Polynesian origins and destinations: reading the Pacific with S Percy Smith

Abstract

Stephenson Percy Smith, militia member, surveyor, ethnologist and ethnographer, and founder of the Polynesian Society and its Journal, had a major impact on the New Zealand of his day and on a world-wide community of Polynesianist scholars. Whereas a good deal of attention and critique has been given to his work on Māori and the settlement of New Zealand, the purpose of this thesis is to explore those of his writings substantially devoted to the island Pacific outside New Zealand. To that end, I assemble a single Text comprising all of those writings and proceed to read it in terms of itself but also in the light of the period in which it was written and of its intellectual context. My method, largely based on elements of the approach proposed by Roland Barthes in the early 1970s, involves first presenting a representation of that Text and then reading within it a historical figure, the author of its components, as a character in that Text. Before doing so, in a Prologue I set out the broad current understanding of the patterns of settlement of the Pacific and some of the origins of Smith’s racial framing. In order to establish context, the early chapters outline his life and career and the intellectual framework, European and New Zealand, within which he thought and wrote as well as the early history of the Hawaiki that would come to absorb him. The following chapters set out my representation and reading of the Smith Text and open up new perspectives on aspects of Smith’s concepts of race, of relations among those he conceives as races, and of the settlement of the Pacific. My reading reveals Smith’s concern to separate his Polynesians from the other ‘races’ with which they came into contact in order to preserve their integrity and purity. In particular, in exploring the relationship between possible origins and a certain destination, it throws light on the nature of his quest for Hawaiki, the Polynesian homeland, and, in particular, his drive to locate it beyond and prior to Polynesian contact with those other ‘races’. I conclude that, at least in one sense, the real origin of Smith’s Polynesians lies in the racial classification of Oceania that emerged in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and still flourished in the twentieth. I end with a vignette of Smith’s presence in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand. Show more