 after a movement led by the late Sir Albert Henry. The subsequent Prime Minister was Dr Tom Davis, a Rarotongan medical practitioner who, in answer to Thor Heyerdahl, about 1960 made the first contemporary winter eastward sailing journey across the Pacific. The Rarotongans maintained in traditional lore that they made expeditions to the western coast of South America; contrary to Heyerdahl, they claimed that they made roundtrips. Davis dropped anchor in Boston because he was on his way by yacht to Harvard to do his Master's degree in Public Health. Afterwards he worked inthe early stages of the space program for Arthur D. Little, but returned to Rarotonga at the request of local people to run in opposition to Albert Henry in 1972".

My comment: It would take an article to discuss the polemics involved in all this. Anthropologists are viewed with suspicion because of the romantic vision of native life, and they fight among themselves. Earlier postings mentioned the meeting of Americanists I attended in Buenos Aires at which Heyerdahl's very reasonable paper was greeted with scorn and derision by other anthropologists. There was an argument between anthropologists who, as part of their romantic vision of pre-Colombian life, gave incredibly high figures to the numbers of the native population in an obvious attempt to discredit the Spaniards and the Portuguese, and the historians, who stuck to what evidence he have. Earlier postings involved disputes about cannibalism among the Maori. As part of the romantic vision of native life, one school of anthropologists tried to prove that it never existed in the Americas. They have been silent recently, with good reason.

Ronald Hilton - 6/18/01