The somatological studies of the Bayard Dominick Expedition were a key piece of the plan to put the study of Polynesian origins on a scientific footing. As quantitative studies based on large amounts of data, they promised objective, replicable insights into the history of the Polynesian peoples, potentially confirming (or not) the Aryan theory of Polynesian origins and revealing the precise nature of the relationship between Polynesians and their neighbors in Melanesia and Southeast Asia. Reading this work, one feels the intensity of effort, the commitment to the method, the devotion to the idea of science—as one anthropologist of the period put it, “There is only one way by which we can arrive at an understanding . . . and that is by measurements, measurements, and yet more measurements.” And yet it is also obvious that these studies were not a success.
Much of the problem was simply methodological, but at least part of the issue was the way they were formulating the question. The classes or groups into which scientists were trying to sort Polynesians were not the objective categories they appeared to be; they were fluid, socially conditioned, historically constructed, and astonishingly easy to fudge—a point that goes some way toward explaining Sullivan’s imprecise and constantly shifting terminology.
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, a lot of this work looks creepy, and for good reason. Physical anthropology in the early twentieth century was closely associated with eugenics and with attempts to legitimize racist claims using scientific methodologies. But this is not to say that the whole project was irredeemably flawed. Later scientists, using better tools and larger data sets, would succeed in deriving statistically meaningful information from biometric information, and with the sequencing of the human genome, the role of biological evidence in the search for answers about human history would leap to the fore. Although these early attempts to use biology to answer questions about origins, ancestry, and heredity were clumsy, the questions they sought to answer were not going away.
A Māori Anthropologist
Te Rangi Hiroa
Peter Buck studying Paratene Ngata making a hinaki (wickerwork pot for trapping eels), ca. 1922, by an unidentified photographer.
ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY, NATIONAL LIBRARY OF NEW ZEALAND, WELLINGTON.
THE QUESTION OF who Polynesians were—in a biological sense—was of particular interest to one of the period’s leading anthropologists, a man who went by the names of both Peter H. Buck and Te Rangi Hiroa. Born in New Zealand to an Anglo-Irish father and a Māori mother, he was the only anthropologist of the early twentieth century who could claim Polynesian descent and, thus, the only one with a personal stake in the problem of Polynesian origins.
Te Rangi Hiroa had one of those remarkable lives: arising from nowhere and ascending, on the strength of ability alone, to the very pinnacle of his profession. His father was an itinerant worker who had followed the gold rush to Australia and, failing to strike it rich, crossed over to New Zealand, where he settled down with a Māori woman from the Taranaki region. As a child, Te Rangi Hiroa was deeply attached to his mother and grandmother, who were his first teachers of Māori language and custom. He attended a primary school for European children, and after his mother died in 1892—he would have been about fourteen or fifteen at the time; his actual birth date was never recorded—he left with his father to go work in another part of New Zealand. A few years later, having concluded that the shearing life was not for him, he applied to Te Aute College, a famous secondary school for boys that produced many of the most prominent Māori leaders of the early twentieth century. From there he went on to the University of Otago, where he studied medicine, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1904 and his doctorate in 1910.
He often described himself as being conscious of “an internal struggle.” “Sometimes,” he wrote, “the Irish in me criticized the Maori, and at other times the Maori differed from the Irish.” But this sense of belonging to two different worlds was central to his identity and, later, to his authority as an anthropologist. He believed that his biculturalism gave him an edge—“the inside angle,” as he once put it—and that he could see things that European scientists missed. It also occasionally made for odd situations, as on the day he first entered “the taboo precincts” of the Otago Medical School and saw, at the top of the stairs, a notice “offering various prices for Maori skulls, pelves, and complete skeletons.” He read it “with horror,” he wrote, and almost abandoned his quest for Western medical knowledge there and then.
He did not abandon the quest, however, and went on to become a physician and medical officer with the New Zealand Department of Health. He was always interested in cultural issues: large chunks of his doctoral dissertation addressed the history of traditional Māori medicine, and even while he was still working as a doctor, he was publishing descriptions of tattoo patterns and house panels, basketry, and weaving, and notes on small outrigger canoes. He also, on his own initiative, conducted one of the largest somatological studies of a Polynesian population in this period. He had served as a medical officer in the Maori Pioneer Battalion in World War I, and in 1919, at the end of the war, it occurred to him that he would have a large sample population on board the troop ship returning home to New Zealand. Borrowing a Flower’s craniometer and a von Luschan color panel, he undertook the measurement of no fewer than 814 Māori soldiers, amassing by far the largest sample of Polynesian biometric information to date. (His conclusions, once he had collated the results, were no less murky than Sullivan’s.)
In 1923, at a Pan-Pacific Science Congress in Melbourne, he came to the attention of Herbert Gregory of the Bishop Museum, and the next year he was invited to join an expedition to the Cook Islands as a follow-up to the Bayard Dominick Expedition. A few years later, Gregory asked him to join the museum’s staff in Honolulu. This marked a turning point in his career; he left both New Zealand and the practice of medicine and turned his focus entirely to anthropology. Over the next few years he traveled widely, writing papers on the ethnology of Samoa, Aitutaki, Tongareva, Manihiki, Rakahanga, and Mangaia. By the mid-1930s his reputation as one of Polynesia’s leading ethnologists was secure, and in 1936, when Gregory stepped down, he became director of the Bishop Museum, a post he held, along with the prestigious Yale professorship that went with it, until his death, in 1951.
NATURALLY, TE RANGI HIROA was interested in the problem of Polynesian origins; not only was this one of the dominant questions in Pacific anthropology, it was the story of his own kin. He had been raised with a reverence for the traditions of his mother’s people, and he had a deep admiration for the work of men like Fornander and Smith, whose historical narratives formed the backdrop for research into Polynesian origins in the 1920s and ’30s. But while he never questioned the authenticity of the Great Fleet story, he was uneasy about many of the details. He noted that some of the narratives on which Smith had based his account were uncomfortably close to biblical tradition, while others contained a knowledge of geography that could only have come from European sources. He also questioned some of the extremely long genealogies that had been used to date Polynesian migrations. While he felt sure that genealogies did serve as a kind of chronology of Polynesian history, he doubted whether any people could keep an accurate oral record of events for more than two thousand years. “With all my love for my mother’s stock,” he wrote, “my father’s unbelieving blood gives me pause.”
Te Rangi Hiroa himself had come to the problem of origins not through folklore and mythology but through disciplines like anatomy and epidemiology. He believed that theorizing should begin with evidence, and that the best evidence was material. He liked things that were measurable (like bodies) or concrete (like fish traps) and felt that the history of nonliterate peoples could best be deduced from the “objects which people of past generations have made with their hands.” And not just the objects, but the living technique: a weaver might use modern materials, “but the fingers and the mind express themselves in the culture technique that her mother handed
on as it was handed on to her.”
In time, Te Rangi Hiroa became so knowledgeable about these things that he could tell at a glance what part of Polynesia an artifact belonged to, and on trips to see the great Polynesian collections in European and American museums, he routinely discovered items that were mislabeled. In a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, he noted that a Tahitian figure making a pandanus thatch was posed with the wrong implement in his hand. In the Berne Historical Museum, in Switzerland, he found a typical Hawaiian adze with the label A HATCHET FROM OTAHEITE. In the same museum he also found a Native American cape from the Pacific Northwest and a Māori cloak with a taniko border, both of which were described as Tongan. “Imagine,” he wrote to his friend Apirana Ngata, “the atrocities that could have been committed by an academic student in Berne writing a thesis on the textiles of Tonga!”
He was most famous, however, for the “unwearying patience” with which he studied how these objects were made and for his mastery of a vast array of Polynesian handicrafts. He could weave floor mats, cloaks, and baskets; make seine nets, scoop nets, trap nets, and crayfish pots. One colleague described how he would stand for hours, notebook in hand, observing the construction of some complicated object, recording each stage of the work with sketches, photographs, and descriptions. Then, when it was all finished, he would start from the beginning, repeating the entire process himself on the principle that “the best way to describe an operation is to do it from personal working.” So complete was his understanding of how to make house panels, boats, clothing, furniture, weapons, baskets, and tools that it was said he could have lived “like one of his ancestors if he had been cast away on an atoll.”
Ngata, the great Māori statesman and his closest friend, urged Te Rangi Hiroa to go beyond the “packed store-houses of facts” to “conclusions that will compel anthropologists to readjust their Western angle to the facts of a wider humanity.” And in the 1930s he did make a stab at a general theory of Polynesian origins. This was always going to be interesting because of his deep knowledge of Polynesian cultures, but it ended up being interesting because of his emotional investment in the problem itself.
Like most anthropologists of the period, Te Rangi Hiroa still accepted the basic tenets of the Aryan thesis, though he was never much interested in the very earliest stages of this tale. What did interest him was the pathway that the ancestors of the Polynesians had taken once they began migrating out of Southeast Asia. The most obvious route passes through Indonesia and the Philippines, along the north coast of New Guinea, through the Bismarck Archipelago to the Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Fiji, and thence to Tonga, Samoa, and the rest of the Polynesian Triangle. This path through the heart of Melanesia presents the fewest and smallest gaps between islands and offers the advantage of abundant natural resources: many kinds of plant and animal food, access to fresh water, a variety of useful materials like wood and stone.
But Te Rangi Hiroa did not believe that his ancestors had followed this path. He thought they had taken a more northerly route, island-hopping from the Philippines through Micronesia—from Palau to Yap to the Caroline, Marshall, and Gilbert Islands—on the way to Samoa and the Polynesian Triangle. But this region is not called Micronesia for nothing. Not only are the distances between islands enormous, the islands themselves are minuscule coral atolls with extremely limited natural resources: plentiful in fish, shellfish, and sharks, but poor in soil, plants, animals, water, wood, and stone.
There are countless problems with the idea of a primary Polynesian migration through Micronesia. But the most insurmountable, as Te Rangi Hiroa himself noted, is that virtually all the Polynesian food plants—breadfruit, banana, cassava, sweet potato, most varieties of taro—will grow only in continental or volcanic soils and could not have been transported along an “atoll-studded route.” His solution was to argue for two separate waves of migration: a foundational wave of original settlers who “steered their ships . . . from atoll to atoll” and a later wave of people who brought food plants and domestic animals by the more southerly route. But this was not, as one anthropologist puts it, “a parsimonious explanation.”
One has to wonder why Te Rangi Hiroa would tie himself in knots in this fashion, and the Occam’s razor answer is that he objected to the idea of his Polynesian ancestors migrating through the islands of Melanesia. But to understand why this might be so, we have to take a step back and look at the history of this region.
ALMOST FROM THE very beginning, European travelers had noticed a curious thing about the Pacific: the inhabitants of the central and eastern islands (the Polynesian Triangle) looked different from their neighbors in the islands immediately to the west. To Cook’s naturalist, Forster, the Pacific appeared to be inhabited by two great “Varieties” of people: “the one more fair, well limbed, athletic, of a fine size . . . and the other, blacker, the hair just beginning to become woolly and crisp, the body more slender and low.” This idea was further reinforced in the early nineteenth century by the French navigator Jules Dumont d’Urville, who proposed a set of divisions and a nomenclature that are still with us today. It was d’Urville who gave us the three “’nesias”—Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia—the first named for the “many islands” of the central and eastern Pacific; the second for the “little islands” to the north and west; and the third for the “black islands” of the western Pacific. D’Urville considered Micronesia to be a sort of extension of Polynesia, and so the primary contrast was between the lighter-skinned people of the open ocean—d’Urville called them “la race cuivrée,” or “the coppery race”—and the darker-skinned people at the western edge.
This idea of two distinct varieties of people (which quickly hardened into a Polynesian/Melanesian divide) turns what is, in fact, a spectrum of skin tones and peoples across the Pacific into a more or less binary division between black and white. With this binary came a tangle of other ideas about morality, intelligence, temperament, beauty, social and political complexity, even depth of time. Melanesians were routinely described by Europeans as not just dark-skinned, but “primitive” in their political, economic, and social structures. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts, they are depicted as small, dark, and mistrustful, the women “ill-favoured” and “ugly,” the men “despotic” and cruel. Banded together in small, autonomous groups, they appeared to Europeans to lack any form of law, government, or organized religion and compared unfavorably with their larger, fairer-skinned, more hierarchical neighbors the Polynesians, differing from them, in one unforgettable formulation, “as the wolf from the dog.”
The term “Melanesian” had thus long served in European discourse as a marker for otherness and inferiority, and in the racially charged climate of the early twentieth century, Te Rangi Hiroa could hardly fail to be aware of this. When the anatomist J. H. Scott (the probable author of the Otago Medical School notice offering to buy Māori skeletons) asserted, “We know the Maoris to be . . . the result of the mingling of a Polynesian and a Melanesian strain,” or when Sullivan argued for a “Melanesian element” in his Tongan or Samoan data sets, Te Rangi Hiroa would certainly have recognized the subtext. And in his own early somatological studies, which were written explicitly with the work of these other men in mind, you can see him struggling with the problem.
It would be both simplistic and patronizing, however, to see Te Rangi Hiroa’s views on the Melanesian question purely in terms of an internalization of racist European ideas. His own attitudes about race and racism were, not surprisingly, complex. He regarded his own biracial heritage as advantageous—“I am binomial, bilingual, and inherit a mixture of two bloods that I would not change for a total of either,” he once wrote, and “any success I may have achieved has been largely due to my good fortune in being a mongrel.” But being “half-caste” in the 1930s and ’40s definitely had its disadvantages. One of the great irritations of Te Rangi Hiroa’s life was the refusal of the U.S. government to grant
him citizenship, on the grounds that he was not more than 50 percent Caucasian, as U.S. naturalization laws then required. The irony of this, of course, was that most anthropologists of the period, including Te Rangi Hiroa himself, believed that Polynesians were Caucasian, being part of the great Indo-European diaspora. But the U.S. government of the 1940s classified them as “Asiatics” and barred them from becoming citizens on these grounds.
Even his ever-increasing eminence—half a dozen major academic prizes, a bestselling book, four honorary doctorates, and a knighthood—could not entirely protect him from insult. And, while he was famously genial and good-natured in public, he occasionally unleashed a torrent of resentment in his private correspondence. As he put it to Ngata, “the Pakeha [European] attitude towards the native races is on the whole saturated with the deepest hypocrisy. . . . Even in ethnology, I doubt whether a native people is really regarded as other than a project to give the white writer a job and a chance for fame.” But Polynesians, too, had their own systems of ranking and classification. Te Rangi Hiroa described “Melanesian” physical characteristics as conflicting with “the Polynesian idea of beauty” and wrote that among Māori, “a fair skin was admired,” while those at the darker end of the spectrum had “to put up with the humorously disparaging remarks of their lighter tinted friends.”
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