Maori Origins and Migrations by M. P. K. Sorrenson

Author:M. P. K. Sorrenson [Sorrenson, M. P. K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 1979-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

3 The Making of the Maori

This chapter is concerned with the making of Maori culture by European ethnographers. I am not going to try to recreate Classic Maori culture, ‘The Maori As He Was’ (to borrow the title of Best’s book) at the time of Cook’s coming. Rather, I am going to examine what Europeans from Cook onwards have made of Maori culture. In doing so I want to make two points. First, that the ethnographers nearly always found in Maori culture what they expected to find; their expectations were kindled by the prevailing anthropological theories of their day. In this respect the ethnographic record on the Maori is a fairly faithful reproduction of changing fashions in anthropology. Secondly, descriptions which purported to be of the Maori as he was at the time of Cook were often considerably influenced by the condition of contemporary Maoris; the greater the distance in time from Cook, the greater the difficulty of observers and informants in describing what the culture was before his coming. Perhaps it would be going too far to suggest that Best’s Maori As He Was was in fact the Maori of the Ureweras of the late nineteenth century, not Cook’s Maori of the late eighteenth century; but the statement has a measure of truth. These two points may not matter much for aspects of material culture, since their pre- or post-European provenance can usually be verified from the museum or archaeological site, but they are very much more important, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, for such aspects of culture as social organization and religion.

Of course in attempting to describe the Maori and his culture, we are creating a stereotype that did not exist; for there was no one typical Maori but many Maoris; no one Maori culture but regional and tribal varieties of culture. Moreover, most observers were expert in the culture of only one or two areas, though they often passed off that information as representative of the Maori people as a whole. Even the name, Maori, is an abstraction, created in the nineteenth century. Cook called them Indians, though the name New Zealanders was soon applied. Maori (ordinary) was first recorded about 1800, as an adjective in the phrase tangata maori, an ordinary person as contrasted with tangata tupua, a supernatural being, as the Europeans were first thought to be. By the 1830s Maori was being used occasionally as a proper noun but it did not come into general use as such until about the 1860s. Since then it has been used retrospectively to describe early inhabitants though such terms as Maruiwi and Moriori were also used in the late nineteenth century to describe the earliest people, the tangata whenua.1

What then did Cook and his fellow navigators make of the people we have called Maori? It is impossible to summarize their views adequately within the space of a few paragraphs; I shall therefore note what seems to be most characteristic of their comments, especially in view of what later ethnographic observers were to make of the Maori.

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