Why James Marriott Should Read the Kumulipo
Scott Hamilton
James Marriott's substack essay 'The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society' went viral in the United Kingdom and United States after it was published last year. Marriott documented the decline in reading in those societies, and linked this decline to the explosion of social media. He argued that members of a post-literate society will be vulnerable to conspiracy theories and demagogues, and wondered whether democracy could survive without a mass reading culture. Marriott has now expanded his essay into a book.
Marriott makes some important and persuasive arguments, but one aspect of his text will dismay many scholars and writers in Aotearoa and the Pacific. Marriott makes a series of crude and unfair claims about non-literate indigenous cultures. He alleges that people who live inside these cultures find it hard to think rationally, are easily manipulated by unscrupulous religious and political leaders, and rely on myths rather than history for their understanding of the past. According to Marriott, the irrationality of Trump's America resembles the state of pre-literate indigenous societies. We are going back to the future.
But it is Marriott who has gone backwards. The distinction between 'primitive' non-literate societies and 'modern' literate societies was a staple of nineteenth century Victorian scholarship into non-European societies, but it was discredited almost a century ago by anthropologists like EE Evans-Prichard. In his studies of the Nuer and Azande peoples of Africa, Evans-Pritchard showed that the oral transmission of culture and history was no obstacle to critical thinking and to scientific and historical insights. Evans-Prichard and others showed the cognitive continuity of European and 'primitive' thought.
Generations of both indigenous and palangi researchers have demonstrated the effectiveness with which Pacific peoples could hoard and pass on knowledge. In 1982 RJ Blong published The Time of Darkness, which recorded an ancient super-eruption in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Blong had noticed that the oral histories of many highland peoples described the disappearance of the sun and ash falling from the skies. His excavations confirmed the truth of the stories: a layer of ancient ash covered huge areas of the highlands. Andrew Crowe's 2018 book The Pathway of the Birds showed how Polynesians found ways across the vast open reaches of the Pacific by studying birds, sea creatures, tides, and winds. Their mastery of the science of phenology was expressed in a treasure trove of stories, songs, and proverbs, which Crowe mined to superb effect.
The Kumulipo, Hawai'i's epic creation chant, is one of the most remarkable examples of the ability of oral tradition to transmit knowledge. The Kumulipo was a sort of oral encyclopedia, packing in information about the Hawai'i's natural world. Like any good encyclopedia it was regularly updated. In his seminal book Hawai'ian Nation: Man, Gods, and Nation Michael Kioni Dudley noted how the Kumulipo contains one of the world's first notions of evolution, in its description of the progression of life from simpler to more complex forms.
Rhyme was not the only mnemonic device used by Pacific islanders. Material culture provided complex ways of storing knowledge, like the tukutuku of Aotearoa and the lalava or Tonga. Filipe Tohi is a Tongan master carver who has helped revive the art of lalava, or lashing. The ceiling of the University of Auckland's huge Pasifika fale is held together by hundreds of lengths of rope that Tohi made from coconut fibre. In his lectures and writings, Tohi has shown how the intricate rope patterns of lalava can store information on everything from astronomy to genealogy.
Reproduced below is the opening passage of a translation of the Kumulipo made by Queen Liliuokalani in 1897. Placed under house arrest by the invaders who had overturned the Hawai'ian constitution, Liliuokalani worked to preserve the most important text in her people's literary canon. For many generations the Kumulipo had been passed between specially trained scholars, but in the grim conditions of 1897 she feared that this continuity could be broken. By putting the epic on paper and also translating it into English she preserved it for future generations.
Today the Kumulipo is a core text in Hawai'ian Studies departments, and an inspiration to creative writers as well as scholars. In 2019 astronomers, some of them working at Hawai'i's Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea observatories, located a new black hole and photographed it. The black hole was given the name Kumulipo, in a reference to the epic's passages describing a primordial nothingness, and the emergence of light and life out of that nothingness.
At the time that turned the heat of the earth,
At the time when the heavens turned and changed,
At the time when the light of the sun was subdued
To cause light to break forth,
At the time of the night of Makalii (winter)
Then began the slime which established the earth,
The source of deepest darkness.
Of the depth of darkness, of the depth of darkness,
Of the darkness of the sun, in the depth of night,
It is night,
So was night born
O ke au i kahuli wela ka honua
O ke au i kahuli lole ka lani
O ke au i kukaiaka ka la.
E hoomalamalama i ka malama
O ke au o Makali’i ka po
O ka walewale hookumu honua ia
O ke kumu o ka lipo, i lipo ai
O ke kumu o ka Po, i po ai
O ka lipolipo, o ka lipolipo
O ka lipo o ka la, o ka lipo o ka po
Po wale hoi
Hanau ka po
Rhyme was not the only mnemonic device used by Pacific islanders.
Material culture provided complex ways of storing knowledge, like the tukutuku of Aotearoa and the lalava or Tonga. Filipe Tohi is a Tongan master carver who has helped revive the art of lalava, or lashing. The ceiling of the University of Auckland's huge Pasifika fale is held together by hundreds of lengths of rope that Tohi made from coconut fibre. In his lectures and writings, Tohi has shown how the intricate rope patterns of lalava can store information on everything from astronomy to genealogy.
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