Roasting A Dead Corpse...

Analogous to beating a dead horse...

Rather than bury my response to some comments in the comments section of the post on Getting A Taste For It, I decided to post an entry in response.

Paul Moon is a critic in his book This Horrid Practice of what he sees as the political correctness of contemporary NZ historians and some in Maoridom that seek to ignore or deny Maori cannibalism. I guess Canterbury Heritage's point is that Moon didn't go far enough.

An early blog entry I wrote here assesses Dr. Moon's claim that modern NZ historians have ignored Maori cannibalism. They have not. To which I would only add further evidence to support the claim that Dr. Moon has done nothing but knock down a straw man. Trevor Bentley's Pakeha Maori, for example treats cannibalism extensively in the context of pakeha who lived as maori in the early days of contact. In the earlier post, I noted Michael King in Moriori pulls no punches in recording the brutality of the Te Ati Awa genocide against Moriori on Rekohu/the Chathams and the associated cannibalism. See too my summary here of Anne Salmond's work in The Trial of the Cannibal Dog on cultural conflict over cannibalism on Cook's voyages.

I'm at a bit of a loss in trying to understand Canterbury Heritage's comment that Dr. Moon suffers from Imposters Syndrome. Perhaps I'm too slow to pick up the joke. Dr. Moon hardly seems one troubled by insufficient self-confidence. I would simply drop the word "syndrome" from the appellation.

If anything Dr Moon seems to suffer from a persecution complex, overreacting equally to both ill-informed and learned criticisms of his scholarship or lack thereof. It is OTT, as the young people say or rather text, to equate, as Dr. Moon does in a New Zealand Herald August 2008 interview, the critical response to his work with the Nazi book burning of the 1930s. Such hyperbole I would expect more from shock-jocks who need to fuel controversy in order to do the next round of talk shows, TV appearances etc to flog a few more copies of their book. The US is replete with such examples. Perhaps the lesson has been successfully transmitted to academic-lite institutions in New Zealand, I cannot judge.

As for Dr. Moon's claim that the New Zealand academy is academic-lite, in the Herald interview he confuses academic freedom with freedom of speech in his admiration for US protection of speech, conflating the two as somehow protected absolutely by the US constitution. New Zealand, apparently, has "no such absolute security of freedom of speech". Well, there is news for Dr. Moon: the US constitution does not provide "absolute" freedom of speech, moreover, freedom of speech only applies to the relationship between the state and the individual, private actors may - and do, all the time - restrict the exercise of speech. My private employer, for example, may restrict what I say on work time. A publisher can decline to publish my work because she does not like what I have to say. Academic freedom is a loose concept applicable only somewhat in the academy and not much beyond it. Certainly it receives no constitutional protection unless in some way the state is involved in suppressing the act of academic speech.

But there are those of us who saw the Bud-lite nature of much of the New Zealand academy a few decades back and who departed for the "home of the brave, land of the free", etc. etc. to enjoy greater academic freedom and free speech. But I'm sure the research I completed and published in 1994-96 analyzing the inherent instability of the financial derivatives markets and the consequential likelihood of an global economic collapse absent an international lender of last resort would have equally fallen on (ideologically) deaf ears in the "free market of ideas" whether it was published in the US or New Zealand.

Yes, dear readers, kuaka is an imposter: no small, trans-Pacific migratory bird at all, but a mere academic. But, do not worry for me, for I do not struggle to accept my dizzying professional success - for there has not been much of it! And, mercifully, there is so much more to life than being a mere academic.

Meat on the Table - Maori Cannibalism Revisited

Anne Salmond's three books - Two Worlds, Between Worlds, and The Trial of the Cannibal Dog - are sophisticated, nuanced accounts of first contacts between Maoris and Pakeha (Europeans).

Kahura, Maori Chief at Grass Cove, 1773,

Self-confessed cannibal

In The Trial of the Cannibal Dog (2003), Salmond explores how Captain Cook's sailors, outraged at his lack of reprisal for the cannibalism of fellow sailors at Grass Cove on a previous voyage, put a kuri or Maori dog owned by a shipmate on trial (the dog kept nipping shipmates) - then ate it - and had the shipmate owner of the dog unwittingly eat a meal of it.

Salmond looks at this mock trial from the cultural perspective of both the English/European and Maori worlds. In 18th century European eyes, dogs and cats were familiars of witches and even if the owner was not a witch, the animals were seen as representatives of their owners. Thus, to eat a dog was akin to cannibalism.

Each side trying to come to terms with a foreign culture may subconsciously begin to absorb and adopt elements of the other's culture. The English seamen, who spend more time in Polynesia than England in the years of their voyages, end up adopting the Maori cultural practice of utu (revenge) in order to restore their mana (prestige) but combine this act with a mock English trial for the crime of cannibalism.

Cook's "enlightened", tolerant approach to conflict with Maori and other Polynesians was to forbid the use of deadly force by his men unless they were in imminent danger. This led to much conflict and resentment from a number of Cook’s officers and crew. From a Maori perspective, Cook's failure to take revenge meant to Maori that he and his men were taurekareka - people without mana or spiritual power, no better than slaves, and this exposed them to further aggressive acts. Salmond argues that this incident sowed the seeds of discord between Cook and his crew as well as with Polynesians on this, Cook's final and fatal voyage in the Pacific.

So, I reiterate from an earlier recent post that recent historical work has indeed dealt with the issue of Maori cannibalism. Sure, there are those hacks in Maoridom and the Pakeha world that may ignore or exclude cannibalism in their work & romanticize pre-European Maori, but there continues to be serious scholarly work that explores the violence and cannibalism of Maori. And Maori did not have a monopoly on violence, Europeans proved rather more adept at it on a larger scale. Sadly, it's the dark side of the human condition not confined to any particular ethnic group.

In other words, there’s more than enough blame to go around on all sides.