Rank and Religion in Tikopia (Routledge Revivals)

A Study in Polynesian Paganism and Conversion to Christianity.

Raymond Firth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136505508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1970, this book represents a unique study of beliefs and ritual practices in a pagan religion, and of the processes by which a transformation to Christianity took place.

Christianity came to the major islands of Polynesia nearly two centuries ago, and within a couple of generations, the traditional pagan religion had disappeared. Only a few remote islands such as Tikopia preserved their ancient cults.

Over eighty years ago, the author first observed and took part in these pagan rites, and on later visits he studied the change from paganism to Christian faith. Unique in its rich documentation, this book presents a systematic account of the traditional beliefs in gods and spirits and of the way in which these were fused with the social and political structure. The causes and dramatic results of the conversion to Christianity are then described, ending with an examination of the religious situation at the time of the book's original publication.

The book is both a contribution to anthropology and a case study in religious history. It completes the major series of studies of Tikopia society for which the author is famous. It gives the first full account of a Polynesian religious system in a state of change.

CHAPTER 1

TRADITIONAL TIKOPIA RELIGION AND SOCIETY

Religion is a label for an extremely diverse complex set of beliefs and practices with a high degree of cultural variation. Basically, any religion is concerned with problems of meaning—it is part of man's attempt to attribute order and sense to human existence, to see pattern in the relation of man to his fellows and to the external world. In sophisticated societies philosophy and science share this aim. But they work primarily by systematizing, analysing and reflecting upon the data of sense experience and the language by which this is expressed. Religion is prepared to go further and to claim knowledge of or belief in forces or entities not verifiable by ordinary empirical means. Religion, much more than science, is characterized by faith in the correctness of its propositions. Questioning, doubt, the search for empirical evidence which may contravene its propositions, is built into the scientific approach. Religion is oriented to the defence of its assertions, is unafraid of dogma; science is ready to attack its own most cherished beliefs and tries hard to be undogmatic. Both religion and science share belief in power—the power of knowledge. But the knowledge which religion will recognize includes a conviction of inner certainty and truth independent of external criteria of evidence. So the religious concept of power rests on foundations which can be challenged but not destroyed by outside scepticism. Highly personal ritual procedures and mystical forms of communication not subject to ordinary rational controls are claimed to give direct access to this power —power of a god, of a sacred object, of prayer. Recognition of mystical power is central to a religion; and to concepts embodying it, often given elaborate symbolic expression, are attributed avalidity of an absolute order.

The religious beliefs and procedures of any traditional society form an articulated system, with a structure which is partly overt and superficial and partly covert, to be revealed by systematic analysis. In such analysis the standpoint of the analyst is a relevant factor. In some recent anthropological studies much has been made of the need to consider a religion as an autonomous system, ‘for its own sake’. While not precise, this expression draws attention to several very relevant issues. It emphasizes the view that religion is not simply an epiphenomenon of society—that it has functions of a more personal kind than reflection or support of social forms, or protest against them. It points to the import ance of analysing the structure of religious beliefs and practices in primary relation to one another, as representing modes of thought about basic human interests and relationships. The plea for the recognition of the autonomy of religion as an object of study is reminiscent of the claims made for art, with which, in its stress upon the primacy of intuitive perception, religion is in some ways allied.

The religion of a people is concerned with their basic notions of ultimate reality.¹

More specifically, people are concerned with how to comprehend this reality, to communicate with it, and to use the results for a more adequate adjustment of individuals and of society to the conditions of human life. A basic assumption in any religious system is that there are beings or forces with power beyond human endowment. Part of the practice of the more speculative-minded adherents to the system is to develop (or as they put it, to explore) the character and relationships of these superhuman beings. Such theology can offer intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction. But pragmatically it is a necessary part of religion, to broaden the basis for organized human action. For part of the practice of the system is also to initiate or maintain a right relationship with these superhuman entities, usually with a hope of manipulating them.

But those who are thought to know how to maintain a right relation with the superhuman beings are in a position to direct the activities of other human beings. Understanding commonly implies power of control. In so far as a religious system claims to provide the key to the understanding of human problems and relationships, it tends also to provide avenues for the exercise of control over people. Most religions offer ways of individual, personal contact with the extra-human, the Divine; but they also have tended to use privileged individuals as stereotyped channels of communication between the human and the extra-human spheres. Moreover, the solutions to individual problems provided by religion tend to be assigned a general validity, and to be treated as obligatory for belief as well as for practice by all members of the society concerned. Empirically, structures of authority have tended to be created in every religious system, so that almost inevitably religious operations have involved the manipulation of power relations. This in turn has involved problems in the allocation of resources. So, however significant and elaborate be the emotional commitment, intellectual speculation and aesthetic development of a religious system, it has a concomitant series of relationships in a structure of wealth and power, whether internal to its own constitution or linked with the external frame of society.

But religion may be not only a mechanism for utilizing and sanctioning social structures but also for redressing their imbalance. It may offer not only a means of relating to society and manipulating social relationships but also of personal problem-solving, an antidote and even an escape from society. This implies a flexibility in its arrangements and a capacity for internal modification. It also implies that confrontation with another competing religious system is not a simple opposition of monolithic structures, but a contrast of systems each articulated with some weak as well as some strong links. So, a religious system may be envisaged as a field of intricate strategies operated by people in diverse combinations, for ends which range from very mundane and ego-centred to other-worldly and vicarious.

In Tikopia the religious system has displayed, if only in miniature, the operation of such forces; and their working out has been open to anthropological observation at intervals over a period of forty years.

TIKOPIA RELIGION AS PAGANISM

As William Howells has pointed out, there is no special name for ‘primitive’ religions and churches. They have been referred to as heathenism, paganism, tribal cults; Howells himself is inclined to call them ‘native cults’.¹ Of the various shorthand terms available to characterize traditional Tikopia religion I prefer paganism.

Paganism is a descriptive general term which has been used historically in several senses. A restricted quasi-philosophical usage of the nineteenth century equated paganism with the conduct of a kind of natural animal man, without sense of sin, allegedly free from the trammels of conventional society. Allied to this was conceived to be an attitude of integrity, of instinctive reaction, of freedom from all moral sophistry and strain. This was how William James described it.² The Tikopia were not pagans in this sense.

But in a more directly religious context ‘paganism’ has been commonly (and pejoratively) defined by contrast: a pagan is a person whose religious faith is not Christian, Jewish or Muslim. Paganism is then, on this ethno-centric reading, any religious system which has refused to acknowledge the existence of God as conventionally defined in Western terms.¹ Specifically, scholars of the early period of Western church history have used the term paganism for the set of religious ideas and practices in the Roman and related empires before the rise of Christianity, and, in continuity, for the early religions to which Christianity was opposed. Indeed, etymologically, pagan, in its then current Latin meaning of ‘civilian’ (? villager) obtained its religious sense because it was opposed to the usage of the early Christians in referring to themselves as the enrolled ‘soldiers’ (milites) of Christ.² Historically, then, the traditional Tikopia religion, which during the period of my observation of it stood in contrast, and to a great degree in opposition to Christianity, can be fairly termed a type of paganism.

What primarily marked off the classical pagan cults, as also the ‘heathenism’ of the early Semites, from the religions which superseded them, was the difference in their attitude to the concept of divinity. This, too, was the crucial issue in the relation between the traditional Tikopia religion and Christianity.

Tikopia concepts of spirit entities covered a very wide range (cf. ch. 3–6), but some of these were endowed with such special qualities of power and were the object of such specific worship that they may be appropriately termed gods. The system was a theistic one in the general neutral sense of the term. But theism is capable of many variants. Divinity may be conceived as universal or local in sphere, single or multiple in kind, human or non-human in origin, exclusive or nonexclusive in attitude. The divine knowledge and power may be regarded as limited or all-embracing, eternal or time-confined. In the best-known examples of monotheism, all owing much to oriental inspiration or presentation, the deity has been envisaged as unique, of universal validity, eternal, omniscient and omnipotent, and exclusive in not admitting even the existence (let alone worship) of other gods. Moreover, in such monotheistic religions the concept of this unique god has been associated with other theological notions of an intellectual complexity and moral elevation which have given it a conviction of superiority as well as a perception of difference.¹ Anthropologically, this concept has not only provided a reference point or model for much descriptive writing about primitive ideas of divinity but also has given a stimulus to much evolutionary speculation.

I am not directly concerned with such issues. Tikopia traditional religion was of another order. It was polytheist, in that it admitted the worship of many gods, and it regarded them as local, with jurisdiction primarily in Tikopia. Only by somewhat dubious extension were these gods conceived to operate for Tikopia abroad. This religion was not exclusive in that it was prepared to accept the entry of other gods into the system by proper ritual process of incorporation, and it was tolerant in treating another faith such as Christianity as an alternative to its own.

But polytheism and monotheism are gross labels, and the classification of any religious system in such terms may depend upon the level of statement, as in the weight given to popular manifestation of a faith against its intellectual exposition. Even in overt polytheism, notions of ranking of gods and assignment of supremacy of belief to one, may emerge in what Max Muller termed henotheism; or there may be a mixture of the worship of different deities or of their attributes, to be characterized as theocrasy; or all the deities may be interpreted as but forms of a single one, in syncretism. In such ways, opposition between belief in the many and in the one is reduced.² The emergence of monotheism in the Near Eastern religions has been variously credited to the innate logic of religious thought in general, to the internal structure of particular religious systems, or to the political conditions of the societies concerned. While sceptical of any ‘law governing the development of paganism’, as Cumont assumed, I would note the interesting speculative problem presented by one aspect of Tikopia theology—the focus in this polytheistic system on one major god as supreme. An ancestral culture-hero, he putatively emerged from the theistic field of the traditional religion, and his worship claimed pride of place in the Work of the Gods. (The Work of the Gods in Tikopia, London, 1967, pp. 27, 57, etc.). Developments which led to this situation are obscure, but its implications, particularly in the structure of ritual authority, were important, and were significant in the historical confrontation between Tikopia paganism and Christianity.

Tikopia paganism had then a concept of superhuman power, fragmented into a range of different personalizations with many separate attributes, but with a subtle and complex focusing of some of these in ways which acknowledged supremacy in part to a single deity. These traditional conceptions of divinity were treated with great reverence, their representations could be approached only within regulations of taboo, and putative communication with them could be accomplished only by elaborate rites of worship. And the representations of the divine were so simply mnemonic that this worship was almost completely words of address and acts of bodily respect offered to the unseen. Periodically, in small groups or large, the Tikopia concentrated their energies and their resources and rededicated these to the service of the beings whom they themselves had created.

RELIGION AND THE SOCIAL LIFE

But the orientation was not all one way. Traditionally, Tikopia religious ideas and practices entered into or were combined intricately with other aspects of the social life. The public, everyday economic and social activities of the Tikopia community were so rich, their agriculture, fishing, cooking, dancing, mourning so obviously inspired by practical considerations, that it was easy for an observer to overlook for a time their more retired esoteric aspects, and especially the intricate linkage of the secular and the religious.¹ Many ordinary religious rites took place inside dwellings, or uninhabited houses used as temples. But in the gloom inside one could see floor mats not trodden or sat upon; areas from which children were chased away; house posts not used in the common way as back rests; spears and clubs not touched. Amid orchards or gardens were buildings hardly ever used yet periodically repaired, and stones on which one was warned not to set foot. References to dreams, illnesses and untoward events helped to reinforce the realization that for an investigator there were elements of irrationality and mystery to be encountered in the organization of social life, that many Tikopia activities were linked with complex beliefs in controlling spirit powers.

Not every aspect of Tikopia secular life had its religious accompaniment. In ordinary house-building, plaiting mats and beating bark-cloth, in reef fishing, in the collection of most types of orchard foods, in most ceremonies of initiation, and marriage, there was no orientation of activity toward extra-human beings, and no belief that they influenced what was happening. But complex religious rituals accompanied the construction of the larger canoes, and tools used in their construction and repair were dedicated to guardian spirits. Periodic rites were aimed at assuring the co-operation of these spirits in the capture of flying fish, bonito and shark from these vessels. Yam, taro and breadfruit, among the most important vegetable foodstuffs, had each its planting and harvesting rites, and extraction of sago and turmeric flour was accompanied by analogous invocations to spirit beings. Formal recreational assemblies such as dart match and dance festival involved ritual acts directed to gods and ancestors. At life crises much of the behaviour of the participants was motivated by their beliefs in the existence of spirits and the power of these to influence and improve human affairs. Some religious rites could be observed to be associated with activities involving ends difficult to achieve because of the technical expertise needed or the social restrictions that encompassed them. Some rituals represented at a general level relations between major sections of the society; some emphasized relations of structural separation, difference and opposition; some required cooperation in the face of apathy or hostility, or allowed expression of competition in an organized manner. In elaborate and subtle ways Tikopia religion provided both objectives and instruments of action to groups and individuals pursuing both public and private ends.

‘SPIRITUAL VALUES’ IN TRADITIONAL TIKOPIA RELIGION

The Tikopia religious system was openly and strongly oriented towards economic ends, drew largely upon economic resources and served as a channel for their redistribution. It was also intricately interlocked with the system of rank. Chiefs and other lineage heads, in a broadly graded hierarchy, were not only the most promine...