The Genealogists

Te Ao Hou, November 1964, Page 44

The Genealogists Prose narrative is common to most folk literatures, but the development of genealogical recital as a literary device is a feature peculiar in the Pacific to Polynesian cultures. The social function of genealogies in determining rank and succession was of course important; and when a narrator was telling traditions, the recital of an appropriate pedigree, linking the main character with the narrator, demonstrated his right to tell the story and documented its authenticity. But as we have seen in the case of the cosmogonic genealogists, what appears at first sight to be a list of names set out in genealogical sequence, is in fact a cryptic literary form (in this case, rehearsing the evolution of the universe). In New Zealand, and presumably elsewhere, there are several named techniques of genealogical recitation. In one, only a single line of descent is given; in another, marriages are added; and in a third, collateral lines are included. In addition there was a considerable specialist vocabulary concerned with genealogy, which included of course the terminology of kinship. There is a well-known cartoon which shows an anthropologist, notebook in hand, quizzing an informant from some unidentifiable but savage-looking culture. The informant is saying, ‘I don't know what I would call my mother's brother's daughter's child—and what's more, I don't give a damn!’ The Polynesian genealogist, however, defi-