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Te Ao Hou, November 1964, Page 45

nitely did give a damn about kinship terms, and his ability to handle concepts of kinship was commensurate with his interest. In Hawaii he was a professional. His duties included deliberate but subtle falsification of pedigrees to enhance the position of his own ruler. In this capacity he was known as ‘the wash-bowl of the high chief’. In New Zealand, where a chief's authority was not absolute, but was delegated to him by the adult males of rangatira status, professional genealogists were unknown, and falsification of genealogies was not tolerated. Every adult was expected to know his own lines of descent and to be able to recite them. The recognised expert, moreover, was expected to be something of a walking de Brett, knowing not only the descent lines of his own group but those of neighbouring tribes, and in particular those lines which, through intergroup marriages, facilitated the social and political intercourse of different tribes. Such an expert delighted in testing his knowledge against that of others in reciting the lines of men, which were said to be ‘as many, and as far-reaching, as the runners of a gourd-plant’. The setting up of the land-court, where claims were decided largely on genealogical evidence, must have caused such an expert to lick his lips. The case is quoted of a court-sitting at which an old man took four full days to recite the genealogies of a single sub-tribe, and one can't help wondering how much the protracted nature of land-court proceedings owed to the love of genealogical wrangling.