Prof. Harvey

Polynesian Otherness Review Sheet

With Blu's Hanging we will have completed the long historical arc from discovery (Captain Cook) to postcolonial marginalization or assimilation.  My goal has been threefold: to have you feel the "otherness" of Polynesian culture, to almost get you thru the wall of otherness to an insider's perspective, to get you to care about the way the modern/West affects indigenous cultures.  I suspect neither of the three goals has been met, in part because of time constraints (3 or 4 weeks on all of Polynesia thru time!), and in part because "otherness" issues tend never to be resolved (going back to the "feel like a bat" conundrum).  Nonetheless, please read the questions or statements below and mentally process them in group if I am not in class.  Do #6 below.

POLYNESIAN-AS-OTHER

1)  Polynesian culture has tended to be presented as either lush/sunny/sensual (the clip I showed from the Mel Gibson "The Bounty" film ... deep blue sea, frolicking natives, and so on).  Or as horrifyingly sensual--i.e. the grisly remains of Captain Cook, or fears of cannibalism in Typee.

2)  The native does not get to speak intelligently (all body, no mind): in Typee, their taboos do not make any sense, they speak gibberish, and to think about them too much gives one (Tommo--the Westerner) a headache.

THRU-THE-WALL-OF-OTHERNESS

3)  You live with rules, some are codified in written law (the stop sign), some are manifest in authority figures (the policeman at the stop sign waiting for you to transgress the law), and some are internalized (going thru stop signs is deviant, would make you feel guilty).  Imagine what it would be like if you were obliged to obey the law not because of written law, the law of authority, or internalized law, but because of taboo law.  Imagine all of geographical and social space being saturated with rules and requirements that just ARE ... not a matter of consent or dissent (the points we made in class about the Kory-Kory being behind the jailhouse window).  Would one feel paranoid all the time? or complacent? (Kory-Kory is not unhappy in the jailhouse metaphor).  Imagine the feeling of power that would accrue about your body/body space if you had a shield of tattoo/taboo "radiation" that would astonish your enemies with genealogical (Maori, in particular) magical strength.  All those without lavish, swirling tattoos on their faces and bodies... what weaklings they are!

4)  The swirling, life-affirmative, multi-bodied patterns of Maori tiki or wood carvings:  try to feel them not as quaint collector pieces, but as embodying the cosmic opposites of life/death, simple/complex, abstract/biomorphic, male/female.  Imagine wearing one that was carved by your great-great-great grandfather.

OTHERNESS AFTER COLONIALISM

5)  Many of you saw "Once" as merely brutal and totally disconnected from Maori culture.  Nobody thus far in the postings has said something like, "Jake is a monster, and the gangs seem pretty silly ... but maybe having all of your ancestral land stolen from you, maybe having your entire spiritual system, which was largely based on genealogy (remember the Maori huts), eroded should be considered as well."  The fact that the dreary welfare housing the family lives in does not resemble traditional Maori dwellings, from that perspective, is exactly the point. (Obviously, this doesn't provide an apology for Jake's brutality.)   Imagine driving out State Road 7, west of Hollywood, where the Seminole tax-free cigarette shops are--is that a legitimate expression of Seminole culture?  Are the forms an indigenous culture takes, in the aftermath of post-colonial depredations and assimilations, "real"?  Do you care that the Bush administration is gleefully giving oil/mineral mining rights to all sorts of companies, although vast tracks of native American land will be despoiled in the process?

6)  Imagine you are of Maori descent (like the director of "Once") and a major film studio offers you the chance to make a dramatic film (i.e. not a documentary) about contemporary Maori.   Below, write out the basic plot line and setting: