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.

Just Eat The Vegetables… Cannibalism in early New Zealand

Emile Rouargue’s fanciful illustration of Maori cannibalism, an illustration in a volume on French explorer Dumont D’Urville’s expedition to New Zealand. The artist is not known to have visited New Zealand. This illustration is on the cover of Moon’s This Horrid Practice – the title itself being Captain James Cook’s reference to cannibalism.

In This Horrid Practice, (Auckland: Penguin NZ, 2008), author Paul Moon argues that Maori cannibalism or kai tangata [human food] was more widespread and occurred later than many histories record. Moreover, in various radio & newspaper interviews launching his book, he charges revisionist historians have sanitized New Zealand histories in recent decades by ignoring or excluding discussion of cannibalism. This post will limit itself to the second claim and its factual accuracy.

Conceding for argument’s sake that political correctness in New Zealand has been widespread in recent decades, the charge that recent New Zealand general histories have denied or ignored the practice of cannibalism is a weak one not borne out by the facts.

Moon charges that Keith Sinclair’s A History of New Zealand (multiple editions) mentions cannibalism but once and that Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand (2003) omits any discussion of it at all.

A quick review of Sinclair’s history shows at least three separate references: quoting Maori anthropologist Terangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck) as dryly commenting of the pre-European Maori that ” ’Human flesh was eaten when procurable’.” (p.18); that the inter-Maori musket wars of the 1820s “led to heavy casualties and cannibal feasts unprecedented in pre-European battles fought with stone weapons” (p. 42); and, that under the influence of the missionaries “Christian chiefs… gave up killing and cannibalism” (p. 45). It is clear from the tenor of Sinclair’s remarks that cannibalism was embedded within Maori culture and was practised on a large scale in the 1820s. A closer reading of Sinclair’s body of work would likely uncover further references to the role of cannibalism within Maori culture.

Turning to Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand, he certainly does examine the short, brutal lives of Maori, cut short often by premeditated acts of violence: “As Maori oral tradition recorded, and ancient burials have confirmed, elderly people, women and children, along with defeated male warriors, were periodic subjects for torture, killing and cannibalism.” (p. 87) King continues with an un-cited quote detailing the evidence of violence at a burial site in Palliser Bay that notes the site was hidden possibly to avoid desecration by enemies (pp. 87-89).

King also cites the Grass Cove incident of 1773 in which ten of Captain Cook’s crew were victims of Maori cannibalism to underscore the misunderstandings of first contacts between Maori and Europeans, despite Cook’s generally enlightened and moderate approach to indigenous peoples in the Pacific (p. 106).

One might be led to conclude, among other possibilities, that Moon’s consideration of these two general histories was limited to an act the first year student is cautioned against: the reading of a book’s index to a topic rather than a thoroughgoing reading of the work in question. A scholar has a higher duty yet - of familiarizing himself with the body of another’s work before making a full assessment.

Stepping back from King’s general history which of its nature means even for such a young country as New Zealand that many matters must be dealt with sketchily, in the context of his body of scholarship it is clear that King knew well and did not shy away from tackling the vexed issue of cannibalism.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in King’s Moriori (1989) in which he presents an authoritative account of the genocide, including cannibalism, of intertribal colonisation by mainland Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama Maori of the Chatham Island/Rekohu Moriori. King’s work was path-breaking in confronting a European or Pakeha myth that Moriori were an inferior, non-Maori group driven from the mainland; in challenging Maori accounts of the Moriori genocide; and, affirming Moriori as first peoples in Rekohu.

In Moriori, (for example, pp. 62-66), King quotes at length missionary Johannes Engst who collected the few surviving Moriori accounts of genocidal cannibalism: after death, “the heads were removed and thrown to the dogs, which gnawed off the best and buried the remainder for the next meal. Then the virile membrane [penis], having been cut off, was thrown to the women sitting around who ate this dainty morsel eagerly…. The heart, the most sought-after part of the whole body, was set aside for the chief guest…. When it [the flesh] had all been washed clean it was brought to the oven…. [Once cooked] they then laid the flesh compactly in small baskets, giving each person an individual portion.” (p. 65).

Did Sinclair and King ignore or deny the prevalence of cannibalism? Even their general histories suggest not.

If you don’t like the meat, just eat the vegetables…