Gardens of Rongo: Applying cross-field anthropology to explain contact violence in New Zealand

Abstract

The scholarship of early-contact violence involving European voyagers and the first peoples of the Americas and Oceania is notable for divergent interpretations and debates around the methods and ethics of historical ethnography, as in the celebrated controversy over Captain James Cook's 1779 Hawaiian death. Scholars agree that this divergence is exacerbated by reliance on fragmentary or tendentious documentary sources. New research on the "first contact" in 1642 between a Dutch expedition and South Island New Zealand Māori suggests the potential value of a cross-field anthropology to elucidate encounter violence. Archaeological, ethnobotanical, and anthropology of religion research results are reported so as to inform a cultural-landscape interpretation for the contact events of December 18 and 19, 1642. This provides for a new reading of the encounter around local perceptions of Dutch interests in kūmara (sweet potato) fields under tapu (a restricted, spiritually dangerous state) and the ritual care of the deity Rongo. Cross-field anthropology may yet encourage new collaborations in contact studies and prove useful in generating testable explanations of violent historical encounters where traditional accounts are sparse. © 2012 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.