ABSTRACT
Introduced into English by Captain Cook, ‘taboo’ was once central among the constructs of social anthropology. Reporting the custom of human sacrifice in Tahiti, Cook observed: ‘The solemnity itself is called Poore Eree, or Chief ’s Prayer; and the victim, who is offered up, Tataataboo, or consecrated man’ (III 1784, ii: 40). The natives of Atui Island asked Cook’s party apprehensively whether certain objects shown them were ‘taboo, or, as they pronounced the word, tafoo?’ (Cook III 1784, ii: 249). Following Cook’s death, his successor in maintaining the ship’s journal wrote of native priests ‘tabooing’ a field of sweet potatoes using wands, and of women who – throughout Polynesisa – ‘are always tabooed, or forbidden to eat certain kinds of meats’ (Cook III 1784, iii: 10-11). On the basis of such accounts, taboo – with the
stress shifted from the first to the second syllable – rapidly entered the English language. In common usage throughout the nineteenth century, it was given a new lease of life in the twentieth through the writings of Sigmund Freud (e.g. 1965 [1913]), who linked it particularly with sexual prohibitions such as the ‘incest taboo’. James Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and many other social anthropologists used the term when referring to any strong ritual prohibition. Etymologically, the Maori term, tapu, derives
from two words: ta, to mark, and pu, thoroughly (Steiner 1967 [1956], citing Shortland 1854: 81). But in Polynesian usage, more than secular marking was signified. Cook and subsequent European
visitors were never sure whether tapu meant ‘sacred’ or ‘defiled’. They alternated between the two ideas in their translations, noting that in either case, strict ritual avoidance was required. It may seem paradoxical to allow a single term to link, say, the ‘pollution’ of a woman’s menstrual flow with the ‘holiness’ of a priest, and although this Polynesian pattern is far from unusual, not every symbolic system would permit it. ‘One has only to think of Indian caste society’, comments Steiner in his classic account, ‘ … to see how inapplicable the Polynesian range of taboo would be there: it would mean using the same word for Brahman and pariah, for the sacred cow and human faeces’ (1967 [1956]: 35). Returning to Polynesia, political power
throughout the region was traditionally inseparable from ritual power or mana, in turn measurable by reference to the ‘taboos’ a person could impose. Cook mentions the Tongan food controller, alerting people to the foods they were prohibited from eating (III 1784, i: 410-11). This official could declare any category of food taboo when it grew scarce; it was then protected from consumption until the next harvest. Local history records occasions when officials or chiefs went too far, tabooing foods to the point of provoking a revolt. To challenge a chief s right to impose food taboos was to doubt his mana, calling into question his whole right to rule. The taboos imposed by a chief were con-
ceptualized as emanating directly from his physical constitution. Thanks to his mana, the whole body of a chief was tapu, and if he wanted to extend this to certain external objects – claiming them to himself – he could do so by calling out, for example, ‘Those two canoes are my two
thighs!’ Once the objects in question were his body – rendered, like his name, symbolically inseparable from his very flesh and blood – then for as long as his mana held, no one could challenge such supernaturally sanctioned ownership. Comparable linkages of ‘taboo’ with the notion of bodily ‘self ’ are to be found worldwide; such a mystical identification between persons, names and ‘respected’ things forms an important strand in what used to be termed ‘totemic’ thinking (Lévi-Strauss 1969b [1962]; Knight 1991: 106-21).
