ABSTRACT
Maoris are very interested in how people are related and how kinsfolk ( whanaunga ) ought to behave to each other. They themselves regard this interest in kinship (whanaungatanga) as one of the things that distinguish them from Pakehas. A Maori once said to me: ‘The Pakeha lives only for his own immediate family, but a Maori never turns a relative down.’ Maoris are always pleased when they can establish kinship with a stranger. They know at once how to treat him, and constraint vanishes. A mother told me that she had been most upset when her daughter wrote home from the city that she wanted to marry a boy from another tribe, but she quickly withdrew her objections when it came out at the tomo (p. 140) that an ancestor of his had married the sister of one of hers. That made him one of her ‘bones’, a favourite word for relatives of common descent.
