THE LARGER SIGNIFICANCE OF HAU

Returning now to the hau, it is clear we cannot leave the term merely with secular connotations. If the hau of valuables in circulation means the yeild thereby accrued, a concrete product of a concrete good, still there is a hau of the forest, and of man, and these do have spiritual quality. What kind of spiritual quality? Many of Best's remarks on the subject suggest that the hau-as-spirit is not unrelated to the hau-as-material-returns. Taking the two together, one is able to reach a larger understanding of that mysterious hau. Immediately it is clear that hau is not a spirit in the common animis­tic sense. Best is explicit about this. The hau of a man is a quite different thing from his wairua, or sentient spirit—the "soul" of ordi­nary anthropological usage. I cite from one of Best's most comprehen­sive discussions of wairua:

In the term wairua (soul) we have the Maori term for what anthropologists style the soul, that is the spirit that quits the body at death, and proceeds to the spirit world, or hovers about its former home here on earth. The word wairua denotes a shadow, any unsubstantial image; occasionally it is applied to a reflection, thus it was adopted as a name for the animating spirit of man. . . . The wairua can leave the sheltering body during life; it does so when a person dreams of seeing distant places or people. . . . The wairua is held to be a sentient spirit; it leaves the body during sleep, and warns its physical basis of impending dangers, of ominous signs, by means of the visions we term dreams. It was taught by high-grade native priests that all things possess a wairua, even what we term inanimate objects, as trees and stones (Best, 1924, vol. 1, pp. 299-301).16

16. Thus Mauss's simple translation of hau as spirit and his view of exchange as a lien d'ames is at least imprecise. Beyond that, Best repeatedly would like to distinguish hau (and mauri) from wairua on the grounds that the former, which ceases to exist with death, cannot leave a person's body on pain of death, unlike wairua. But here Best finds himself in difficulty with the material manifestation of a person's hau used in witch­craft, so that he is alternatively tempted to say that some part of the hau can be detached from the body or that the hau as witchcraft is not the "true" hau.

Hau, on the other hand, belongs more to the realm of animatism than animism. As such it is bound up with mauri, in fact, in the writings of the ethnographic experts, it is virtually impossible to dis­tinguish one from the other. Firth despairs of definitively separating the two on the basis of Best's overlapping and often corresponding definitions—"the blurred outline of the distinction drawn between hau and mauri by our most eminent ethnographic authority allows one to conclude that these concepts in their immaterial sense are almost synonymous" (Firth, 1959a, p. 281). As Firth notices, certain contrasts sometimes appear. In reference to man, the mauri is the more active principle, "the activity that moves within us." In relation to land or the forest, "mauri" is frequently used for the tangible representation of an incorporeal hau. Yet is is clear that "mauri" too may refer to a purely spiritual quality of land, and, on the other hand, the hau of a person may have concrete form—for example, hair, nail clippings, and the like used in witchcraft. It is not for me to unscram­ble these linguistic and religious mysteries, so characteristic of that Maori "esprit theologique et juridique encore imprecis." Rather, I would emphasize a more apparent and gross contrast between hau and mauri, on one side, and wairua on the other, a contrast that also seems to clarify the learned words of Tamati Ranapiri.

Hau and mauri as spiritual qualities are uniquely associated with fecundity. Best often spoke of both as the "vital principle." It is evident from many of his observations that fertility and productivity were the essential attributes of this "vitality." For example (the italics in the following statements are mine):

The hau of land is its vitality, fertility and so forth, and also a quality which we can only, I think, express by the word prestige (Best, 1900-1901, p. 193).

The ahi taitai is a sacred fire at which rites are performed that have for their purpose the protection of the life principle and fruitfulness of man, the land, forests, birds, etc. It is said to be the mauri or hau of the home (p. 194).

. . . when Hape went off on his expedition to the south, he took with him the hau of the kumara [sweet potato], or, as some say, he took the mauri of the same. The visible form of this mauri was the stalk of a kumara plant, it represented the hau, that is to say, the vitality and fertility of the kumara (p. 196; cf. Best, 1925b, pp. 106-107).

The forest mauri has already received our attention. We have shown that its function was to protect the productiveness of the forest (p.6).

Material mauri were utilized in connection with agriculture; they were placed in the field where crops were planted, and it was a firm belief that they had a highly beneficial effect on the growing crops (1922, p. 38).

Now, the hau and mauri pertain not only to man, but also to animals, land, forests and even to a village home. Thus the hau or vitality, 01 pro­ductiveness, of a forest has to be very carefully protected by means of cer­tain very peculiar rites . . . For fecundity cannot exist without the essen­tial hau (1909, p. 436).

Everything animate and inanimate possesses this life principle (mauri): without it naught could flourish (1924 vol. 1, p. 306).

So, as we had in fact already suspected, the hau of the forest is its fecundity, as the hau of a gift is its material yield. Just as in the mundane context of exchange hau is the return on a good, so as a spiritual quality hau is the principle of fertility. In the one equally as in the other, the benefits taken by man ought to be returned to their source, that it may be maintained as a source. Such was the total wisdom of Tamati Ranapiri.

"Everything happens as if the Maori people knew a broad concept, a general principle of productiveness, hau. It was a category that made no distinctions, of itself belonging neither to the domain we call "spiritual" nor that of the "material," yet applicable to either. Speak­ing of valuables, the Maori could conceive hau as the concrete product of exchange. Speaking of the forest, hau was what made the game birds abound, a force unseen but clearly appreciated by the Maori. But would the Maori in any case need to so distinguish the "spiritual" and the "material"? Does not the apparent "imprecision" of the term hau perfectly accord with a society in which "economic," "social," "political" and "religious" are indiscriminately organized by the same relations and intermixed in the same activities? And if so, are we not obliged once more to reverse ourselves on Mauss's interpretation? Concerning the spiritual specifics of the hau, he was very likely mis­taken. But in another sense, more profound, he was right. "Ev­erything happens as if" hau were a total concept. Kaati eenaa.

Political Philosophy of the Essay on the Gift.

For the war of every man against every man, Mauss substitutes the exchange of everything between everybody. The hau, spirit of the donor in the gift, was not the ultimate explanation of reciprocity, only a special proposition set in the context of an historic conception. Here was a new version of the dialogue between chaos and covenant, trans­posed from the explication of political society to the reconciliation of segmentary society. The Essai sur le don is a kind of social contract for the primitives.

Like famous philosophical predecessors, Mauss debates from an original condition of disorder, in some sense given and pristine, but then overcome dialectically. As against war, exchange. The transfer of things that are in some degree persons and of persons in some degree treated as things, such is the consent at the base of organized society. The gift is alliance, solidarity, communion—in brief, peace, the great virtue that earlier philosophers, Hobbes notably, had discov­ered in the State. But the originality and the verity of Mauss was exactly that he refused the discourse in political terms. The first consent is not to authority, or even to unity. It would be too literal an interpretation of the older contract theory to discover its verifica­tion in nascent institutions of chieftainship. The primitive analogue of social contract is not the State, but the gift.

The gift is the primitive way of achieving the peace that in civil society is secured by the State. Where in the traditional view the contract was a form of political exchange, Mauss saw exchange as a form of political contract. The famous "total prestation" is a "total contract," described to just this effect in the Manuel d'Ethnographie:

We shall differentiate contracts into those of total prestation and contracts in which the prestation is only partial. The former already appear in Aus­tralia; they are found in a large part of the Polynesian world . . . and in North America. For two clans, total prestation is manifest by the fact that to be in a condition of perpetual contract, everyone owes everything to all the others of his clan and to all those of the opposed clan. The permanent and collective character of such a contract makes it a veritable traite, with the necessary display of wealth vis-a-vis the other party. The prestation is extended to everything, to everyone, at all times . . . (1967, p. 188).

But as gift exchange, the contract would have a completely new political realization, unforeseen and unimagined in the received phi­losophy and constituting neither society nor State. For Rousseau, Locke, Spinoza, Hobbes, the social contract had been first of all a pact of society. It was an agreement of incorporation: to form a community out of previously separate and antagonistic parts, a superperson of the individual persons, that would exercise the power subtracted from each in the benefit of all. But then, a certain political formation had to be stipulated. The purpose of the unification was to put end to the strife born of private justice. Consequently, even if the covenant was not as such a contract of government, between ruler and ruled, as in medieval and earlier versions, and whatever the differences between the sages over the locus of sovereignty, all had to imply by the con­tract of society the institution of State. That is to say, all had to insist on the alienation by agreement of one right in particular: private force. This was the essential clause, despite that the philosophers went on to debate its comprehensiveness: the surrender of private force in favor of a Public Power.

The gift, however, would not organize society in a corporate sense, only in a segmentary sense. Reciprocity is a "between" relation. It does not dissolve the separate parties within a higher unity, but on the contrary, in correlating their opposition, perpetuates it. Neither does the gift specify a third party standing over and above the separate interests of those who contract. Most important, it does not withdraw their force, for the gift affects only will and not right. Thus the condition of peace as understood by Mauss—and as in fact it exists in the primitive societies—has to differ politically from that envi­sioned by the classic contract, which is always a structure of submis­sion, and sometimes of terror. Except for the honor accorded to generosity, the gift is no sacrifice of equality and never of liberty. The groups allied by exchange each retain their strength, if not the inclina­tion to use it.

Although I opened with Hobbes (and it is especially in comparison with Leviathan" that I would discuss The Gift), it is clear that in sentiment Mauss is much closer to Rousseau. By its segmentary mor­phology, Mauss's primitive society rather returns to the third stage of the Discourse on Inequality than to the radical individualism of a Hobbesian state of nature (cf. Cazaneuvc, 1968). And as Mauss and Rousseau had similarly seen the oppositions as social, so equally their resolutions would be sociable. That is, for Mauss, an exchange that "extends to everything, to everyone, to all time." What is more, if in giving one gives himself (hau), then everyone spiritually becomes a member of everyone else. In other words, the gift approaches even in its enigmas that celebrated contract in which, "Chacun de nous met en commun sa personne et toute sa puissance sous la supreme direc­tion de la volonte generale; et nous recevons en corps chaque membre comme partie indivisible du tout."

17.I use the Everyman's edition for all citations from Leviathan (New York: Dutton, 19S0), as it retains the archaic spelling, rather than the more commonly cited English Works edited by Molesworth (1839).

But if Mauss is a spiritual descendant of Rousseau, as a political philosopher he is akin to Hobbes. Not to claim a close historic relation with the Englishman, of course, but only to detect a strong conver­gence in the analysis: a basic agreement on the natural political state as a generalized distribution of force, on the possibility of escaping from this condition by the aid of reason, and on the advantages realized thereby in cultural progress. The comparison with Hobbes seems to best bring out the almost concealed scheme of The Gift. Still, the exercise would have little interest were it not that this "problema-tique" precisely at the point it makes juncture with Hobbes arrives at a fundamental discovery of the primitive polity, and where it differs from Hobbes it makes a fundamental advance in understanding social evolution.

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 882