The Commentaries of Levi-Strauss, Firth and Johansen

Mauss's interpretation of the hau has been attacked by three schol­ars of authority, two of them experts on the Maori and one an expert on Mauss. Their critiques are surely learned, but none I think arrives at the true meaning of the Ranapiri text or of the hau.

Levi-Strauss debates principles. He does not presume to criticize Mauss on Maori ethnography. He does, however, question the reli­ance on an indigenous rationalization: "Are we not faced here with one of those instances (not altogether rare) in which the ethnologist allows himself to be mystified by the native?" (Le'vi-Strauss, 1966, p. 38.) The hau is not the reason for exchange, only what one people happen to believe is the reason, the way they represent to themselves an unconscious necessity whose reason lies elsewhere. And behind Mauss's fixation on the hau, Levi-Strauss perceived a general concep­tual error that regretably arrested his illustrious predecessor short of the full structuralist comprehension of exchange that the Essay on the Gift had itself so brilliantly prefigured: "like Moses leading his people to a promised land of which he would never contemplate the splen­dor" (p. 37). For Mauss had been the first in the history of ethnology to go beyond the empirical to a deeper reality, to abandon the sensible and discrete for the system of relations; in a unique manner he had perceived the operation of reciprocity across its diverse and multiple modalities. But, alas, Mauss could not completely escape from posi­tivism. He continued to understand exchange in the way it is pres­ented to experience—fragmented, that is to say, into the separate acts of giving, receiving, and repaying. Considering it thus in pieces, in­stead of as a unified and integral principle, he could do nothing better than to try to glue it back again with this "mystic cement," the hau. Firth likewise has his own views on reciprocity, and in making them he scores Mauss repeatedly on points of Maori ethnography (1959a, pp. 418-421). Mauss, according to Firth, simply misunderstood the hau, which is a difficult and amorphous concept, but in any event a more passive spiritual principle than Mauss believed. The Ranapiri text in fact gives no evidence that the hau passionately strives to return to its source. Nor did the Maori generally rely on the hau acting by itself to punish economic delinquency. Normally in the event of a failure to reciprocate, and invariably for theft, the estab­lished procedure of retribution or restitution was witchcraft (maku-tu): witchcraft initiated by the person who had been bilked, usually involving the services of a "priest" (tohunga), if operating through the vehicle of the goods detained.³

3. It seems from Firth's account that the same procedure was used both against thieves and ingrates. I appeal here to Maori authorities for clarification. Fr₍om my own very limited and entirely textual experience, it seems that the goods of a victimized party were used particularly in sorcery against thieves. Here, where the culprit usually is not known, some portion of the goods remaining - or something from the place they were kept—is the vehicle for identifying or punishing the thief (for example, Best, 1924, vol. 1, p. 311). But sorcery against a known person is typically practiced by means of something associated with him; thus, in a case of failure to repay, the goods of the deceiver would be more likely to serve as vehicle than the gift of the owner. For further interest and confusion, such a vehicle associated with the victim of witchcraft is known to the Maori as hau. One of the entries under "hau"\n W. Williams's dictionary is: "something connected with a person on whom it is intended to practice enchantment; such as a portion of his hair, a drop of his spittle, or anything which has touched his person, etc., which when taken to the tohunga[ritual expert] might serve as a connect­ing link between his incantations and their object" (Williams, 1892).

Furthermore, adds Firth, Mauss confused types of hau that in the Maori view are quite distinct—the hau of persons, that of lands and forests, and that of taonga—and on the strength of this confusion he formulated a serious error. Mauss simply had no warrant to gloss the hau of the taonga as the hau of the person who gives it. The whole idea that the exchange of gifts is an exchange of persons is sequitur to a basic misinterpretation. Ranapiri had mere­ly said that the good given by the third person to the second was the hau of the thing received by the second from the first.⁴ The hau of persons was not at issue. In supposing it was, Mauss put his own intellectual refinements on Maori mysticism.⁵ In other words, and Levi-Strauss notwithstanding, it was not a native rationalization after all; it was a kind of French one. But as the Maori proverb says, "the troubles of other lands are their own" (Best, 1922, p. 30).

Firth for his part prefers secular to spiritual explanations of reci­procity. He would emphasize certain other sanctions of repayment, sanctions noted by Mauss in the course of the Essay:

The fear of punishment sent through the hau of goods is indeed a superna­tural sanction, and a valuable one, for enforcing repayment of a gift. But to attribute the scrupulousness in settling one's obligations to a belief in an active, detached fragment of personality of the donor, charged with nostal­gia and vengeful impulses, is an entirely different matter. It is an abstrac­tion which receives no support from native evidence. The main emphasis of the fulfillment of obligation lies, as the work of Mauss himself has suggested, in the social sanctions—the desire to continue useful economic relations, the maintenance of prestige and power—which do not require any hypothesis of recondite beliefs to explain (1959a, p. 421).⁶

4. The intervention of a third party thus offers no obscurity to Firth. The exchange between second and third parties was necessary to introduce a second good that could stand for the first, or for the hau of the first (cf. Firth, 1959a, p. 420 n.).

5. "When Mauss sees in the gift exchange an interchange of personalities, 'a bond of souls/ he is following, not native belief, but his own intellectualized interpretation of it" (Firth, 1959a, p. 420).

6. In his latest word on the subject, Firth continues to deny the ethnographic validity of Mauss's views on the Maori hau, adding also that no such spiritual belief is involved in Tikopian gift exchange (1967). Too, he now has certain critical reserva­tions on Mauss's discussion of the obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate. Yet at one level he would agree with Mauss. Not in the sense of an actual spiritual entity, but in the more generalized social and psychological sense of an extension of the self, the gift does partake of its donor (ibid., pp. 10-11, 15-16).

The latest to apply for entrance to the Maori "house of learning," J. Prytz Johansen (1954), makes certain clear advances over his prede­cessors in the reading of the Ranapiri text. He at least is the first to doubt that the old Maori had anything particularly spiritual in mind when he spoke of the hau of a gift. Unfortunately, Johansen's discus­sion is even more labyrinthal than Tamati Ranapiri's, and once having reached the point he seems to let go, searches a mythical rather than a logical explanation of the famous exchange a trois, and ends finally on a note of scholarly despair.

After rendering due tribute and support to Firth's critique of Mauss, Johansen observes that the word hau has a very wide semantic field. Probably several homonyms are involved. For the series of meanings usually understood as "life principle" or something of the sort, Johan­sen prefers as a general definition, "a part of life (for example, an object) which is used ritually in order to influence the whole," the thing serving as hau varying according to the ritual context. He then makes a point that hitherto had escaped everyone's notice—including, I think, Best's. Tamati Ranapiri's discourse on gifts was by way of introduction to and explanation of a certain ceremony, a sacrificial repayment to the forest for the game birds taken by Maori fowlers.⁷

7. In the original Maori as published by Best, the passage on gifts was actually intercalculated as an explanatory aside between two descriptions of the ceremony. The continuous English translation, however, deletes the main part of the first description, this Best having cited a page earlier (1909, p. 438). Besides, both English and Maori texts begin with a discussion of witchcraft spells, not apparently related to the ceremo­nial or the gift exchange, but about which more later.

Thus the informant's purpose in this expositing passage was merely to establish the principle of reciprocity, and "hau" there merely signi­fied "countergift"—"the Maori in question undoubtedly thought that hau means countergift, simply what is otherwise called utu " (Johan­sen, 1954, p. 118).

We shall see momentarily that the notion of "equivalent return" (utu) is inadequate for the hau in question; moreover, the issues posed by Ranapiri transcend reciprocity as such. In any event, Johansen, upon taking up again the three-party transaction, dissipated the ad­vance he had made. Unaccountably, he credited the received under­standing that the original donor performs magic on the second party through the goods the latter received from the third, goods that become hau in this context. But since the explication is "not obvious," Johansen found himself compelled to invoke a special unknown tradi­tion, "to the effect that when three persons exchanged gifts and the intermediary party failed, the counter-gift which had stopped with him might be hau, i.e., might be used to bewitch him." He then finished gloomily: "However a certain uncertainty is involved in all these considerations and it seems doubtful whether we shall ever attain to actual certainty as regards the meaning of the hau (ibid., p. 118).

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 936