A New Zealand Book of Beasts by Annie Potts

Author:Annie Potts [Potts, Annie, Armstrong, Philip and Brown, Deidre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cultural studies, Art history
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2013-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

The Animal as a Human Hybrid

In whakapapa something occurs that might be regarded as hybridisation, an effect also engineered by Māori artists in their various zoomorphic and anthropomorphic illustrations of manaia and marakihau.8 When these are performed by atua they are supernaturally sanctioned; when they are performed by humans there must be a clear cause for doing so, and appropriate tikanga and ritenga (customs) must be followed in order to achieve the desired goal without invoking the punishment of the atua.9 The tapu associated with art production is well documented. Creativity involves the taking of risks through adapting and challenging customary practices and expectations, and tohunga (experts) engaged in creative acts surround themselves, their materials and tools, and their work in a protective mantle of karakia in order to achieve the sanction of atua.

Any attempt to interpret manaia solely as lizards, birds or humans is defied by their ambiguous forms. Artists delight in this effect; scholars can be frustrated by it. But this practice may have been more than just an aesthetic convention, and could have served an important purpose in demonstrating the whakapapa connections between these creatures, possibly for a specified objective. This was risky behaviour, but the adaptability of the manaia concept may have mitigated any supernatural ramifications, and the practice made safe through the ritual observation of tapu. The long-running debate about the origin of the manaia reveals the issues inherent in trying to define this character form according to Western taxonomy. While it could be argued that manaia are ambiguous creatures transmuted by Māori artists over time, another interpretation might be that they are ‘characters’ manifesting themselves in art and stories in different forms, some of which are animate and others inanimate.

In his account of published discussions concerning the origin of the manaia in Māori wood carving, ethnologist Roger Neich has argued that the artistic licence to experiment has often been forgotten as scholars attempt to demonstrate specific animal origins or developmental sequences.10 ‘An awareness of this sophisticated and conscious playing with ambiguities in representation’, he writes, ‘tends to make one wary of tight evolutionary reconstructions, which rely too strongly on a strict categorisation of the world in Western scientific terms.’11 We should not be too quick to dismiss the earlier scholarship, however, as it provides an insight into how the manaia might have been developed differently in different places with some cross-fertilisation of ideas.

Such discussions about the origins and development of the manaia fall into three schools of thought. The earliest is that the manaia is a local variation of a speculative ‘bird-headed man’ cult associated with Polynesia. This proposition, made by the ethnologists H. D. Skinner (in the 1930s) and Terence Barrow (30 years later), may have been a local manifestation of totemism, a mid-nineteenth-century European theory founded on the belief that ‘primitive’ people related to certain elements of the natural world, in this case animals, in their creation, conception and performance of group identity.12 In his contemporaneous critique of Skinner’s work, the zoologist

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