Chapter 31

THIRTY-ONE

These words of Māori Marsden guide my response to the generous invitation by His Highness Tui Atua to open up and continue a dialogue on the significance of our indigenous knowledges in assisting us to navigate our lifeworlds. Māori Marsden signals the importance of drawing on our plural traditions to embrace the world and to live fully engaged lives. It is a call to acknowledge the depth and the dynamism that exists in our knowledge systems that can allow us to live lives of abundant intellectuality and spirituality, and from where we can derive the gifts necessary to be able to offer profound service to our families and communities. His Highness pushes us to reflect on our indigenous religious cultures: the belief systems of our ancestors that continue to shape our lives and underpin our consciousness of ‘the hidden reality’.

In endeavouring to answer the question on the nature of ultimate reality, Māori Marsden says that philosophy (the love of knowledge) “pursues three fundamental questions: What is the nature of reality, the nature of right and wrong and the grounds of valid belief?”375 These questions remain pertinent, even critical, to us. To answer these questions and to let the answers inform our lives and our practices, surely we should draw on the strength of all our knowledge traditions and have confidence to hear the voice and reason of our forebears. This is not to argue that their voice will always resonate with us, or that we are directed to accept all ancient explanations of reality, but rather to be cognisant that these explanations helped them make sense of a world that was complex and that, while much changed, we have inherited.

I came to the academy later than some and started my degree in religious studies. However, a shift in focus and circumstance meant that I went from the study of religion to the study of society and became a sociologist. While my disciplinary training remains something that I am deeply indebted to and has allowed me the intellectual pleasure of being able to examine the social in deep and analytical ways, always mindful of issues of power and social location, I still continue to have an abiding interest in things religious. There is of course no necessary disconnect between the social and the religious. Each informs each other implicitly and explicitly. Throughout history – and further back into our pre-history – religion has been a vital and pervasive feature of human existence. To understand human history and human life and experience more generally, it is necessary to understand the way that religious thought and action – particularly the actions of individuals or communities of believers – have influenced and informed personal, regional, national and global narratives. Ninian Smart376 argues that understanding belief systems is important in three ways. First, they are a fundamental element in the varied story of humanity’s various experiments in living. Second, in order to grasp the meaning and values of the plural cultures in the contemporary world, we need to know something of the worldviews that underlie them. Third, having an understanding of religious tradition and knowledge allows us to attempt to form a coherent picture of reality.377 There also remains an intrinsic satisfaction in studying the significant ideas and practices of cultures and civilisations.

From our earliest times, some form of believing has been central to all human endeavours. Peter Berger defines religion as the “audacious attempt to conceive of the universe as being humanly significant”.378 The problems of definition prove particularly challenging when applied to questions of religion, faith and systems of belief. These are concepts that we sense we immediately understand, yet when pushed, we find it difficult to come up with an inclusive definition that captures its many qualities. We could say that religion is connected with those socially shared ways of thinking, feeling and acting that have as their central focus some transcendent otherness. This attempt at a definition in a few words goes from the concrete (thinking, feeling and acting) to the abstract (transcendent otherness). Religion then is, among other things, an important tool to make sense of human experience, consciousness and reality.

Marsden wrote that from a Māori379 worldview, the ultimate reality is wairua (spirit), and that Io (the Supreme God) is, by one of his names, Io Taketake, shown to be the First Cause and the foundation of all things.380 Wairua (spirit; soul; quintessence) is everywhere, imminent in all things and in all processes: upholding, sustaining, replenishing all things by its hau or mauri (breath of life principle).381 Marsden notes that the ancient Māori created sets of symbols to explain models of natural and social phenomena. This allowed representations by which they could interpret phenomena and attempt to grasp a sense of the ultimate reality. He writes:

These symbols were encapsulated and couched in story/myth/legend/art/forms/ proverb/ritual and liturgical action. The institution of ancestral genealogy, portrayed in minor thematic symbols [such] as the tree developing from seed to fruit/or the sexual act culminating in the birth of a child out of the darkness of the womb into the light of the natural world, were some of the ways by which the real world was represented. Just as human genealogical tables denoted successive generations of descent, by analogy every living organism in the natural world, every tree, fish, bird or object is the result of a prior cause, of a chain of procession of events.382

This way of seeing the world leads to holistic approaches and practices that seek the integration of multiple elements. Ancestral genealogy could be traced back to divine origins and culture heroes, so that even the divine was integrated with the human. As Ranginui Walker notes, these beliefs shaped political relations because while rule was exercised by chiefs, elders and tohunga, their power was tempered by kinship bonds and the need to validate leadership by generous and wise rule.383 The ability to distribute resources and foster a community characterised by a sense of well-being was the sign of strong (divinely mandated) leadership. Throughout Polynesia today we see how these fundamental beliefs still resonate. The values that underlie them remain a cultural constant, even after the introduction of new belief forms.

To have a deep understanding of the world and its complexities at a cultural, social, political and even economic level requires some understanding of the way that beliefs inform and influence societal structures. Similarly, social norms and values tend to be based on religious ethical codes and individual attitudes are often informed by religious tenets. While a faith is commonly expressed as a religion or a recognised community of religious believers, it is also an acceptance of beliefs and ideals that may not be amenable to verification through experimentation and reason. Faith, by its very nature, is beyond reason. Religion, faith and belief are many things and are understood very differently from the perspectives of belief or non-belief. However, whether we are theist or atheist, or somewhere else in this continuum, we can be assured that whatever else religion is, it is decidedly a social phenomenon. As James Beckford384 explains:

Regardless of whether religious beliefs and experiences actually relate to the supernatural, superempirical or noumenal realities, religion is expressed by means of human ideas, symbols, feelings and practices and organisations. These expressions are the products of social interactions, structures and processes and, in turn, they influence social life and cultural meaning to varying degrees.385

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), a French sociologist, believed that religion served a key function in creating social cohesion and was an important agent of social control. He saw it as critically important in all societies. The study of early religious forms would, he thought, enable a greater understanding of the religious disposition he saw as a permanent and essential aspect of humanity.386 Durkheim argued:

Religion is an eminently social thing. Religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities; rites are ways of acting that are born only in the midst of assembled groups and whose purpose is to evoke, maintain, or recreate certain mental states of those groups. But if the categories are of religious origin, then they must participate in what is common to all religion: they too must be social things, products of collective thought.387

His classic study The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life388 used one in-depth case study, Australian aborigines, and focused on the role of the totem in their culture. Durkheim chose this group because he felt they represented the most elementary forms of religion within a culture. He believed that religion is centred in beliefs and practices that are related to sacred as opposed to profane things and argued that all societies divide human experience into these two categories. The profane, as the realm of the everyday, involves those aspects of social reality that are routine and secular. The sacred is extraordinary and awe-inspiring, beyond the profane realm; it evokes an attitude of reverence. It is important to note that nothing is inherently sacred or profane but rather it becomes such after being defined and labelled by individuals and groups. Durkheim saw religion as having a vital role in ensuring social cohesion and social order and in creating the norms and values of any given society. His analysis suggested that no society “does not experience the need at regular intervals to maintain and strengthen the collective feelings and ideas that provide its coherence and distinct individuality”.389

As a Māori woman I feel privileged to have, largely by the luck of birth, access to dual traditions. While birth should neither limit nor control the desire to delve into the collective understandings of all people, it often shapes our knowledge pathways, giving us the ability to see only the path trodden by our contemporaries and immediate ancestors. We need to recognise that knowledge is deeply connected to regimes of power and that the introduction of new knowledge often leads to the suppression of older knowledge forms. As the body polity shifts, knowledge that once was legitimate, indeed seen as divinely mandated, can come to be seen as illegitimate. Older religious traditions can be viewed in a number of ways. They may be seen as a form of esoteric knowledge that only the very learned may have access to. They may be seen as dangerous and corrupting. They may be seen as evidence of earlier forms of ignorance and delusion. In regards to indigenous religious knowledge, we have seen all these reactions and more. This suppression of knowledge has seen both loss and distortion.

His Highness reminds us that similar practices may have emerged from quite different responses. We whisper, seemingly involuntarily, when we are confronted with the magnificent and the awe-inspiring. Our voices are tempered by the recognition of the transcendent and often by the fleeting sense that we are in a space where our ways of understanding are expanded, reaching out to the knowledge beyond our present individual or collective knowing. We can experience this in contemplation of the natural (the topographical high places; the expansive spaces of land and sea; the colours and vibrancy of flora and fauna), as well as in contemplation of that which humanity has crafted (our places of reverence and worship; our artistic renderings of celebration, memory and mourning; and all those creations we have fashioned that let us glimpse aspects of our shared experience). Yet we also whisper when we have a sense of shame or when we are recounting stories that may stigmatise others or ourselves. We whisper when our words intentionally cause pain or suffering to others. We whisper when the words frighten us or when we are aware of the damage they may do to reputation and honour. The fact that we may whisper when we are in a state of veneration or when we are in a state of abjection helps inform the way that we can think of knowledge production.

The fact that we may now experience shame where we once experienced pride must make us consider what drives changes of attitudes and the implications of such change. To do this we must seek to know what was. We are not required to reinstate all practices and ideas but rather have the confidence to look at them without shame or prejudice. We need to acknowledge the pathways of intellectual insight from the past that lead to us, and to truly value this inheritance. Our knowledges are dynamic and adaptive and have been altered by living in this world. Changes in the way we understand or represent the world have sometimes come about by force and active suppression, where power regimes have sought to eradicate beliefs and practices to better facilitate their dissemination of new knowledge and their appropriation of the social polity in all of its forms. This alienation from our cultural knowledge base has had nefarious effects that can be read across a broad swathe of negative social indicators. It has impacted on our social relations, our psyches, our economic bases and our sexualities. While introduced knowledge has enhanced our life understandings, the strength of that knowledge has perhaps been diminished by an environment that suppresses earlier knowledge forms that may still provide guidance and insight.

Māori Marsden differentiated between knowledge and wisdom. He noted that while obviously related they were different in nature. He saw knowledge, an accumulation of facts, as a thing of the head while wisdom was “a thing of the heart. It has its own thought processes. It is there that knowledge is integrated for this is the centre of one’s being”.390 His discussion on the importance of having a centre is useful in getting a full appreciation of the way that our knowledge inheritance can anchor us to this world in profoundly spiritual and practical ways. For Marsden, a truly educated person is not someone who knows a little about a lot but one who is truly in touch with their centre. This centre is the basis of their convictions, their moral centre, and it gives direction to the meaning and the purpose of life: a life that “shows a sureness of touch that stems from inner clarity. This is true wisdom”.391

Over a period of forty years, Sir Apirana Ngata collected and compiled songs, chants and poetry. Assisted by Pei Te Hurinui Jones, they produced the four volumes of Ngā Mōteatea.392 Their work is now seen as a national treasure. Recent editions have all four volumes in Māori and English, meaning that this treasure can now be enjoyed by Māori and non-Māori alike. These books clearly demonstrate a long history of intellectual scholarship – they show a wealth of concepts, a beauty of phrase and a depth of knowledge about a world from which we are now largely removed. Throughout the compiling process, Ngata realised that much of this knowledge had already been lost and was starting to be seen as less relevant to Māori. In a tribute edition of the works after his death, we were/are reminded that a turning away from knowledge may not always be permanent:

Let us remember that this kind of singing is perhaps two thousand years old or more … The elders did not approve of children trying to learn them. They told them to wait an appropriate time. Poor things! They did not realise how quickly the Māori language would be lost. Now, I can only ponder on the ditties, the canoe-hauling chants and the many sayings that have been lost forever. Moreover, the songs were long and young people became bored with them saying, “Whenever will it end?” Yet now the younger generation are hungry for the songs and chants of the past. The dust rises….393

The ability to accommodate dual beliefs sometimes passes unnoticed and at other times creates tensions. In Māori society the tensions around drawing on our indigenous religious cultures alongside present belief systems are not as marked as they perhaps are in other parts of the Pacific. While the church is the centre of Pacific village life, the marae394 remains the centre of all Māori communities. The marae creates a space of connectedness to our forebears that predates introduced Christian traditions. Even in marae that adhere to strong Christian protocols, these protocols co-exist alongside ancient protocol. It does not mean that there is an absence of tensions but rather that wharetoroa (the social environment) goes some way to mediate these tensions. Some tensions remain unresolved, some forgotten, while others are still located in the world of whispers.

Let us feel the confidence, because our centre is strong, to speak and ask questions with clarity and to move our knowledge into the realm of wisdom. This was something that Marsden was unafraid to do as a tohunga (scholar, healer) and Anglican minister. He valued, learned from and shared the teaching from plural knowledge systems and reminds us of the quality and provenance of insight:

Knowledge is transformed into wisdom. This is essentially a spiritual experience. Illumination is from above, a revelation gift from God. When it occurs, it acts as a catalyst integrating knowledge to produce wisdom.395

374 Marsden, M. (2003). Royal, Te Ahukaramu C (Ed.). The woven universe: Selected writings of Māori Marsden. New Zealand: The Estate of Rev. Māori Marsden, pp. xv–xvi.

375 Ibid, p.27.

376 Smart, N. (1993). The world’s religions. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

377 Ibid, p. 9.

378 Berger, P. (1967). The social reality of religion. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, pp.36–37.

379 The macron is used in the spelling of Māori, for both Marsden’s first name and for the general term refering to the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand.

380 Marsden (2003), pp.16, 33.

381 Ibid, p.33.

382 Ibid, p.31.

383 Walker, R. in Marsden (2003), p.35.

384 Beckford, J.A. (2003). Social theory and religion, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

385 Ibid, p.2.

386 Cipriani, R. (2000). Sociology of religion: An historical introduction, New York, U.S.A.: Aldine de Gruyter. p.66.

387 Durkheim, E. (1995). The elementary forms of the religious life: The totemic system in Australia (K.E. Fields, Trans.). New York, U.S.A.: Free Press, p.9.

388 Ibid.

389 Ibid, p. 429.

390 Marsden (2003), p.59.

391 Ibid, p.59.

392 Ngata, A. (2004). Ngā Mōteatea: The songs. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press.

393 Wharetoroa in Ngata (2004), pp. xi–xii.

394 Marae refers generally here to the traditional Maori tribal meeting place, inclusive of people.

395 Marsden (2003), p.58.