9 - Rituals of Encounter among the Maori: Sociolinguistic Study of a Scene

Summary

Background

The Maori people, New Zealand's Polynesian inhabitants, were first effectively contacted for the European world by Captain James Cook and his party in 1769. They immediately acquired a reputation for belligerence, because whenever the explorers tried to approach a group, ‘they rose up and every man produced either a long pike, or a small weapon of polished stone’ (Banks 1896:42). In fact it was standard practice for stranger groups to make such ritual displays of strength upon first encounter, but the explorers weren't to know this, and retaliated with musket fire whose effects were anything but ritual. Subsequent arrivals in New Zealand – the missionaries, traders, and whalers – were greeted more tentatively, and as they became better acquainted with Maori custom they learned that challenges, sham fights, and war dances as well as oratory and other verbal arts were an expected part of ceremonial occasions. For their part, the Maori people learned to keep their greeting forms to themselves, and it was only Europeans who had frequent cause to parlay with the chiefs and elders who ever mastered them. As increasing numbers of settlers arrived in New Zealand, the pattern became established. Maori gatherings, or hui, once held in the village plaza, were now staged in a marae complex, with its carved meeting-house and courtyard for orators fenced off and isolated from other settlement. Europeans were only rarely to be found at a hui, and the privacy of the marae was jealously preserved.