Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

“KNOWLEDGE IS A BLESSING ON YOUR MIND – Selected Writings, 1980-2020” by Anne Salmond (Auckland University Press, $NZ65)

Dame Anne Salmond, anthropologist and historian, is by now one of New Zealand’s most esteemed scholars, an expert in her fields and prolific in her research and writing. Quite apart from the very many papers and articles she has written, she has also produced seven authoritative books on Maori and Pasifika themes and on the interaction of Polynesians and Pakeha.

In gathering together a collection of her writings over forty years, she chose as a title Knowledge is a Blessing On Your Mind. The phrase came from one of her mentors, the erudite Maori elder Eruera Sterling, about whom Salmond wrote in her book Eruera: The Teachings of a Maori Elder. It was from Eruera’s teaching that she began to see anthropology in a new light. She understood that “Eruera’s teachings come out of a chiefly tradition, centred on whakapapa and politics and shaped by the powers of the ancestors – mana, ihi, wehi and tapu. They have led me to reflect about knowledge in the European academic tradition and in the Maori world, and to look carefully at my chosen profession of anthropology.” (p.60)

 In 2013, she was interviewed at length by Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka in which she articulated some of her main ideas: “For me it’s not so much learning about Maori life, it’s actually about learning from it. This is where I think that anthropology has to be heading. It can’t stay within the Western tradition for all of its key conceptions and insights.  If the post-colonial debates have taught us anything, it is that people from other societies don’t appreciate being objectified, turned into items of curiosity for detached inspection.” (p.47) And in the same interview she said “I see anthropology as a kind of comparative philosophy that helps us to bring to light our own unexamined assumptions – about the world and how best to inhabit it – and to generate new ideas and conceptions from this fundamental rethinking. The arrogance of the past – the presumption that the ‘West’ has a monopoly on ‘advanced’ ideas and knowledge….has rightly been attacked…” (p.51) This approach is affirmed in the very last item in the book, the brief comment headed “What is Anthropology?”

Knowledge is a Blessing On Your Mind comprises 500-plus large pages before end-notes and index. It is a formidable book which has to be read carefully. Between chapters Salmond gives detailed accounts of the marae, museums, universities, archives and seminars she has attended and the anthropologists and historians whom she has conferred with – in effect, she gives us a sort of academic autobiography.

In reading my way through this very impressive collection I found myself sorting out the most essential and informative essays; and the essays or commentary that are related to [once] topical matters, polemics and personal connections.

Of the latter, I include “Institutional Racism at the University of Auckland” (1983) which was originally published in the Auckland students paper Craccum, advocating the real need for a Maori marae on campus. “Antipodean Crab Antics” (1994) is Anne Salmond’s spirited response to the negative review of her book Two Worlds which had been written by the philosopher Peter Munz. “McDonald Among the Maori” (1990) deals with Salmond’s Scottish ancestry and how it was connected to New Zealand. It is mainly a tribute to James McDonald, her great-great grandfather, and how he became deeply immersed in Maori customs and arts, and was a pioneer in cinematography, capturing on film images of Maori life in the early 20^th century. Two articles are headed as “Of Women”. One is called “Women and Democracy”, a speech Salmond gave on how there was equity for Maori women and men, who had responsible positions in iwi in pre-colonial times. The other is a newspaper article she wrote in 2016, refuting the argument of Alan Duff (author of Once Were Warriors) that Maori domestic violence was the result of violent Maori traditions. All these articles are informative, expressed clearly and still well worth reading. There is only one article I found difficult to read. This is “Theoretical Landscapes: On Cross Cultural Conceptions of Knowledge” (1982), basically about how metaphor is over-used in too many anthropologic texts. Some of its post-modern language was beyond me, and would have to be untangled for me by a linguistic specialist. In contrast “Pathways in Te Ao Maori” (1984), related to an exhibition and considering taonga that were hidden away in archives, was part of a catalogue, and hence written in a very accessible style as it gave a clear account of varieties of iwi whom Captain Cook encountered in his voyages around New Zealand.

While these texts are all interesting, informative and [with one exception] readable, they are not the most important texts. For an ignorant Pakeha like me, far more enlightening are the major and more detailed essays, which I will now tackle one by one.

Maori Epistemologies (1985) was, says Salmond, “ written as a riposte to metropolitan assumptions about the superiority of modernist knowledge, and was argued as cogently as I knew how.” (p.80) She sets out to show how complex and sophisticated traditional Maori thinking was, and she analyses in detail the traditional concepts viz. Matauranga, meaning reliable knowledge and how to communicate and preserve it ; Wananga, being the Maori conception of the universe, including the role of ancestral histories [which were taonga] ; and Tikanga, being the laws and schools preserving the laws; Korero, being discussion, debate and polemics among experts, for lore was passed down by experts - but such experts were aware that other iwi than their own could have a different idea of cosmology and different ideas of the origin stories. Also, Salmond notes, in pre-colonial times Maori understood Mataurenga and Wananga should be held as separate from mere fables, known as korero tara. Tales like those of Maui came into this category. In effect Salmond is proving in Maori Epistemologies that Maori had a very sophisticated and detailed understanding of both the cosmos and human origins, amounting to an advanced philosophy.

Ruatara’s Dying (1993) was originally the last chapter of Salmond’s Between Two Worlds, concentrating of the different perceptions of death as held by Maori and Pakeha.

The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, or, Why Did Captain Cook Die? (1996) is a very detailed article which later became the last chapter of Salmond’s book of the same name. Salmond makes convincingly the case that, progressively, Captain Cook became disillusioned in his three Pacific voyages. He moved from seeing the Polynesian peoples as welcoming and peaceful, to seeing their hostility, cannibalism (not in all Polynesian islands, but certainly in New Zealand) and aggression. As well as this, Cook’s crews became more discontented as they were taken to bleak destinations far from decent provisioning – such as Cook’s forays into the wild southern seas, as near as possible to Antarctica as an 18^th century wooden ship could go. Discontent became anger and Cook, who had generally been lenient in punishing malcontents, became more and more disciplinarian. It all spilled over when Cook reached Hawaii. There was a major clash between the Hawaiians and Cook’s crew when Hawaiian sacred protocols were violated, and in the ensuing fight Cook was killed. This is only one part of Salmond’s narrative, for the earlier pages of this account concern the radically different ways Polynesians and Europeans regarded dogs and other animals, especially when it came to the provision of food.

Their Body is Different, Our Body is Different (2004) examines European and Polynesian interactions, especially with regard to different concepts of navigation – and with the inevitable mutual misunderstandings and Europeans’ unawareness of the importance of ritual.

Possibly the most crucial work in Knowledge is a Blessing On Your Mind are the 114-long pages devoted to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which Salmond was commissioned (in 2010) to write for the Waitangi Tribunal. She makes minute scrutiny of the treaty, how it was understood, how Rangatira basically saw it as the Crown was offering protection but not as imposing British sovereignty, the process by which the treaty was written, and the two different languages in which it was devised. Then, in detail, Salmond gives a collection of the spoken or written reactions to the treaty made by Rangatira (and a few Pakeha) in the months following the signing at Waitangi, when the treaty was taken to different locations on the North Island to be ratified. As did Ruth Ross decades before, Salmond concludes that the English-language version of the treaty was merely a draft, and the only valid version of the treaty was the Maori-language one…but British authority gradually took the English-language version to be definitive. [On this blog you may see my review of Bain Atwood’s A Bloody Difficult Subject  which covers much of this territory.]

The last essays in this collection are categorised as “On Environmental Questions” . One deals with how different Maori and Pakeha conceptions of personhood are – this being in the context of “The Whanganui River Settlement” that deemed the river to be a living person.  The other has to do with the menace of climate change, which is causing the sea to rise and threatening Pacific island states.

As I hope this simplified and inept review of Knowledge is a Blessing On Your Mind has given you at least some sense of Anne Salmond’s achievements. While she does criticise many Pakeha misconceptions or misrepresentations of Maori life and lore; and while she faults many of the older texts written by Pakeha anthropologists in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries; she does not blanketly dismiss with contempt all Pakeha pioneer attempts to reach some understanding about Maori customs, beliefs, rituals, and politics. Elsdon Best still has worthwhile things to say to us. And of course, as an anthropologist, Anne Salmond knows that there is no society or nation that is not flawed.

 

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“BLIGH – William Bligh in the South Seas” Anne Salmond (Penguin/Viking , $65)

Here is a problem for reviewers. When they are faced with something flawed, it is easy to write a review, as the review will consist of a clever comments at the expense of the book being reviewed.

But when reviewers are faced with high quality, they can do little more than list a book’s contents and explain the author’s perspective. This makes for dull and not particularly clever criticism.

It means that this week I am going to indulge in dull and not very clever criticism, because I find little to criticise in the hefty 500-plus pages of Dame Anne Salmond’s Bligh - William Bligh in the South Seas. It is a fascinating, detailed book, illuminating aspects of a famous story that have hitherto been left unchronicled.

Anne Salmond’s reputation rests as much on her work as an anthropologist as on her work as an historian. In a series of detailed books (Two Worlds, Between Worlds, Aphrodite’s Island etc.) she has given accounts of European “first contact” with the peoples of the Pacific, and the impact of European civilization and settlement. Her focus has most often been on the eighteenth century, the age when Spanish and French and especially British expeditions first encountered Tahiti, Hawaii, New Zealand and other such exotic places.

Salmond’s specialty is the interface of different cultures, their mutual borrowings and mutual misunderstandings. As much as she can (in the absence of written indigenous records), she tries to reconstruct what the French Annalist school of historians would call the “mentalites” of the pre-contact and early-contact Pacific peoples. Some speculation is inevitably involved, and much depends on trying to interpret, from an indigenous point of view, events that have been recorded only by European observers.

Salmond is aware of the hugely negative impact that much European contact had on the islands. But she does not succumb to any afterglow of the “Noble Savage” myth. She is fully aware that if Europeans brought firearms, syphilis, alcohol and exploitation, then the islanders already lived in radically unequal societies, often ravaged by clan warfare, routinely taking slaves and sometimes practising human sacrifice. With the climate, the abundance of food and the sexual complaisance of Pacific women, it is easy to see why French and British sailors thought they had discovered Paradise in the Pacific. But they thought wrong. Basically, Salmond remembers that as a modern historian and anthropologist, she has to treat both Pacific society and European society dispassionately. Both societies had mores radically different from our own. Salmond does not set Pacific innocence neatly against European corruption. Power plays, faction and human weaknesses are on display in both polities.

All of this informs her new, detailed biography of one of the most controversial figures of eighteenth century Pacific exploration.

William Bligh is doomed to be remembered as the commander of the Bounty whose crew mutinied. The few who know anything more about him will probably next recall that he became a harsh Governor of New South Wales, who again suffered mutiny when he tried to control the rum trade.

Salmond wants to set Bligh in the context of his times and particularly in the context of the Pacific, as the book’s subtitle suggests. She gives him high marks as an early ethnographer, coming to study and understand Pacific communities much better than most of his European contemporaries did, and leaving valuable accounts of Pacific customs. He did not exploit Pacific communities anywhere near as grossly as some of his rivals and subordinates did.

Inevitably, Salmond also has to recount much of Bligh’s life outside the Pacific, including his earlier career working merchant ships to the West Indies, his later career as a trusted and capable officer under Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen, and the more distressing events in New South Wales.

Of Bligh’s superb seamanship and skills as a navigator there is no doubt. This is proven not only in his later voyages to gather breadfruit seedlings, but also in his open-boat voyage across the ocean to Timor, with those who had been turned off the Bounty with him. There is also no doubt of Bligh’s skills as a cartographer. His original charts of parts of the Pacific, often made under distressing circumstances, became the standard charts in naval publications. Unusual in the often rakish and brutal society of naval officers, Bligh was apparently also an exemplary family man, happily married, devoted to his wife Betsy and to their 6 children.

Yet while establishing all this clearly, Salmond also has to explain why the legend of Bligh as a sadistic disciplinarian arose.

All records and evidence show that Bligh was no harsher a disciplinarian than any other Royal Navy commander of his day. He was a lot more lenient than many. In his fateful Bounty voyage, Bligh was responsible for having 10% of his crew flogged for misdemeanours.  Compare this with the 25% of his crew that James Cook had flogged on his third Pacific expedition, and the 45% of his crew that the genuinely sadistic George Vancouver had flogged in his explorations of the American Pacific coast. Bligh did a better job than most in attempting to protect his men from scurvy. Fletcher Christian, who led the mutiny, was a man whose career Bligh had mentored in his merchant navy years.

So what went wrong on the Bounty?

Salmond really comes up with a three-part answer.

First, despite his genuinely humanitarian impulses, Bligh was a stocky, unimposing man who lacked the charisma of  James Cook, who found it hard to assert his authority and who was filled with justified resentments. Bligh had, on numerous occasions, been passed over for prestigious commands which he had merited, because he did not have the right aristocratic connections. The original chart surveys he undertook on Cook’s last voyage were attributed to others who had more influence than he. (Salmond begins her book with an account of Cook’s last voyage, ten years before the Bounty mutiny, detailing Bligh’s role and the messy recriminations surrounding Cook’s murder in Hawaii.) All this bred a suspicious streak in Bligh.

Second, for all his good qualities, Bligh clearly had a foul temper. His contemporaries called him “passionate”. He got offside not only with the Bounty mutineers, but with those who chose not to mutiny and to accompany him in the long boat. Sailors did not like being flogged, but they knew it was part of naval discipline and on the whole accepted it. What they did not like was a being bawled out and belittled, sometimes in front of their subordinates, on very little provocation. This trait in Bligh angered even the men who admired him.

Third, Salmond notes there was something quite beyond Bligh’s control in the whole Bounty expedition. The ship Bligh was assigned was too small a craft for such a long expedition. Men lived cheek-by-jowl with their commander, who had no privacy and whose authority was inevitably undermined.

Lack of authority, a foul temper and the conditions of the ship became intolerable for those officers and sailors who had formed relationships with women in Tahiti, where the Bounty had had to stay for longer than Bligh wanted it to. And so the mutiny happened.

Salmond does not whitewash Bligh. His character flaws and inconsistencies are clear. But at the same time she does not whitewash the mutineers. Fletcher Christian was no common man rebelling against the officer class (the Hollywood legend), but was of higher social rank and had better social connections than Bligh himself. In many respects he was the “gentleman ranker” who resented legitimate authority. Some of his fellow mutineers were very unsavoury types and were far more exploitative of indigenous Pacific women than their officers were.

Of those mutineers who did not accompany Fletcher Christian to Pitcairn Island, some were rounded up by HMS Pandora, and transported back to England. Some drowned when the Pandora struck the Great Barrier Reef and sank. Three were hanged after court-martial in England. We can make our own judgements about the harshness of British justice in this matter. But there is no doubt that Fletcher’s closest followers did a very good job of destroying themselves, without official intervention. Within a very few years nearly all the mutineers on Pitcairn had murdered one another, basically in a series of fights over the Tahitian women they had taken with them. Only one mutineer, John Adams, survived, to be discovered twenty years later as the mellowed patriarch of his own tribe of women and children.

True historian that she is, Salmond does not bother to mention persistent romantic fictions about Fletcher Christian, which claim that he returned secretly to England and provided part of the inspiration for Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In hard reality, there was no such happy ending for Fletcher Christian, who was murdered on Pitcairn. Yet in England, Bligh lost a battle of pamphlets when Fletcher Christian’s brother Edward Christian, a Professor of Law, wrote an account of the mutiny which caught the public imagination. It gave a fanciful version of a harsh disciplinarian Blight harassing a cowed crew. It is from this pamphlet that subsequent romanticisations developed.

I finished this long, detailed book with a strong sense that Bligh was a man whose true talents were never fully developed, and who never achieved the reputation he could have won if he did not have such a foul temper.

As an account of his life, this is certainly the most comprehensive to appear so far. Its anthropological detail of the Pacific is impressive.