F.E. Maning and the European Construction of Tapu

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 26, Issue 1, 1 January 1993, Page 77

F.E. Maning and the European Construction of Tapu

ALEX CALDER

... so shall you hear Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters, And death put on by cunning and forced cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall’n on th’inventors heads: all this can I Truly deliver. Hamlet, Vii 378-384.

‘I was never intended for a philosopher,’ wrote Maning to the director of the Auckland Institute and Museum: ‘I never in my life could get hold of or discover one single, good, substantive fact, what are all these great truths which you of the Institute sometimes fancy you could discover? Just shakey notions dependent on contingencies as tottering as themselves.’ 1 I would like to examine Maning’s ‘shakey notions’ about Tapu. I do so from a particular perspective: this is a study in the European sources of early New Zealand ethnography. I shall have nothing to say about Maori understandings of tapu. In this, I differ from Maning who, of course, felt he had a great deal to say. But I would also want to insist that Maning’s views are not simply mistaken, that I could put him right with a few good substantive facts about tapu. From my perspective, one based wholly in the European archive, there are no facts about tapu, only interpretations, and my main interest is in the contingencies, both personal and public, that go into their construction.

For a writer like Maning, tapu is the object of quasi-ethnographic description; my interest is in tapu as a concept through which Europeans have understood or coped with difference. By and large, when something tapu is described, or when native superstition’ is gone into, what truly was different in an indigenous culture is revealed as strange-yet-familiar to the European observer. And I mean rather more than a variation of the old paradox: the traveller writes always of home. It is not just that the exotic is interpreted with reference to the grand taboos of Europe; it is also the case that the writer is often the one on the ground, at the borderline, on the paepae, in the very zone of tapu - and I doubt one ever assimilates the other without becoming, or warding off, something taboo, or without some magic invocation that serves to maintain the proper borders ofWestern subjectivity in its encounter with difference. I think this is why there is so often a curious reflexivity in representations of tapu. When tapu is experienced as more

than a routinised, more or less useful, more or less awkward system of prohibitions and restraints, it tends to be accompanied by a special mode of discomfort: an uneasiness peculiar to the inbetween, to the borderlands. In tracking this discomfort through Maning’s ostensibly confident representations of tapu, I hope to show how the themes and agendas of colonialism are combined with a subjective experience of the uncanny, of having met that tapu before. The apparently hapless narrator of Old New Zealand is forever losing the thread of his story in his discourse. A bare narration of the simplest plot event is liable to be kidnapped by the need to digress, and by the way any plain statement, like the arrow which never reaches its target, can be interrupted by other, and still other, possible statements. Rowing ashore, once the work of a few minutes, now takes the narrator two chapters to accomplish. He tells us:

My story is a true story, not ‘founded on fact,’ but fact itself, and so I cannot manage to get on shore a moment sooner than circumstances will permit. It may be that I ought to have landed before this; but I confess I don’t know any more about the right way to tell a story than a native minister knows how to ‘come’ a war-dance. I declare the mention of the war-dance calls up a host of reminiscences, pleasurable and painful, exhilarating and depressing, in such a way as no one but a few - a very few, pakeha Maori - can understand. Thunder! - but no, let me get ashore. How can I dance on the water, or before I ever knew how? On shore I will get this time, I am determined, in spite of fate - so now for it.

‘So now for it’: the pakeha Maori’s term for this taking of a deep breath, this girding of the narratorial loins, is ‘trying back.’ In the fifth chapter of Old New Zealand, the pakeha Maori buys his estate, but the form in which payment was made is not described until chapter thirteen. Between these two plot events, between purchasing his estate and describing how he himself was part payment, is the ethnographic core of the book: that long, over-arching, digression of digressions on tapu. ‘The whole affair is fast becoming one great parenthesis,’ the narrator realises, adding:

If I could only get clear of this tapu I would ‘try back.’ I believe I ought to be just now completing the purchase of my estate. I am sure I have been keeping house a long time before it is built, which is, I believe, clear against the rules, so I must get rid of this talk about the tapu the best way I can, after which I will start fair and try not to get before my story, (p. 168)

Many pages later, the narrator is ‘getting tired of this tapu,’ (p. 173) and many pages later still, he protests, ‘this tapu is a bore, even to write about’ and vows to get rid of it ‘lest it should kill my reader.’ (p. 181) Why can’t the narrator leave this topic? Why does this digression come to occupy almost half the book? The author - as distinct from the narrator - has a playful enough reason. It so happens that the pakeha Maori got himself ‘tapu’d’ with a ‘horrible - horrible - most horrible style of tapu,’ (p. 138) - a scene I will examine in some detail later - but he also cheated the rituals of

decontamination a little, and the suspicion remains that ‘I had not been as completely purified from the tapu tango atua as I might have been.’ (p. 149) The pakeha Maori still carries the taint of tapu, and that is why he cannot rid himself of the topic, why he must try back to an occasion chronologically prior to his catching the dreaded tapu. This is a game the author plays confidently. His very cleverness suggests that tapu is not to be taken seriously; in comparison to this display of narrative virtuosity, tapu is implicitly just so much native mumbo-jumbo. But there is rather more to it than that, and I think there may be several reasons why Maning truly can’t let tapu alone.

Early on in his account, the pakeha Maori offers what I take to be an authorially endorsed theory of tapu. Beneath the apparent absurdity and impracticality of tapu, Maning detects a distinct utility in the belief that people possessed a ‘mysterious quality’ that was ‘extended or communicated to all their property, especially to their clothes, weapons, ornaments, and tools.’ (p. 122) Whereas Muru assists the free circulation of property, ‘the original object of the ordinary tapu,’ he suggests, ‘seems to have been the preservation of property.’ (p. 122) That Maning should view the possession and transmission of property as a natural basis for all social arrangements is an obvious if unsurprising ethnographic projection, but the following anecdote goes well beyond proving that ‘tapu is a great preserver of property.’ (p. 126)

A chief of very high rank, standing and mana was on a war expedition; with him were about five hundred men. His own personal tapu was increased twofold, as was that of all the warriors who were with him, by the war tapu.... They were, in fact, as irreverent pakehas used to say, ‘tabooed an inch thick,’ and as for the head chief, he was perfectly unapproachable. The expedition halted to dine. The portion of food set apart for the chief... was, of course, enough for two or three men, and consequently the greater part remained unconsumed. The party, having dined, moved on, and soon after a party of slaves and others, who had been some mile or two in the rear, came up carrying ammunition and baggage. One of the slaves, a stout, hungry fellow, seeing the chief’s unfinished dinner, ate it up before asking any questions, and had hardly finished when he was informed by a horror-stricken individual - another slave who had remained behind when the taua had moved on - of the fatal act he had committed. I knew the unfortunate delinquent well. He was remarkable for courage, and had signalized himself in the wars of the tribe.... No sooner did he hear the fatal news than he was seized by the most extraordinary convulsions and cramps in the stomach, which never ceased till he died, about sundown the same day. He was a strong man, in the prime of life, and if any pakeha freethinker should have said he was not killed by the tapu of the chief, which had been communicated to the food by contact, he would have been listened to with feelings of contempt for his ignorance and inability to understand plain and direct evidence, (pp. 124-25)

Mailings description emphasises both the weight and gravity of the tapu and the strength and vitality of the transgressing slave. These points in turn highlight the effect and affect of tapu: it is communicated to the slave by contact and, after hearing ‘fatal news’ of the ‘fatal act,’ results in his succumbing to fate. But compare the following passage on the current state

of the Maori: ‘Doubting our professions of friendship, fearing our ultimate designs, led astray by false friends, possessed of that ‘little learning’ which is, in their case, most emphatically ‘a dangerous thing,’ divided amongst themselves - such are the people with whom we are now in contact - such the people to whom, for our own safety and their preservation, we must give new laws and institutions, new habits of life, new ideas, sentiments, and information - whom we must either civilise or by our mere contact exterminate.’ (p. 104) ‘Mere contact’: the concept, the very phrase, occurs repeatedly in late nineteenth century Social Darwinist texts. Benjamin Kidd, for instance, in Social Evolution (1894), writes: ‘The weaker races disappear before the stronger through the effects of mere contact.... The Anglo-Saxon, driven by forces inherent in his own civilisation, comes to develop the natural resources of the land, and the consequences appear to be inevitable.’ 3 But how does ‘mere contact,’ this strange contagion, work, and what is the nature of this grave, somewhat mysterious, quality inherent in Anglo-Saxon civilisation?

We should not be too quick to take those imperialist metaphors of contagion literally. The anonymous author of ‘Musings on Maning’s Old New Zealand' (1877), for example, argues that the effects of imported disease on the native population have been much exaggerated. ‘Unless the race was already “on the go” from some other reasons, real depopulation never takes place from that cause.’ The real cause is something else again. ‘The Maori went,’ says this writer, ‘according to the behests of that terrible law: “Remove thyself, that a higher than thou may take thy place, as soon as thou hast sufficiently warmed it for him.” A law so stern and inexorable, that the very means used to prevent its execution only assists it, and the efforts of the incoming race to preserve some relics of the outgoing one only hasten its destruction.’ 4

Tapu, whatever else it might be, is also the screen onto which writers like Maning project the obscure and magical workings of social evolution. When the pakeha Maori arrives on shore in New Zealand, he also travels back to an atemporal category of time variously termed savage or primitive, yet mere contact also places the native on the first rung of historical, civilised time. The question then is: will the Maori rise or fall? In his undated paper, ‘The Native Question,’ probably written in the 1860 s, Maning argues against those who would ‘accelerate native progress’ rather than trust ‘the current of time to carry the native race nearer and more near to a state of civilisation.’ 5 Privately, he tended to be more pessimistic. A letter to Cheeseman of 1878 explains: ‘When the waters of the sea overflow and mingle with the waters of the lake the fish become sickly and many die. The Maori are now surrounded by a medium not made for them, or such as they, as Maories, were not made for, they are dying of the slow poison of civilisation.’ 6 Old New Zealand explains how. Following the digression on tapu, Maning plots the decline of Maori through a web of circumstance and innate

characteristics. The Maori are warlike, they desperately require muskets, and so, in order to produce flax and timber for trade, they neglect their crops and swap their dry hilltop forts for the unhealthy dampness of the swamps. ‘There,’ Maning writes, lying on the spongy spoil, on beds of rushes, which rotted under them - in little low dens of houses ... full of noxious exhalations from the damp soil, and impossible to ventilate - they were cut off by disease in a manner absolutely frightful.’ (p. 209) 7 Maning either, as in the chain of events just related, portrays the Maori in a situation of passive acquiescence before fate, or as actively willing extinction upon themselves - in wars, in the way, in the good old times, suicide was an ‘almost daily occurrence.’ (p. 176) If the mechanisms of tapu, as of social evolution, are fate and contagion, it is also clear that, for Maning, civilisation is always already more potently tapu than any native chief on the war path; and if a slave should die after eating tapu food, it only goes to show that his race has internalised the demographic instincts of the lemming.

Maning writes of the good old times in a book that tells futures. In the last chapter, the pakeha Maori, apparently confused and divided between the two halves of his identity, predicts, ‘I belong to both parties, and I don’t care a straw which wins; but I am sure we shall have fighting.’ (p. 235) It has often been pointed out that there is no confusion of identities here. Maning, writing in 1862, knows there will be war and, by emphasising Maori violence and skill in warfare, he is, as Joan Fitzgerald has argued, launching a warning to his possibly complacent readers. 8 He is also seeking to counteract another set of oracles, to scotch another vision for the future. After publishing the book in 1863, Maning fancied he had won a tactical victory against those he called ‘Maori Doctors’ - the various lesser experts on the Maori who, as Maning saw it, unwisely sought to ‘accelerate the progress of the natives’ through ‘moral persuasion’ or political concessions. ‘The doctors are gone to the Devil,’ he crowed to McLean, “‘the oracles are dumb” - but the evil they have done lives after them and will cost a gallon of blood for every bottle of ink they have expended to put it right.’ 7

But Maning was always predicting a calamitous future, always expecting a serious and desperate war. Throughout the land wars, Maning took it upon himself to inform those in high places of the mood of local tribes and was only too happy to offer military advice; it was a role he never relinquished. As late as 1873, for example, the Sullivan murder prompted a long letter to McLean arguing that it was vital for the Europeans to amass all their power and properly subject the Waikato. 10 Later in the 1870 s, Zulu successes reminded him of the clever way leaders like Te Whiti can put the onus of the first blow on Grey and the Pakeha and at the same time feel his pulses to see if there is any fight at all left in him.’ ‘They have found that out now,’ he added ominously, ‘and the Maori king will act accordingly.’ 11 Old New Zealandvfas written during the lull between the wars inTaranaki and the Waikato. While the novel is a polemical response to the crisis of the

early 1860 s, there is also a sense in which Maning’s reading of the native situation exceeds any specific context. His diagnosis is always the same; war is always imminent, and the underlying rule of cultural negotiation is invariably one the pakeha Maori recommends in his ‘dissertation on courage’: ‘No matter of what kind the danger is, you must look it boldly in the face and keep your wits about you, and the more frightened you get the more determined you must be - to keep up appearances - and half the danger is gone.’ (p. 11) The final words of the book come from the last speech of Old Lizard Skin: ‘Be brave that you might live,’ he said, (p. 236) Maning’s succession of alarmist predictions and bellicose solutions suggest he took the old chief’s words to heart, but they may have a more particular meaning: ‘Be brave lest you be perceived as weak.’ A comment by Celine seems especially apt.

But when one’s weak, the thing that gives one strength is stripping those one fears of the slightest prestige that one may still tend to accord them. One must teach oneself to see them as they are, as worse than they are, that is. One should look at them from all points of view. This detaches you, sets you free and is much more of a protection than you can possibly imagine. It gives you another self, so that there are two of you together. ‘

It was not only in Old New Zealand that Maning gave himself another self - the pakeha Maori persona - he also did that in life. He liked to cultivate a mystique as one who had lived beyond the pale, who knew dark things, things no white man should know. There are stories of burnt manuscripts on esoteric Maori lore, of his becoming a tohunga, of maintaining high influence among Maori. But these aren’t mischievous, yarn-spinning lies. They are inflationary devices; they construct a second self in much the same manner as some lizards respond to a threat with a show of bellicosity, with a puffing up of oneself. Maning, then, is at once superior and under threat, both aggressive and defensive in his attitude toward Maori. He simultaneously believes that the Maori are a vanishing race and that they pose the gravest military threat to the colony. He calls himself a peace at any price man,’ but insists the price to be paid is war; he believes in the rule of law but thinks only brute force can secure it. 13 These little inconsistencies in no way undermine the coherence of Maning’s political views, but they do point to an allied emotional ambivalence that might well fracture in the production of second selves or split forms of subjectivity.

One day, the pakeha Maori was walking along a stretch of coast when he came to a spot where a landslip had disturbed an old burial site. Bones were strewn about and a large skull bobbed in the water. He was travelling some distance ahead of his companions, and had just finished burying the skull when the rest of the party arrived. They were dismayed and astonished, and made it plain that contact with the skull - clearly the skull of one of their more famous chiefs - had rendered the pakeha Maori unfit for human

company. The pakeha Maori saw no alternative but to ‘vote’ himself tapu and act accordingly. Come dinner-time, however, a portion of the evening meal was brought to him but was placed some distance away - as if he was expected to eat without using his hands, in the manner of Maori ‘kai tango atua,’ or undertakers. This, the pakeha Maori felt, was taking things too far and, despite the warnings of his friends, he proceeded to tuck in his usual manner. I declare positively I had no sooner done so than I felt sorry. The expression of horror, contempt, and pity observable in their faces convinced me that I had not only offended and hurt their feelings, but that I had lowered myself greatly in their estimation. Certainly I was a pakeha, and pakehas will do the most unaccountable things, and may be, in ordinary cases excused; but this, I saw at once, was an act which to my friends, seemed the neplus ultra of abomination. I can now well understand that I must have, sitting there eating my potatoes, appeared to them a ghoul, a vampire, worse than even one of their own dreadful atua, who, at the command of a witch, or to avenge some breach of tapu, enters into a man’s body and slowly eats away his vitals, (pp. 140-41)

Later that evening, his friends broke camp, and rushed home to warn everyone of the condition the pakeha Maori was in. Next day, he returned, tired and hungry, to an empty house: The instinct of a hungry man sent me into the kitchen: there was nothing eatable to be seen but a raw leg of pork, and the fire was out. I now began to suspect that this attempt of mine to look down the tapu would fail, and that I should remain excommunicated for some frightfully indefinite period. I began to think of Robinson Crusoe, and to wonder if I could hold out as well as he did. Then I looked hard at the leg of pork .... (A horrible misanthropy was fast taking hold of me.) Why should I not tear my leg of pork raw, like a wolf? 1 will run amuck!’ suddenly said I, ‘I wonder how many I can kill before they ‘bag’ me? I will kill, kill, kill! but I must have some supper, (pp. 142-43)

This is the story of how the Pakeha became Maori. Because the tapu of the dead chief has been internalised, the Pakeha starts to resemble the old rangatira; that is to say, he becomes a kind of vaudeville cannibal, a creature of appetite, misanthropic, unrestrained, who will kill, kill, kill, because he must have some supper. Maning presents the situation as farce, but takes care to balance an assumed native wildness with apt reference to Defoe and quotations from Shakespeare - ‘Out damned spot!’ mutters the Pakeha Maori, as he scrubs away at his hands. I will return to rituals of decontamination shortly; for the moment it is enough to observe that a moment of transgression is followed by a division between civilised quotation on one hand, and stock images of savagery on the other. In 1882, the Maori King,Tawhiao, made a state visit to Auckland. Maning sent the following report to his friend Spencer Von Sturmer:

Yesterday I happened to be in the Museum ... and who should come in but the filthy Hobgoblin Tawhiao, he had been brought there to see the wonders, the first thing he saw was the Diana. He at once put his hand up under the petticoats or kilt and with a diabolical grin began fumbling but when he went further and saw the Venus the lecherous monkey

shone out clear - you could not have told him from a very ugly lecherous monkey with squint eyes. He began capering round the beautiful statue - a perfect contrast - beauty and the beast - first thing he began poking his fingers between the thighs of the figure ... rolling his squint eye liking [sic] his lips grinning like a sater - and then ran round and began poking with his fingers at the backside - then, round in front again pawing at the breasts then stopping and pretending to lick the place. Such an utterly horrid exhibition of beastly, open, brutish immodesty before everyone evidently thinking his goings on were quite approved of and he returned to this amusement several times - if you only saw the black hideous ill-favoured gorilla at his anticks before the beautiful impassive statue you would have seen something to moralise over that sight convinced me more than ever that the Maori are truly diabolic and have outlived their time in the world like other great brutes and must positively be extinguished.

‘Do Not Touch The Exhibits’ is the least of the rules Maning sees broken here. But what was Tawhiao doing? Perhaps I should not trust the letter so far as to pose that question, but I would like to suggest at least one of the ways Maning’s story might be retold. One can imagine the mayoral party pointing to these Treasures ofWestern Civilisation with some pride; imagine, too, aTawhiao who responds to the solemnities with a kind of jaw-dropping amazement, who can barely contain his laughter and incredulity. What strange objects these pakeha single out to admire, and what curious ideas about women! And so, it might be with the brisk good humour of one who knows better that Tawhiao begins his demystifying performance - a performance put on for and at the expense of his European audience, for it declares something pathetic about these quaintly taboo objects and reveals European attitudes toward sexuality as pious mumbo-jumbo. Might some such message have been sent across that cultural boundary? I do not intend to suppose so; I only want to underline the oddness of the very different message Maning received. He thinks Tawhiao is a beast who has become sexually excited by these statues - and abomination is his only response for so shocking, so blatant, a breach of tapu.

When Tawhiao is sent back along the evolutionary scale to become a lecherous, diabolical brute, he is thrice cast out: as the demonological other of Christianity who lives under Satan’s thumb; as the childish other of the enlightenment who is ignorant of his own ignorance; and as the fossilised other of Darwinist ethnography who seems, in a genocidal fantasy, a metonym for the race who ‘must positively be extinguished.’ These otherings are a mise-en-scene for the European construction of tapu, and Maning summons them all, expels them all, in a paroxysm of projective disgust. But Maning and Tawhiao are only two corners of a triangulated scene: there is also the ‘beautiful impassive’ statue, and perhaps it is something about her that makes a moral so readily legible, that leaves Maning transfixed with rage and contempt. Since the statue puts both civilisation and the feminine on a pedestal, Maning would appear to be reacting as if to a colonial damsel in distress; it makes his blood boil to imagine a bravely impassive Englishwoman the

victim of savage misuse. But not only that: a confrontation that occurs across a museum room, across cultures, has many other scenes. Something similar occurs, for example, when Tom Brown, that model of young English manhood, goes up to Oxford and finds himself troubled by thoughts of a pretty barmaid. It was a time, the author generalises, ‘of blinding and driving storm, and howling winds, out of which voices as of evil spirits spoke close in our ears - tauntingly, temptingly whispering to the mischievous wild beast which lurks in our hearts ... And all the while ... was there not the still small voice appealing to the man, the true man, within us, which is made in the image of God - calling on him to assert his dominion over the wild beast -to obey, and conquer, and live?’ 15 Maning is to Tawhiao as the true Tom Brown is to the mischievous wild beast within; when dominion over the beast is asserted, sexual and colonial imperatives come to resemble each other.

Maning’s lurid supposition that Tawhiao is in the grip of ungovernable sexual passion recognises, only to disavow, the ‘lecherous monkey’ within. In describingTawhiao’s ‘transgression’, Maning identifies with the symbolic edicts of his own culture and projects something unruly within onto a convenient screen. The native, someone who is both the same and different, suits this role admirably: Tawhiao is similar enough to permit recognition, and so obviously different as to trigger processes of disavowal and projection. These preserve the statue in an attitude of proper impassiveness - an attitude proper to mothers, sisters, and daughters, to a gentler sex over and above sex - and leave Maning secure in the stiffness, shall we say, of his patriarchal outrage. And yet, however convenient, there is also a sense in which Tawhiao is a supernumerary in this scene. The key detail is the anatomical reticence of the statues themselves.

If one were to ask what is under the Dianas petticoats, or what is behind the Venus de Medici’s modestly poised hand, the answer, of course, is nothing at all. However, if we consider the statuary as a type of fetish, we might readily read something into that nothing: beneath the petticoat, behind the hand, is the space in which a phallus might swell. Perhaps a few words of explanation are in order. Freud’s analysis of fetishism has been particularly suggestive for colonial studies insofar as he offers a structural account of the effects of maintaining incompatible beliefs in response to a traumatic perception of difference. 16 In its most schematic scenario, a young boy perceives his mothers lack of a penis. His acknowledgment of this perception, and his anxious recognition of its implied threat of castration, will persist; but so too will a strenuous disavowal of that anatomical difference in the attachment to a fetish - the ‘petticoat’ of a statue, say - which metaphorically substitutes for the presence of the maternal phallus while marking its absence. While the ego protects itself by maintaining these contradictory attitudes, its narcissistic demand for wholeness comes at the price of splitting, and it is worth emphasising that the split always involves a defence against external

reality. That is why Freud can compare fetishism to the ‘stopping of memory in traumatic amnesia’ and why he can also note the reactivation of this complex in political beliefs. ‘ln later life,’ he suggests drily, ‘a grown man may perhaps experience a similar panic when the cry goes up that Throne and Altar are in danger, and similar illogical consequences will ensue.’ 17 Maning makes that cry often enough, but let me return, not to throne and altar, but to hearth and home. The pakeha Maori, having resolved not to kill anyone for a week, has been sitting in his kitchen, wondering how long this ‘devilish tapu will last.’ (p. 143) Four days have passed, and on the morning of the fifth, an old, one-eyed Tohunga arrived. ‘I guessed at once he was coming to disenchant me,’ recalls the pakeha Maori, ‘and prepared my mind to submit to any conditions or ceremonial he should think fit to impose.’ (p. 144) First, another meal had to be eaten: the Tohunga produced a baked kumara and muttered incantations while the pakeha Maori ate.

I remember I felt a curious sensation at the time, like what I fancied a man must feel who had just sold himself, body and bones, to the devil. For a moment, I asked myself the question whether I was not actually being then and there handed over to the powers of darkness. The thought startled me. There I was, an unworthy but believing member of the Church of England ... ‘knuckling down abjectly to the ministration of a ferocious old cannibal, wizard, sorcerer, high priest - as it appeared very probable - to Satan himself. (p. 145)

Maning implies that the direction of theTohunga’s cure is a homoeopathic correction of like with like; the kumara has been prayed over, it is consecrated food, and eating it might be supposed to remedy the consequences of an earlier ingestion of tapu. This supposedly traditional view is parodied as it continues the development of stereotypes. The old Tohunga is a diabolic figure, but accepting his black eucharist does not alter the symptom of native wildness. Like does not cure like; the pakeha Maori only becomes more violent still. ‘Blacken his remaining eye, knock him over and run the country!’ suggests a guardian angel, ‘or else a little impulsive sprite who often made suggestions ... in those days.’ (p. 145) Ironically, the angrier he gets, the more he confirms the Tohunga’s diagnosis.

‘Boy,’ said [the Tohunga], gravely and quietly, and without seeming to notice my very noticeable declaration of war and independence, ‘don’t act foolishly; don’t go mad .... You will be miserable here all by yourself. And what is the use of being angry? What will anger do for you?’ (p. 147) And so, the pakeha Maori suffers further inroads upon his sense of identity. He has to throw away all property connected with the kitchen, he has to yield to fate, and he has to take off all his clothes. The humour has a polemical edge. Detail after detail suggests that when the pakeha becomes tapu, he becomes ‘Maori,’ and that, despite the theories of those who would hurry evolution along, to be ‘Maori’ is to exist in a condition or state that is both primitive and unimprovable. Maning almost

writes himself into a corner at this point. His satirical development of the tapu theme has produced a wild savage for a protagonist, but how is this figure to become the mixed pakeha Maori who writes the book? There has to be some way of incompletely dodging or removing tapu. As I explained earlier, the pakeha Maori will always ‘retain some tinge of the dreadful infection’ (p. 149) for we are told that he disobeyed some of the tohunga’s instructions, and collected his banned forks and spoons for re-use. But the author can dodge tapu through narratorial sleight of hand, by trying back to scenes and incidents that chronologically precede the transgression episode. Even so, some sort of ‘decontamination’ has to occur, and this is where Maning might really be said to cheat. I mentioned that the pakeha Maori is ordered to remove his clothes. He supposes this means he is about to be flogged, and looks about anxiously to see whether theTohunga has instruments of flagellation in his possession. This, of course, is to expect western sanctions, but there are no whips, no studded belts, nothing of that sort is about to happen. Then, having introduced so much delay, the moment at last arrives. ‘Let me not dwell upon the humiliating concession to the powers of tapu,' says the pakeha Maori, ‘Suffice it to say, I disrobed.’ (p. 148) An aporia closes the transgression scene. But the anecdote also begins with a similar moment of reticence. Earlier, the pakeha Maori has been talking about undertakers, and the terrible tapu associated with these persons.

One of these people might be easily recognised ... even by a pakeha. Old, withered, haggard, clothed in the most miserable rags, daubed all over ... with red paint... keeping always at a distance, silent and solitary, often half insane, he might be seen sitting motionless ... under the ‘lee’ of a bush, or tuft of flax, gazing silently, and with ‘lack-lustre eye,’ on the busy doings of the Maori world, of which he was hardly to be called member.... When I met, or rather saw, a female practitioner, I fairly ran for it; and so, believing my readers to be equally tender-hearted, I shall not venture on any more description, but merely say that the man undertaker, such as I have described him, would be taken for Apollo if seen in one of these hags’ company. What will my kind reader say when I tell him that I myself once got tapud with this same horrible - horrible - most horrible style of tapu? (p. 137-8)

If Mailing’s style of tapu has a gender, it is feminine. Most especially, it is also that which cannot be described, that which requires an averted gaze. It is as if Maning experiences whatever is unsettling, disturbing, or threatening at the border between cultures in a form more appropriate to the fetishist’s response to the anatomical difference between sexes. I began by suggesting that, for Europeans who set out to describe it, tapu very quickly loses its status as a different symbolic and becomes that which is strange but familiar, becomes indeed, a European category of mediation. With Maning, the category works fetishistically: that is to say, it converts that which is culturally different into something that is both previously known and a mark of an essential and binary difference between cultures. Consider his outrage in the colonial museum. Photographs show Diana

wearing a tunic; Maning sees a petticoat, a veil that, in Freudian terms, metaphorically replaces and marks the absence of the maternal phallus. 18 The stability of this equivocation is undermined by Tawhiaos performance, and Maning responds in a manner that preserves the statue s value as fetish. I think we might consider the installation itself in a similar light. These statues, ‘the very gems of ancient art now known to the world,’ are a metonym for all the splendours and advantages of Western civilisation. 11 The statues - or rather, these plaster casts turned out by the thousand in a workshop in Covent Garden - present and maintain these values fetishistically, since what is both recognised and disavowed is the difference their different situation makes. Tawhiao disturbs this equilibrium, and Maning responds with projections and identifications that channel the split subjectivity presupposed by the fetish, and that restore a measure of wholeness by finding signs of the gulf between races. Or take the polemical satire of Old New Zealand - this repetitious message that the Maori are essentially violent and that colonists would do well to remember the fact. Again, values associated with civilisation are held fetishistically. Insofar as the colonial project is fated to succeed because it is the inevitable work of time, the violence and trauma of the colonial situation is disavowed. Instead, violence is located elsewhere, in the warlike characteristics of a people. This all too legible sign allows a common entanglement to be converted into a mark of division between cultures. While the processes of disavowal and projection preserve an illusion of European wholeness and integrity, this in no way compromises a second attitude to the colonial situation that is held simultaneously. Maning also recognises colonising violence in that his advice is always to strike first, to ensure European dominance with crushing levels of force.

I do not want to suggest that an idiosyncratic kink in Maning’s personal psychology somehow determined the writers public discourse or that the pathology of his attitudes towards Maori might stem from a traumatic scene in his infancy. That would itself be a form of disavowal. My point is rather that a fetishistic defence against reality is always likely when perceptions of difference threaten an established view of things, and that we can interpret Maning s construction of tapu as the elaboration of such a defence. Certainly, this construction has its private and its public side; both reproduce the structure of fetishism and, as one considers the shape of Maning s career, one begins to suspect that the private pathology and the shared public discourse come to fan each other, to exacerbate each other, propelling the public man and the private person further and further into bigotry and paranoia. In 1880, estranged from all his children, he complained to a neighbour:

I feel like as if I were dying or likely to go mad. I have eaten nothing or next to nothing for days. My head is giddy - if I do not mend soon something serious will be the end. ... every servant I have on the place has been in league with [my daughters] to deceive and malign me in the most shocking manner.... I do suspect poison. I have been getting worse gradually

for months the same symptoms I often cannot stand without great danger of falling - the Cook in league with [my daughters] and they in the kitchen any night they like.... Antimony! all the symptoms I knew I was poisoned but did not suspect the right cause. 20

The ‘cause’ was not antimony but maybe a ‘horrible, horrible, most horrible style of tapu.’ Maning was making one of his civilised jokes when he echoed the Ghost’s speech in Hamlet ; I guess the joke had turned sour well before Maning, in psychotic collapse, himself took on the role of poisoned father.

REFERENCES In a longer version, this paper includes material on Maning’s role as a judge in the Native Land Court and a speculative discussion of the impact of the death of his wife, Moengaroa, on portions of Old New Zealand. I am grateful to the Alexander Turnbull Library for permission to quote from manuscript material. • 1 Letter from Maning toT.F. Cheeseman, 29 July 1871, Auckland Institute and Museum Library, MS, 419. 2 Old New Zealand (South Yarra, 1987), pp. 8-9. [First ed.: 1863.] 3 Cited in Patrick Brantlinger, Rule Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism , 18301914 (Ithaca, 1988), p. 187. 4 Anon., ‘Musings on Mannings [sic] “Old New Zealand’”, Temple Bar 877), pp. 527, 526. 5 Alexander Turnbull Library, MS papers 32, folder 44. 6 Letter from Maning to T.F. Cheeseman, 30 November 1878, Auckland Institute and Museum Library, MS 419. 7 Like his commentator, Maning does allow that ‘European diseases also assisted, but not to any serious degree’ (p. 213). 8 Joan Fitzgerald, ‘lmages of the Self: Two Early New Zealand Autobiographies...,’ The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 23, 1, (1988), 16-41. 9 Letter from Maning to D. McLean, 7 November 1863, ATL, MS papers 32, folder 44. 10 Quoted in James Cowan, Sir Donald McLean (Dunedin, 1940), pp. 125-28. 11 Letter from Maning to J. Webster, 24 April [1879?], Auckland Public Library, MS 4/ 42. 12 Cited in Julia Kristeva, Powers Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1982), p. 144. 13 Letter from Maning to D. McLean, 24 July 1861, ATL, MS papers 32, folder 44. 14 Letter from Maning to S. Von Sturmer, 25 January 1872, Alexander Turnbull Library, qMS MAN. 15 Cited in Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1957), p. 354. 16 See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken For Wonders...’ in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. ‘ Race ’: Writing and Difference, (Chicago, 1986), pp. 163-184. 17 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, On Sexuality [Pelican Freud Library Vol. 7], trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 352. 18 For photographs and an account of the collection, see Roger Blackley, ‘The Greek Statues in the Museum’, Art New Zealand, 48 (Spring 1988),. 96-99. 19 Theophilus Heale’s announcement of the ‘munificent donation’ is cited in Blackley, p. 96. 20 Letter from Maning to S. Von Sturmer, 24 January 1880, ATL, qMS MAN.