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Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds by Anne Salmond, and: The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Oceania ed. by Ethan E. Cochrane and Terry L. Hunt

2020; World History Association; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jwh.2020.0027

1527-8050

David Igler,

History of Science and Medicine

Reviewed by: Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds by Anne Salmond, and: The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Oceania ed. by Ethan E. Cochrane and Terry L. Hunt David Igler Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds. By anne salmond. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017. 512 pp. The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Oceania. Edited by ethan e. cochrane and terry l. hunt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 528 pp. The Pacific Ocean remains something of a blind spot in world history syntheses despite the wealth of field-specific scholarship on islands, indigenous groups, transoceanic connections, and the environment. A notable exception to this blind spot is J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin's edited volume A Companion to Global Environmental History (2012), which offers a range of essays situated in or directly related to the Pacific. One explanation for the Pacific's relative absence in world history has to do with the intentional localism of some Pacific scholarship, while another explanation is that many outside scholars view the great ocean as anomalous to the historical patterns of the Atlantic and Indian oceans or the Mediterranean Sea. Two recent books, Anne Salmond's Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds, and Hunt and Cochrane's The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Oceania, offer new perspectives on Pacific prehistory, New Zealand, and indigenous and colonial worldviews. While neither book consciously attempts to place the Pacific in a global historical framework, both are worthy of attention by world historians. Anne Salmond's work in anthropology, history, Maori, and Pacific studies has led the past two generations of scholars to seek deeper meanings and alternative perspectives on both the past and the present. From her research on Maori communities and cosmos in the 1970s to [End Page 452] her more recent accounts of Pacific navigators (including James Cook, William Bligh, and Tupaia), Salmond's scholarship combines archival mastery with a stylistic grace rarely found in academic prose. She narrates multiple pasts with compassion for her subjects, both indigenous and European, with the ultimate goal of understanding human actions and worldviews. Salmond has the ability to explain complex worlds crashing together through a singular and exceedingly local episode—a moment in time when possibilities existed for many different outcomes. Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds shows this ability for bridging disparate worlds of understanding. While focused specifically on the different realities and ontologies of Maori and Europeans in Aotearoa New Zealand from 1769 to the present, Salmond's study also contains broader meanings for the clash of cultures in colonial settings around the world. The first part of the book explores the encounters between Maori and Europeans (primarily British) up to the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, which attempted to settle questions of sovereignty in New Zealand. The second part of the book examines the different perspectives on the subjects of waterways, land, the sea, and people—the essential aspects of life that have been recently debated in New Zealand in conjunction with questions of Maori sovereignty. In New Zealand as elsewhere around the world, starkly different worldviews shaped the encounters between indigenous groups and would-be colonizers. For Maori, Salmond argues, knowledge and understanding derive from taonga (ancestral treasure) animated by the vital force of hau, "the wind of life that activates human and non-human networks alike" (p. 3). Hau flows through all things in a space-time spiral or vortex, suggesting a complex universe as well as a "way of being that patterns the world" (p. 14). This ontology stood in stark contrast to the Enlightenmentperspectiveof British explorers, missionaries, and settlers, who viewed the world through a lens of Cartesian dualism. The gulf between these two worldviews may seem unbridgeable, but interestingly, Salmond goes to great lengths to spotlight those individuals who sought not just compromise but mutual understanding. The possibility she offers is that "cosmo-diversity" alongside bio-diversity "may be a force for adaptation and survival" in the future (p. 2). Thus, the first part of Tears of Rangi moves forward in time from 1769 with chapters devoted to the Ra'iatean navigator and priest Tupaia, the first missionaries' meetings with rangatira (chiefs) Ruatara and Hongi Hika, visits to England by rangatira...