on the anthropological map

Books

First Tikopia, now Anuta is on the anthropological map

Anuta: Social Structure of a Polynesian Island. By Richard Feinberg. Published by the In stitute for Polynesian Studies, Brigham Young University- Hawaii Campus and the Polynesian Cultural Center Laie, Hawaii, with the Danish National Museum, Copenhagen, 1981. $U.5.16.95 (cloth) ISBN 0 939154 24 2; $U.5.8.95 (paperback) ISBN 0 939154 23 4.

Until quite recently anyone wanting to learn about the island of Anuta could not readily add much to the few bald facts to be found in the Pacific Islands Year Book.

That inestimable reference work tells us that Anuta is one of the easternmost outliers of the Solomons; that its people are Polynesians; and that its nearest neighbors are uninha bited Fataka, 42 kilometres SE, and Tikopia, 120 kilometres SW. The Year Book also says that Anuta is only about one kilometre long from north to south; that its people maintain contact with, and are related to, their Polynesian neighbors on Tikopia; and that the is land’s European discoverer, Captain Edward Edwards, of HMS Pandora, called it Cherry Island when he came upon it in 1791.

A year or two ago, if my life had depended on adding a few details to the Year Book's meagre facts, I could have said that Captain Edwards gave Anuta its arboreal name not because he found cherry trees growing there but because a certain Mr Cherry was com missioner of the Royal Navy Victualling Office when the Pandora >left England. After that I would have had nothing more to say. For me, as for most other people who had even so much as heard of Anuta, the island was just a dot on the map with no particular identity.

All that has now changed.

Anuta now has its own dedi cated chronicler and explica tor, Richard Feinberg, who seems to be girding his loins to do for that island what New Zealand anthropologist Sir Raymond Firth has been doing for Tikopia these past 50 years: He is putting Anuta on the anthropological map.

Feinberg, an American now in his mid-30s, first heard of Anuta from Sir Raymond Firth. That was in 1971 when Firth gave a series of lectures at the University of Chicago.

One day, Feinberg confided to Firth that he would like to

carry out research for a doctoral dissertation on some really remote island in Polynesia or Melanesia, and Firth, who had visited Anuta for a day some 20 years ear lier, suggested that Anuta was just the place.

Firth explained, however, that Anuta had only about 200 people; that access to it was only by sea; that there was no proper anchorage; and that weather conditions were sometimes so bad that inten ding visitors could not get ashore. Furthermore, Anuta was hundreds of miles from the nearest medical aid, and

although the islanders would undoubtedly give a would-be resident anthropologist a warm welcome, they were simple folk who would not provide intellectual com panionship of a sophisticated kind.

Despite all these warnings, Feinberg went to Anuta in March 1972 and stayed there until January 1973. After wards, he spent six weeks among the small Anutan com munity in Honiara. Since then, he has published a steady stream of scholarly papers on Anutan themes, as well as the first Anutan grammar and dictionary. Now he has brought out his magnum opus so far a book of more than 370 pages, Anuta: Social Struc ture of a Polynesian Island.

From the inside, the book has a somewhat forbidding appearance for it contains half a dozen appendices to the main text that fill no fewer than 150 pages. Among these are six fold-out genealogies measur ing up to 95 cm (37 in.) across.

The genealogies trace the ancestry of virtually every Anutan back to one or another of the island’s putative immig rants, sometimes many cen turies ago. In addition, there is an appendix giving the name, date of birth, family unit, etc., of every Anutan who came within reach of Feinberg’s anthropological microscope.

Feinberg is by no means apologetic about his apen dices. He says it is common for anthropologists to make asser tions about the kinship sys tems of the people they study, but it is less common for them to detail the data from which they draw their inferences.

His genealogies and pages of personal data are therefore presented with a view to cor recting this situation and also in the hope that they will be useful to other students of Polynesian ethnohistory, de-

These portraits, linked with the history of Tikopia more than 150 years ago, include those of Martin Bushart (centre) and Lascar Joe (lower right). The pictures were in a book published last century and were done by an artist in the d’Urville expedition of 1828 - 15 years after the two men settled on the island.

mographic patterns or, perhaps, population genetics.

Feinberg’s book proper con sists of eight chapters which, in the main, concentrate on getting to grips with Anuta’s social structure. They are written in crisp, reasonably simple English, which is agreeably free of the jargon that many social anthropolig ists use. The second chapter, “The Setting”, provides an ex cellent background to Fein berg’s study. Three memor able points he makes are: (1) although Anuta’s land area is only 0.15 square miles, a re markable variety of vegetable life has been squeezed into this small space; (2) the Anutan agricultural system is one of the most intensive in the Paci fic; and (3) for someone com ing from a non-oceanic en vironment, the variety of ways in which the Anutans catch fish is “nothing less than in credible”.

Feinberg says that the origin of Anuta’s first human inhabi

tants is unknown and that little is known about its people until the time of Pu Ariki, a chief from Tikopia of about 14 generations ago. From then on, Anuta is said to have been settled by people from Tonga, Wallis Island, Samoa and Rotu ma, and has always maintained relations with Tikopia.

“There is currently a great deal of Tikopian admixture in the Anutan population,” Fein berg says. “The languages of the two islands are mutually intelligible. Their culture and social structure are similar, and the people of the two islands see themselves as being closely allied when com paring themselves with the rest of the world.” Feinberg says also that although Tongan and Samoan blood has been retained through Anuta’s women, the island’s present chiefly line traces its ancestry back to one Pu Taupare, an immigrant from Wallis Island, which is otherwise known as East Uvea.

These statements are parti cularly interesting in the light of a recently published study by Professor Bruce Biggs, a specialist in Polynesian lan guages at the University of Auckland. This study, which was partly based on Feinberg’s Anutan dictionary, had not been published when Fein berg’s book went to press. It is entitled “The Position of East Uvean and Anutan in the Polynesian Language Family” (Te Reo, vol. 23, 1980), and it reveals that Anutan is basical ly a dialect of Tikopian, which has been heavily overlaid by borrowings from Wallisian, or East Uvean. In other words, Biggs’ study generally con firms what Feinberg learned about Anutan prehistory from local traditions.

However, neither Biggs’ study nor Feinberg’s book does anything to explain why the elderly, tattooed Anutan man whose photograph in col our graces the cover of Fein berg’s book, looks decidedly European. Not only does the man have the characteristical ly lean body structure of many Europeans, his skin color is remarkably light, his facial features and hair form are Caucasoid, and he is unusually bald for a “true-blue” Pacific Islander.

For what it is worth, I have my own theory as to why the man on Feinberg’s cover looks as European as he does, even though Anuta had never had any resident Europeans until the last few years. My theory is that the man is a descendant of a Prussian seaman, Martin Bushart, who was left on Tiko pia in 1813 with his pregnant Fijian wife and a Lascar called Joe. One of the officers in the ship that brought Tikopia these early aliens was Peter Dillon, an Irish seaman, who returned to Tikopia in his own ship some 13 years later.

Bushart and the Lascar came out to greet him; and it was because the Lascar had a sil ver sword guard with him, obtained from neighboring Vanikoro, that Dillon later elucidated the fate of the French explorer La Perouse.

Bushart actually accompa nied Dillon to Vanikoro, and then went on to Calcutta with him. However, when Dillon brought him back to the Paci fic in the following year, Bushart was determined to re turn to Tikopia, “there to end his days”, as Dillon put it, “in retirement from worldly affairs”. Dillon’s statement suggests to me that Bushart had left a family on Tikopia.

Indeed, it would be surprising if he had not and if he did, it would have been a part-Euro pean family whose genes would, inevitably, have been passed down the years to the Tikopians of today as well as to their close relatives, the Anu tans.

As far as I know, however, the possibility that either Bushart or the Lascar or, for that matter, several other early European beachcombers on Tikopia could have left descendants on that island is nowhere mentioned in the works of Sir Raymond Firth, even though European-looking faces peer occasionally from the not-terribly-good photo graphs that illustrate his pages.

Social anthropologists seem to have a blind spot for this sort of thing for they like to believe that the remote and isolated communities they in vestigate are uncontaminated by genetic or cultural influ ences from the outside world.

This being so, I hope that any ethnohistorians, demog raphers or geneticists who have occasion in future to use Feinberg’s superb genealogies will spare a thought for Martin Bushart, the Lascar and those other early beachcombers.

The fact is that although Bushart and the Lascar, for example, were but two distinc tive aliens in the Tikopian population of 1813, their Prus sian and Indian genes could now be so widespread that every living Tikopian and Anu tan is of part-Prussian or part- Indian descent to a greater or lesser degree!

In short, despite the difficul ty one still has in getting to and then getting on to Anuta, that island in an ethnic sense, at

least does not seem to be quite as remote from the West ern World as Feinberg thought it was when he went there in 1972. And that makes me won der whether Anuta’s social structure, which Feinberg has described in minute detail, might not, perhaps, be as pure ly “Polynesian” as it was be fore Bushart and the Lascar settled on Tikopia 169 years

ago.

Robert Langdon.