The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power by Jeffrey Sissons (review)

New accounts of Polynesian relations with colonizers in the early contact period seem theoretically indebted to Marshall Sahlins’s elegant reconstruction of the 1779 murder of Captain Cook in Hawai‘i, Islands of History (1985). Sahlins interpreted Hawaiian views of Cook’s arrival in Kealakekua Bay as in conjuncture with how the British saw their hosts in order to illustrate a broader theoretical argument against Whig history, that is, history as a narrative of progress and from the viewpoint of the victors (see The Whig Interpretation of History, by Herbert Butterfield [1965]). In Sahlins’s well-known argument, Cook came ashore during Makahiki, the local new year’s celebration of the rise of the Pleiades that heralds the annual return of Lono, the ancestor-spirit who brings back the wet season of growth and fertility and becomes the object of festivity and revelry before being ritually “killed.” According to Sahlins, at least some Hawaiians thought that Cook was Lono incarnate, and this identification contributed to the larger cultural context and meaning of his death.

Now, Jeffrey Sissons, an anthropologist who focuses on Māori history and culture, has contributed a no less compelling, although somewhat less exquisite, sequel to Sahlins’s account of the death of Captain Cook. In The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power, Sissons focuses on related ritual phenomena that took place in the region during the first few decades of the nineteenth century following contact.

Although his theoretical goals echo Sahlins, Sissons also wants to refine or redefine that earlier argument from a framework borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu that features ritual practices over cosmology. But, to my mind, this is a minor point. The major contribution of Sissons’s careful, rich book is historical. He traces the repeated ways in which the early years of religious change in the early decades of the nineteenth century got mapped onto “the seasonality of power,” a phrase that is his gloss for the wet/dry times of the Polynesian year when society used to shift from decentralized and egalitarian forms of communitas to the renewal political hierarchy around the figures of chiefs and religious leaders usually called “priests” in the literature. Cook obviously had the bad luck of getting caught up in the period of the former rather than the latter.

Drawing mostly from early nineteenth-century missionary reports occasionally supplemented by a Polynesian voice such as that of the great Mo‘orean chief Pomare, Sissons doggedly traces the seasonally based pattern in which chiefs and priests throughout the region again and again rejected Polynesian cosmology and adopted Christianity.

During the wet season, when the Pleiades were visible, or “above” the horizon, these leaders performed acts of religious iconoclasm. They rejected taboos that decreed gender-segregated commensality; they unwrapped and exposed their secret images of ‘Oro and other ancestor-spirits, abandoned conviction in the efficacy and prestige of mana, and tore down their sacred marae. During the subsequent dry season, when the morning stars were “below” the horizon, they then erected new church buildings and decreed new laws to substitute for the old taboos. For example, Sissons details the arresting case of the first missionary printing press in the Society Islands whose floor was built with stones from the old marae that had been destroyed near the site. Some of the old hierarchical and gender-based taboos were re-installed. The house was considered too sacred for commoners to enter. New objects of power were produced from the new sacralized center: fetishized hymnals and spelling books endowed with mana-like authority were now wrapped with barkcloth covers the way the sacred spirit-images had been prior to the iconoclasm. Like the old order, when spirit-ancestors had been bound by barkcloth, book-bindings bound the new society under the sovereignty of a kind of stranger...