The Wayfinders (7 page)

At one point, close to their goal, Nainoa snapped
awake in a daze and realized that with the overcast skies and the sea fog,
he had no idea where they were. He had lost the continuity of mind and
memory essential to survival at sea. He masked his fear from the crew and in
despair remembered Mau’s words.
Can you see the image of the island in your
mind?
He became calm, and realized that he had already
found the island. It was the
Hokule’a
, and he had everything he
needed on board the sacred canoe. Suddenly, the sky brightened and a beam of
warm light appeared on his shoulder. The clouds cleared and he followed that
beam directly to the island of Rapa Nui.

I found it an extraordinary experience to sail
with Nainoa on the
Hokule’a
along with the crew from the Polynesian Voyaging
Society. As important as Mau was to him as a mentor and guide, Nainoa
Thompson has become an icon for an entire generation of young Polynesians,
an immensely important cultural figure, publicly more admired than anyone
else in Hawaii. There is a strong sense throughout the islands that as long
as the
Hokule’a
sails the culture of the navigators will survive.
Nainoa’s entire mission in life is to ensure that this happens. He refers to
Hokule’a
as both a sacred canoe and the spaceship of the
ancestors. To me, this is a fitting choice of words. Indeed, if you took all
of the genius that has allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to
an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia.

I AM DRAWN TO
the story of Polynesia because it reveals so
much about the issues and misconceptions that both inspire and haunt us to
this day: the sheer courage that true exploration implies, the brilliance of
human adaptation, the dark impact of conquest and colonialism. It reminds
us, too, of the need always to be skeptical about the tenacious grip of
academic orthodoxy. Knowledge is rarely completely divorced from power, and
interpretation is too often an expression of convenience.

Anthropology, as we saw in the first lecture,
grew out of an evolutionary model in which nineteenth-century men such Lewis
Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer envisioned societies as stages in a linear
progression of advancement, leading, as they conceived it, from savagery to
barbarism to civilization. Each of these phases of human development was
correlated, in their calculations, with specific technological innovations.
Fire, ceramics, and the bow and arrow marked the savage. With the
domestication of animals, the rise of agriculture, and the invention of
metalworking, we entered the level of the barbarian. Literacy implied
civilization. Every society, it was assumed, progressed through the same
stages, in the same sequence. Thus the technological sophistication of a
people placed them on a particular step on the ladder rising toward
evolutionary success. The Polynesians and the British may have been
contemporaries, but the lack of guns and cannon implied that the former were
at an earlier juncture in their evolution, while the sailors of Captain Cook
represented a later and more advanced stage.

Such a transparently simplistic and biased
interpretation of human history, though long repudiated by anthropologists
as an intellectual artifact of the nineteenth century, as relevant today as
the convictions of Victorian clergy who dated the earth at a mere 6,000
years, has nevertheless proved to be remarkably persistent, even among
contemporary scholars. A recent Canadian book,
Disrobing the Aboriginal
Industry
:
The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural
Preservation
, ridicules the notion that indigenous inhabitants
of the Americas had anything of interest to offer the world at the time of
first European encounter. “Never in history,” the authors write, “has the
cultural gap between two peoples coming into contact with each other been
wider. It doesn’t mean,” they add helpfully, referring in a phrase to tens
of millions of people speaking perhaps as many as three thousand languages,
“that [indigenous people] are stupid or inferior. We all passed through the
stage of Neolithic culture.” That such a sentiment could be expressed by a
university professor, and then seized upon by the national media as proof of
the hoax of the aspirations of First Nations peoples today, is disturbing.

The Americas gave Europe tobacco, the potato and
the tomato, maize, peanuts, chocolate, peppers, squash, pineapples, and the
sweet potato. From the New World came quinine to treat malaria, the muscle
relaxant d-Tubocurarine derived from Amazonian arrow poisons, and cocaine
from the plant known to the Inca as the Divine Leaf of Immortality. These
three drugs profoundly impacted Western medicine; cinchona bark, the source
of quinine, alone saved tens of thousands of lives. Europe offered to the
Americas wheat, barley, oats, goats, cows, African slavery, and steel, as
well as typhus, malaria, measles, influenza, smallpox, and the plague.
Ninety percent of the Amerindian population died within a generation or two
of contact.

The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled the
early Spaniards, as did Cusco, the Inca city of gold. No place in Spain, by
all contemporary accounts, could compare to either capital. The empire of
the Inca only existed because it guaranteed freedom from want and
starvation. Storehouse complexes distributed along the spine of the Andes
held in reserve hundreds of thousands of bushels of quinoa, maize,
lisas
,
oca
,
añu
, and vast amounts of
chuño
, the world’s first freeze-dried food, fabricated from any
number of the 3,000 varieties of potatoes domesticated by the pre-Columbian
civilizations of South America.

In contrast, four centuries after the Conquest,
London was the centre of the European world, the wealthiest and most
powerful city on earth. But the death rate on one side of town was twice
that of the other. One in five children died in birth. The children of the
poor, on average, were 6 inches shorter and 11 pounds lighter than the
offspring of the rich, according to the records of the British Army. Jack
London, describing the urban life of the great capital in 1901, at the
height of its prestige and technological superiority, writes of the poor
scrambling over heaps of hospital garbage, scraps piled high, “on a huge
platter in an indescribable mess — pieces of bread, chunks of grease and fat
pork, the burnt skin from the outside of roasted joints, bones, in short,
all the leavings from the fingers and mouths of sick ones suffering all
manner of diseases. Into this mess the men plunged their hands, digging,
pawing, turning over, examining, rejecting and scrambling for food. It
wasn’t pretty. Pigs couldn’t have done worse. But the poor devils were
hungry.”

There was one scholar in the early history of
anthropology who recognized the inadequacies of broad theories of culture
concocted by men who never went to the field and whose ideas about human
advancement were obviously skewed by preconception. Franz Boas was a
physicist, trained in Germany a generation before Einstein. His doctoral
studies concerned the optical properties of water, and throughout his
investigations his research was plagued by problems of perception, which
came to fascinate him. In the eclectic way of the best of nineteenth-century
scholarship, inquiry in one academic field led to another. What was the
nature of knowing? Who decided what was to be known? Boas became interested
in how seemingly random beliefs and convictions converged into this thing
called “
culture
,” a term that he was the first to promote as an
organizing principle, a useful point of intellectual departure. Far ahead of
his time, he sensed that every distinct social community, every cluster of
people distinguished by language or adaptive inclination, was a unique facet
of the human legacy and its promise.

Boas became the father of modern cultural
anthropology, the first scholar to attempt to explore in a truly open and
neutral manner how human social perceptions are formed, and how members of
distinct societies become conditioned to see and interpret the world.
Working first among the Inuit of Baffin Island and later along the Northwest
coast of Canada, he insisted that his students learn and conduct their
research in the language of the place and participate fully, to the extent
possible, in the daily lives of the people they studied. Every effort should
be made, he argued, to understand the perspective of the other, to learn the
way they perceive the world, and if at all possible, the very nature of
their thoughts. This demanded, by definition, a willingness to step back
from the constraints of one’s own prejudices and preconceptions. This notion
of cultural relativism was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was
Einstein’s theory of relativity in the discipline of physics. Everything
Boas proposed ran against orthodoxy. It was a shattering of the European
mind, and ever since, anthropologists have periodically been accused of
embracing an extreme relativism, as if every human behaviour must be
accepted simply because it exists. In truth, no serious anthropologist
advocates the elimination of judgment. Anthropology merely calls for its
suspension, so that the judgments we are all ethically obliged to make as
human beings may be informed ones.

For Franz Boas, the moment of epiphany came in
the winter of 1883 during his first ethnographic trip to Baffin Island.
Caught in a winter blizzard in temperatures that dropped to minus 46 degrees
Celsius, his party became disoriented in the darkness. For twenty-six hours
they pounded on by sled, Boas abandoning his fate to his Inuk companion and
the dogs. Eventually they secured shelter, “half frozen and half starved.”
Boas was glad to be alive. The following morning he wrote in his diary, “I
often ask myself what advantages our good society possesses over that of the
‘savages’ and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right
to look down on them… . We have no right to blame them for their forms and
superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We highly educated people are
much worse, relatively speaking.”

Boas established the template for ethnographic
research, and his example inspired those who would go on to create the
modern discipline of anthropology. The goal of the anthropologist is “to
grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his
vision of his world.” These words, which could have come from Boas, were
actually written forty years later by Bronislaw Malinowski, an aristocratic
Pole at the London School of Economics, who had taken ethnographic fieldwork
to quite another level of commitment. At a time when economics implied the
theories of either Karl Marx or Adam Smith, Malinowski turned everything
upside down, challenging conventional ideas about the nature of wealth, and
the purpose and meaning of exchange, even as he revealed the dynamics of a
contemporary oceanic trading network so vast and complex that it offered
clues as to the very forces that ultimately led to the settlement of the
Pacific Ocean.

Stranded in Melanesia by the outbreak of the
First World War, Malinowski had spent two years in the Trobriand Islands, an
archipelago of flat coral reefs and islands located some 250 kilometres
northeast of Papua New Guinea. The inhabitants, perhaps 10,000 at the time,
were, in his words, “merry, talkative and easy going,” with artistic skills
that placed them “culturally, in the first rank of Melanesian tribes.” A
gifted linguist, Malinowski quickly mastered their language and went to
work, readily discerning the broad outlines of the culture.

The people lived in villages, and were largely
dependent on their gardens, with the primary crop being the yam, the
cultivation and harvest of which determined the ebb and flow of the social
and ritual cycles of the year. Descent was matrilineal. There were four
recognized clans, who had birds, animals, and plants as linked totems. The
islands were divided into a number of political units, each dominated by a
male leader. Though conflict was endemic, wars had precise rules and battles
were mostly theatrical displays of spears and shields.

The division between men and women struck
Malinowski as curiously equitable. Women had considerable influence,
controlled elements of the economy through their labour, and worked their
own forms of magic which had nothing to do with seduction, though sex became
something of an obsession for Malinowski. Inevitably a product of his own
world, he was stunned by the freedom enjoyed by young Trobriand maidens.
Before marriage, anything seemed to go. Once formally wed, fidelity was
highly prized, and adultery severely sanctioned. Malinowski reflected upon
this at length in one of the two books he wrote based on his time on the
islands. His second book, however, is the one that concerns us,
Argonauts of the Western Pacific
, for this tells the story of
the sea.

Malinowski reached the Trobriand Islands by boat,
after a journey across violent currents and an open ocean that would have
impressed any child of Kraków, the landlocked Polish city of his birth. He
wanted to know how people could possibly maintain social connections across
such barriers. While the Trobriand Islanders drew their subsistence almost
exclusively from the land, their commerce moved over water. But, thought
Malinowski, on the face of it nothing they produced could rationalize the
risks even of the single voyage he had endured to reach them. It soon became
clear to him that something was going on that had nothing to do with
practicality, a curious system of exchange in which nothing of evident worth
or value moved at great risk and with the promise of immense prestige. The
Trobriand Islands, he discovered, were just one of many points in a trading
network that linked scores of communities over thousands of square
kilometres of ocean, small huddled clusters of humanity that clung to coral
reefs and spread over the remains of sunken mountains.