© Bonhams
Paul Moon said his new book, This Horrid Practice, looked at the Maori tradition of eating each other in what was a particularly violent society before Europeans arrived in New Zealand.
Cannibalism lasted for several hundred years until the 1830s although there were a few isolated cases after that, said Professor Moon, a Pakeha history professor at Te Ara Poutama, the Maori Development Unit at the Auckland University of Technology.
He also said infanticide was also widely practised because tribes wanted men to be warriors and mothers often killed their female daughters by smothering them or pushing a finger through the soft tissue of the skull to kill them immediately.
He said the widespread practice of cannibalism was not a food issue but people were eaten often as part of a post-battle rage. Enemies were often captured and killed later to be eaten or killed because of a minor transgression.
"Rather than disposing of the body it was prepared to be eaten,'' he said.
Part of the practice was also to send a warning to other tribes.
"One of the arguments is really if you want to punish your enemy killing them is not enough. If you can chop them up and eat them and turn them into excrement that is the greatest humiliation you can impose on them.''
Prof Moon said historians often said Maori were not cannibals and based their findings on European standards.
"The amount of evidence is so overwhelming it would be unfair to pretend it didn't happen. It is too important to ignore,'' said Prof Moon.
The head of the Maori Studies Department at Auckland University, Professor Margaret Mutu, who had not read Prof Moon's book, said cannibalism was widespread throughout New Zealand.
"It was definitely there. It's recorded in all sorts of ways in our histories and traditions, a lot of place names refer to it. It was part of our culture.''
She said Maori cannibalism was not referred to by many historians because it was counter to English culture.
"You will get your English-based historians who come out of an English culture who don't understand it and avoid it because they don't understand it.
"If you don't understand it you're risking misinterpreting it badly if you try to address it.''
Prof Mutu said she knew of no Pakeha historians who knew how to balance parts of the Maori culture they could not see an equivalent to in the English culture.
"If you don't understand the things you are talking about you take one hell of a risk.''
She said Prof Moon did not understand the history of cannibalism and it was "very, very hard for a Pakeha to get it right on these things especially when they don't know how to interrogate it from within the culture and interrogating it from within the culture means interrogating it from within the language.
"He is braver than I would be,'' she said.
Reader Comments
i don’t necessarily blame ya (I jest…)
BTW, have you found the fleece yet ?
The maori were very hungry most of the time.
Read Paul moons books if your interested.
But it looks like giving it up and switching to a modern (American) diet didn't do them any good ...
Although most Europeans lag behind in this regard, they are on the same path. Just saying.
>none
absolutely this. It’s a hard thing to learn… think about this though: in an order less environment is easy to do literally anything (like eat people…). But as soon as order comes along you have to either readjust, or suffer the consequences of not readjusting. The latter is what we are seeing. And, I’m not saying it’s the right or wrong order for us, it just is; and if it’s one thing I’ve learned it is this:
you can ignore reality all you want; but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. Action <-> reaction. Cause <-> effect.
sorry for the spelling folks.
And although people look somewhat different everywhere in the world, they are mostly the same in most aspects. The obesity problem is present in every country and region which is blessed with American culture, political and economical influence.
Ah! The Europeans saved the day and returned society to it's norms.
What happened, maybe a social and moral crisis due to geological events, changing the landscape due to some sort of unknown event so far back in history it is not recorded. Events that caused a situation, where food and resources were under great stress, will it happen again, who knows, but history does repeat.
I am reminded of Cormac McCarthy's novel and movie the Road, at the end there is a child that finds a group the provides succour, that has not lost it's moral compass.
The Road is a harrowing novel about a post-apocalyptic world. It follows a father and his son as they attempt to survive in a starvation-ravaged wilderness. The industrial world has collapsed, and the human race appears to be on the brink of extinction. Dangers are posed by disease, starvation, and other human beings throughout. The novel is incredibly dark and was made into an award-winning film in 2009.
Which of course is totally different from the European inquisiton at about the same time, which also sacrificed thousands of people to appease their god. Or events like the Thirty Years' War, were catholics and protestants killed each other in thousands, for the glory of their gods.
My suggestion is an ecological disaster, that stretched the morality of human psychology and moral compass. That some are physically able to eat the body of another. I think other anthologies could be made in the society we are living in today it could be made (psychologically) we are literally eating our minds for a political agenda...Social media?
I often wonder if the act of war on a small island is needed to keep the population in check so the food and water supplies are not depleted by over use.
Being able to eat the spoils of war is a bonus!
And to sum up my points made above, us Europeans are in no position to lecture others about such things as ethics. Especiialy not our so-called "elites". We topped them all - in bestiality and depravity.
The method used for the mass slaughter often involved setting fire acres of bush to drive the birds into swamps where they became mired and helpless.
This happened less than a thousand years ago and all were gone before the first Europeans arrived.
There is nothing mysterious or lost about what happened in pre-European New Zealand.
I agree, it is a long forgotten incident, but a psychology message, that when driven to the practise to cannibalize for survivors, it was the only option that they saw available to them at that time for survival. I understand that for some survivors of the incident it left them with life long psychological trauma, they were a group some of them were friends.
It dehumanized the the body and soul of a person, and degenerated the group into nothing more than hunting animals.
It was my suggestion after reading the Cormac McCarthy novel novel The passenger, in some circumstances, given our moral compass for normal humanity.
Some part of the human family have no moral compass, have no insight for what it means to be human and would gladly eat their fellow humankind.
Look: ALL of us have bad stuff in our cultural past at some point, Māori are no exception.
Like most other cultures, they were warlike, had no concept of conservation, and cooked and ate each other when they ran out of other mammals to eat.
How ironic this item is coming from Stuff which about as woke as it gets and is currently virtue-signaling their asses off as its Māori Language Week here in NZ.
good to see/read ya
And is it not GREAT news that Chantelle Baker has just settled on a defamation case against NZ Herald and has her sights set on Stuff?
Yes they took their thirty pieces of silver, and they'll pay the price.
Unimaginable resources were to be had in Africa.
Just a taste;
[Link]
Psychpaths eating other psychopaths !? I am kind of having very mixed feelings right now about that.