From https://www.rpgpub.com/threads/mythic-polynesia-an-in-depth-analysis-of-liams-critiques.8517/

By Séadna (Legendary Member; Joined: Sep 3, 2018; Messages: 6,386)

Okay I'm only currently at Liam's tweet containing

He needs to read Linda Tuhiwai Smith's 'Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples'

In Western terms, the Oceanian culture described herein was established around 1200 AD and remained virtually unchanged until first contact with European travellers in the early sixteenth century

Oceanians distinguish between coastal waters (tai) and Ocean itself, which they call moana. Ocean lies outside the fringing reef of an island, where swells are not broken by subsurface coral and the sea floor no longer moderates the currents and waves. Most Oceanians, even those who are competent sailors, are uncomfortable on Ocean; the currents, swell, and winds are all unfamiliar. There are no laws on Ocean save for those of wind and wave, and no chiefly authority to protect them from harm.

Dec 13, 2022 at 5:30 AM

Okay continuing the points here, it took me a while to learn enough to discuss what Liam says about this extract from the book:

In general, the Oceanian people are relatively tall with light brown skin. Hair colour is always dark and usually wavy to a greater or lesser extent. The western peoples have darker skins and hair tending towards frizzy in texture. Corpulency of the body is considered attractive in both men and women in many cultures, and high-status individuals may retire to islets for the purposes of fattening themselves by excessive eating and indolence. This, combined with pale skin from avoiding direct sunlight, can increase marriage prospects at all ages.
......
In cultures where pale skin is valued as a mark of beauty, both herbal skin-bleaching and seclusion from light are practised by women of the upper social strata

The Tahitian practice of ha'apori (fattening) was found in a part of East Pacific islands (Puka Puka, Mangaia, Mangareva, Rurutu, Rapa Nui...). The
persons subjected to the ha'apori were locked in the shade into special houses, and fed abundantly with a preparation made of mixture of fruits and ‘uru, fruit of the breadfruit tree. It was mostly a practice for young people and some women. Once got fat they were presented in public to their chief so that he would appreciate the curve of their bodies

Fattening rituals in Pacific societies are examined within a discussion of the cultural aspects of obesity as a disease of modernisation. Those rituals contributed to a strong aesthetic value of large body size and light skin, while also incorporating the symbolic value of food. They may have enhanced survival value of a genetic potential in the face of irregular diet. Today with a more regular diet available only the negative aspects of large body size prevail.
......
Selected men and women, usually young, and from high ranking families, underwent a purposeful fattening process. They were set aside in a special place to be fed by relatives and undertake little activity "in order to grow fat and lusty and high spirited"14. Prodigious amounts of breadfruit, both fresh and fermented, together with bananas and other fruits crushed and mixed in water so that they became almost liquid were fed daily. The breadfruit itself was considered to lighten skin colour15 but in addition they were covered in large amounts of tapa barkcloth, which when removed before the nobility of the community revealed just how much lighter the skin had become. The length of time any group stayed in seclusion depended in part on the supply of breadfruit.

The main purposes of the ritual were ‘to enhance their sexual attractiveness"13 and "to grow fat and lusty and high spirited"14. But it is hard to know whether these were the values of the beholder or those of Tahitians themselves. Those who emerged from the ritual were seen to have enhanced beauty, not only in terms of their body size, but also of their lightened skin colour.

Thus these ha’apori rituals combined two aesthetic values, an enlarged body, covered with a lightened skin

Corpulency of the body is considered attractive in both men and women in many cultures, and high-status individuals may retire to islets for the purposes of fattening themselves by excessive eating and indolence. This, combined with pale skin from avoiding direct sunlight, can increase marriage prospects at all ages
......
In cultures where pale skin is valued as a mark of beauty, both herbal skin-bleaching and seclusion from light are practised by women of the upper social strata

La pratique du ha’apori (littéralement « engraissement ») a été relevée par les premiers Européens en contact dans une bonne partie du Pacifique insulaire est : îles Manihiki-Rakahanga, Mangaia, Mangareva, Nauru, île de Pâques, Rurutu, Cook, et dans l’archipel de la Société. Elle aurait été inconnue à Tonga, en Nouvelle Zélande, aux Marquises et à Hawaii

Dec 13, 2022 at 8:32 AM

TristramEvans said: OK. To what extent do you believe that accounts for Liam's criticisms? Because the issues (as read it) don't seem to simply be "general statements were make about Polynesia that simply don't apply to the Maori".

TristramEvans

Dec 13, 2022 at 8:39 AM

Séadna said: The only issue not of this type I've hit yet were his ones about the f/wh sound.

Sharrow

Dec 13, 2022 at 9:48 AM

As a New Zealander, albeit a Pākehā (i.e. someone of non-Māori descent), I can say that it's a bit of a touchy subject from time to time, not helped by variances in regional pronunciation. For a fair bit of the country the author would have been less wrong if he'd said "The 'wh' sound can be assumed to simply be a 'w'". Today it tends to be taken to be a softish 'f', but that is not what I was taught in my early school years (by a Māori teacher, for what that's worth), and certainly not what my mother was taught.

We were taught that the 'wh' sound is that of a 'correctly' pronounced 'when' or 'which' or 'where' (though in NZ today those are usually pronounced with a straight 'w' sound).

On top of that, for many decades there was a tendency of non-Māori to utterly mange local placenames, and aside from placenames there was a concerted attempt by the NZ government after WWII through to about the 1970s to turn Māori into a non-living language by assimilation of the Māori people into a thoroughly Pākehā culture.

So, yeah, a bit of a sensitive spot for some people.

As for the Moriori, their enslavement and genocide occurred in the mid-late 1800s, and is thus part of the upheaval post-contact with Europeans, during the 'musket wars'. I don't think it has any place in a 'mythic polynesia' at all, and that is does suggests that the author is using the old narrative (a European one) that the Moriori were the original inhabitants of New Zealand proper and were driven out (and mostly killed and eaten) by the Māori when they arrived.

Séadna

Dec 13, 2022 at 10:10 AM

This is a bit of a technical aside for people not interested in linguistics.

Sharrow said: As a New Zealander, albeit a Pākehā (i.e. someone of non-Māori descent), I can say that it's a bit of a touchy subject from time to time, not helped by variances in regional pronunciation. For a fair bit of the country the author would have been less wrong if he'd said "The 'wh' sound can be assumed to simply be a 'w'". Today it tends to be taken to be a softish 'f', but that is not what I was taught in my early school years (by a Māori teacher, for what that's worth), and certainly not what my mother was taught.

We were taught that the 'wh' sound is that of a 'correctly' pronounced 'when' or 'which' or 'where' (though in NZ today those are usually pronounced with a straight 'w' sound).

Séadna

Dec 13, 2022 at 4:58 PM

Okay the gender section and this is one of the paragraphs discussed:

Life in an Oceanian society is strictly divided into male and female roles by the threat of Tapu (supernatural afflictions). Sexual Tapus do not imply value differences between the sexes - men are different to women, but in no way considered superior. These roles are ordained by the great atua: men are permitted to enter the sea and the forests by their tutelary gods (Tangaroa and Tane respectively, see page 89) - they are the fishermen, loggers, canoe builders; whereas women are under the protection of Haumia (god of wild forage); they can gather wild food and produce such as pandanus leaves and mulberry bark and use these raw materials to weave mats and make barkcloth respectively. Only Rongo (god of agriculture) allows men and women to labour side by side. The food for the men must be cooked by men and eaten apart from the other sex, and vice versa. During mealtimes, the sexes remain segregated for their own protection.
If a man interferes with the work of women, then he risks polluting that work with his Mana, which causes any women who come into contact with it to sicken. A woman's Mana is better controlled than a man's and cannot accidently infect a man's food or work, but she can remove the Mana inherent in it, siphoning away the maker's magical strength. For more about Mana and Tapu, see page 42 onwards.
No work or eating is done in the marital home to avoid Tapu. Once weaned, children are raised by both parents equally until they reach an age where Tapu starts to exert itself

Pre-contact Hawaiians lived their lives according to a strictly enforced system of responsibility and duty, regulation, restriction, and resource management called kapu, or tapu from which we get the word taboo

1. Seeing the division between men and women as superior/inferior. The book explicitly avoids this, so I won't say anything more on it.
   
   
2. Viewing women as "polluting" men's work by breaking tapu. This is fairly common in older academic works. Recent scholarship does go strongly against this. For instance Hanson, F. Allen and Louise Hanson Counterpoint in Maori Culture (1983) talks about how older academic work saying a women walking over a fishing rod "polluted" it was wrong and rather she just robbed it of its power to catch fish. Mythic Polynesia lines up with recent scholarship here as per the underlined sentence in bold above.
   
   
3. Not including women's role in Nao ceremonies, i.e. that women had the sacred power to cleanse breaks in tapu. Mythic Polynesia has this on p.46, so no foul there I think.
   
   
4. Getting the logical order of tapu and gender backward. That is that rather than men and women being seperated by tapu, instead the rules of tapu dictated various conditions for who was appropriate for what role and then as a consequence of how men and women typically differ biologically this was effectively a gender division though not a priori so. Some papers on this are:
   TAPU AND NOA AS NEGOTIATORS OF MĀORI GENDER ROLES IN PRECOLONIAL AOTEAROA AND TODAY, Mitchell and Olsen-Reeder
   Theorising karanga to make sense of our reality, Mikaere, Ani, INNZNA
   
   I choose these because they are gateways to the literature on this.
   
   A common example is how a chief had to be commanding/strong voiced/etc. Often only a man was felt to meet these conditions, but sometimes a woman could. So the tapu system was not based on gender.
   
   Note in the papers above this is only advanced in tentative language and in some of the literature it's more proposed as a development of the system, sort of like how a Catholic might write about "Catholicism today". This is at quite a theoretical level and still actively discussed within Polynesian scholarship with native scholars disagreeing. There's nothing on it in Mythic Polynesia.

The one thing that has pushed me to challenge the situation about women in Fiji is because of how I am treated in my family. I resent the fact that when I eat I sit at the bottom; I resent that very much and I resent the fact that the women eat second in the villages.

What I resent in Tonga is that a man can fool around and a woman cannot. A man can wander around at night and woman cannot do that. But I do not resent being placed second as far as eating is concerned.

1. Formerly forbidden for women to eat together with men of bonito, squid, popii, and koehi.
2. Women might not go in a canoe.
3. Women might not climb on top of the platform of any sacred enclosure.
4. Women might not eat bananas, fresh breadfruit, or coco-nuts.
5. Many sorts of fish were also tapu to women, also pigs of a brown colour, goats and fowls.
6. The kuavena fish was tapu to the fishermen, also the peata, a sort of shark.
7. Children might not carry one another pick-a-back.

Anything to do with food preparation was strictly organised: categories and genders were separated, there were specific ways of eating food, specific places where food could be prepared, and what different individuals could eat was determined — for example, women could eat only the fish or shellfish that they caught on the seashore

There is no question that men and women ate separately

Séadna

Dec 13, 2022 at 7:13 PM

Continuing from here.

Okay so the remainder of Liam's tweets mostly fall into three categories:

1. Issues with the description of the Moriori and Māori relations.
2. Descriptions of the culture seen as condescending.
3. Cultural concepts being explained in an overly "Western" individualistic way.

Generations passed before Kupe's lore was used in earnest. Fleeing famine and war, a series of migration canoes left Havaiki, and several of them made it to
Aotearoa. A people called the Moriori were discovered inhabiting the land; a sparse and peaceful people who welcomed the settlers with open arms. The warlike Havaikians met the kindness with violence, driving the Moriori from their land and forcing them into a marginal existence either on the southern island or further east on Rekohu

The Polynesian canoe or waka is a masterpiece of maritime engineering for a culture without metal tools, screws or pegs, mortices, pitch, or non-water-soluble adhesives. The very simplest vessel is a float such as a surfing board. However, even these are not just planks of wood,but are carefully shaped according to ancient ratios.

The people of Mythic Polynesia are a stone-age civilisation. Their ancestors had no knowledge of ore smelting and metalwork upon leaving Havaiki (see page 89), and it is a skill they never developed. They do not have any knowledge of ceramics, nor have they discovered the tanning process to make leather from pigskin or dogskin. They never discovered how to weave cloth from plant fibres or (lacking wool-bearing livestock) from animal hair. Nevertheless, they have a highly developed material culture and are a technologically developed people despite these limitations.

Sharrow

Dec 14, 2022 at 12:27 AM

Séadna said: What about the Maori?
So the issue is that it's contentious and political how gender segregated Maori society was traditionally. It seems to have had, from a certain perspective, the least exact implementation of tapu. An introduction to this is:
Maori Women and the Politics of Tradition: What Roles and Power Did, Do, and Should Maori Women Exercise? by Caroline Ralston (1993)
Unfortunately I can't go into more because it becomes political. Native Maori leaders cite tradition as the reason women can't lead, with others saying that view only solidified under European influence and it becomes more complex than I as a foreigner can follow.

My impression is that the Maori seem to not have had eating segregation and that male-only roles had evolved into male-preferred roles.

So once again I would say pretty accurate on Mythic Polynesia's part, clear evidence of following recent academic research*, but with the Maori as an exception not covered.

*See the Noa rituals.

Séadna

Dec 15, 2022 at 7:01 AM

Following here.

Okay so the rest of the Tweets deal with the book's exposition of cultural, legal and worldview concepts and how there misunderstood or treated in an overly "Western" individualistic way.

A lot of these revolve around the concepts of Mana, Rahui, Nao, Tapu, how the family structure is viewed through these concepts etc.

I'll take Rahui and Utu as examples of what Liam discusses, but I need to describe the concepts at a base level first. I'll give quick descriptions.

1. Mana is a supernatural force that allows things to perform the actions expected of them. It lets a chief lead, a fishing rod catch fish, a volcano erupt, etc. Something robbed of Mana will "not work". It should be noted that its not just objects or people that have Mana, even a village or nation can have its own mana that permits it to function well.
   It's quite similar to the Ancient Egyptian notion of Ka.
   
   
2. Tapu as mentioned above is basically a framework defining who can do what jobs, how they do it and to what degree and what resources can be used when and in what amounts. Violating it can cause the wrong "kind" of Mana to flow from one thing into another. So a man's mana infecting a woman's work. The consequences of this include causing illness or corruption or just removing Mana. An example of the latter being a woman walking over a fishing rod will dampen its power to catch fish.
   However some rules within this framework simply relate preventing food, wood, etc from being used incorrectly in a practical sense. Such as setting aside certain amounts of food for times of hardship and so on.
   So its a mix of religious ideas and pragmatics from our perspective. However within the cultures themselves at the time it was closer to just being proper resource management, as Mana was simply another thing to be managed.
   
   
3. Rahui is "temporal" Tapu. Temporal both in the sense being declared by somebody currently in authority and meant to function for a specific period of time rather than being more universal and also in the sense of relating specifically to resources and territory.
   
   
4. Noa are places, people or events that are free from Tapu, i.e. either they are exceptions to the rules or they can correct breaches in the rules. An example is a woman's vagina is Noa in many Polynesian societies and by washing her vagina up river from a man who violated Tapu she can cleanse him. There are also specific Noa ceremonies where typical rules about eating can be set aside.
   
   
5. Finally there is Utu, a specifically Māori idea. It's a part of the Tapu framework relating to reciprocal action. So getting revenge for a wrongdoing or paying off debts.

Séadna

Dec 15, 2022 at 7:09 AM

Here's my basic summary:

If the English language had a snappy word for "Polynesian but not Māori" and this book was called "Mythic <that word>" this would be a well-researched book that could stand alongside Mythic Constantinople and does a good job of explaining and giving mechanics to Polynesian society and cultural concepts.

This book would be nowhere near as good at running a Māori game. You'd be playing "Samoans in New Zealand" and the sections about the Moriori are a major misstep.

Due to how much they differ from other Polynesian socieities the Māori would really need to be in a separate supplement. Kind of like "Lands of the Saxons" for Mythic Britain.

Zebraman

Dec 15, 2022 at 7:10 AM

Out of interest is your sense that the differences between wider Polynesian culture and Maori as presented is a function of compressing a variety of subtleties and cultures into a single RPG volume (and through the filter of a fantastical version of that region)...

OR a more fundamental lack of understanding/research?

(I know that is a very difficult question to answer because it speaks to what a third party and a design team was thinking).

Séadna, Dec 15, 2022 at 7:12 AM

Zebraman said: Out of interest is your sense that the differences between wider Polynesian culture and Maori as presented is a function of compressing a variety of subtleties and cultures into a single RPG volume (and through the filter of a fantastical version of that region)...

OR a more fundamental lack of understanding/research?

(I know that is a very difficult question to answer because it speaks to what a third party and a design team was thinking).

CRKrueger

Séadna said: I would guess the Māori weren't researched in depth, i.e. it's not just from trying to cover all the cultures. However I want to counterbalance that with the fact that I think the non-Māori were clearly researched quite well.

Let me make that more explicit with two examples.

The Moriori error is so obvious and no modern book will say anything remotely like it. You couldn't read modern Maori histories and make this error.

Secondly Utu is such a basic "engine" that drives Māori culture that its absence flat out means you can't run a Māori game with this book and indicates that no real reading about Māori society specifically was done.

?? : Dec 15, 2022 at 9:45 AM

Séadna said: I would guess the Māori weren't researched in depth, i.e. it's not just from trying to cover all the cultures. However I want to counterbalance that with the fact that I think the non-Māori were clearly researched quite well.

Let me make that more explicit with two examples.

The Moriori error is so obvious and no modern book will say anything remotely like it. You couldn't read modern Maori histories and make this error.

Secondly Utu is such a basic "engine" that drives Māori culture that its absence flat out means you can't run a Māori game with this book and indicates that no real reading about Māori society specifically was done.

Raleel : Dec 15, 2022 at 10:19 AM

Séadna said: I would guess the Māori weren't researched in depth, i.e. it's not just from trying to cover all the cultures. However I want to counterbalance that with the fact that I think the non-Māori were clearly researched quite well.

Let me make that more explicit with two examples.

The Moriori error is so obvious and no modern book will say anything remotely like it. You couldn't read modern Maori histories and make this error.

Secondly Utu is such a basic "engine" that drives Māori culture that its absence flat out means you can't run a Māori game with this book and indicates that no real reading about Māori society specifically was done.

Séadna : Dec 15, 2022 at 10:46 AM

Raleel said: Thank you for your extensive work on this.

Not being overly familiar with the field or the topics, how much research has been done on the Maori vs the other cultures, and particularly recent work? My instinct is saying that the Maori have a lot of research, as do the natives of the Hawaiian islands, because they have large governments who could fund said research, with Samoa coming in behind those two, while the rest are much less researched/represented in the literature.

Séadna : Dec 15, 2022

Zebraman said: is there an inference that can be made that if Mana and other cosmological concepts had an objective influence on the material world as they do in the world of Mythic Polynesia that the Māori wouldn't have developed the same belief system in those concepts as they do in the real world? (I.e those beliefs would necessarily be more if not entirely homogeneous across Polynesia).

Again appreciate that's a somewhat difficult question to answer. But it is getting at the point that at a certain point the world building has to move beyond the initial inspiration to be internally consistent.

AsenRG : Dec 17, 2022 at 9:59 AM

Yes, I would say so.

Séadna