REVIEW ARTICLE RECENT BOOKS ABOUT RAPANUI

Transcription

1 REVIEW ARTICLE RECENT BOOKS ABOUT RAPANUI GRANT MCCALL University of New South Wales AMORÓS I GONELL, Francesc: El sueño imposible de Antoni Pujador ( ). Prologue by Josep A. Pujante. Barcelona: Sirpus, pp., drawings, maps, photographs. n.p. FISCHER, Steven Roger: Island at the End of the World. The Turbulent History of Easter Island. London: Reaktion Books pp. US$24.95, UK HAUN, Beverley: Inventing Easter Island. Toronto: University of Toronto Press xxii pp. CA$45 (cloth); CA$35 (paper). PAULY, Stephanie: Rapa Nui: Eine Liebe auf der Osterinsel. Munich: Droemer/Knaur pp PETEUIL, Marie-Françoise: Les évadés de l île de Pâques. Loin du Chili, vers Tahiti ( ). Paris: L Harmattan pp. 23 (paper). VARGAS, Patricia, Claudio Cristino and Roberto Izaurieta, 1000 años en Rapa Nui. Arqueología del asentamiento. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, Instituto de Estudios Isla de Pascua pp., drawings, maps, photographs. US$39 (paper). VERDUGO-BINIMELIS, Dario, Life and Solitude in Easter Island. Bloomington & Central Milton Keynes: Author-House pp., maps, photographs. UK 7.90 (paper), UK (cloth). There never has been a shortage of books about Rapanui, as the people of Easter Island call themselves, their language and their place. Every year a few are produced, taking up aspects of the history or current situation of the island. Some pretend to comprehensiveness and others take a small part of the story and explore it thoroughly. Reliably there is a flow of guidebooks about Rapanui in many languages to familiarise the visitor (or armchair traveller) with the main sights and provide some background to the tour, real or virtual. These tourist publications typically contain a good deal of material from other sources, but also may be 377

2 378 Recent Books about Rapanui seen as research results: the notes on the hotels, restaurants and local amenities usually come about because the writer or their company has actually gone to Rapanui to find out about the place. Guidebooks vary from being pretentious (e.g., Shawn Mclaughlin s Complete Guide) to the relatively impersonal but well informed by Moon Publications and the omnipresent Lonely Planet series. Moon Publications includes Rapanui in its encyclopaedic South Pacific Handbook (along with 14 other countries and territories), whilst LP places it with Chile. Indeed regarding the latter, many tourists, who are not clear about where or what Chile is, are surprised when they find Rapanui is attached (since 1888) to it. For them, of course, Chile is attached to Rapanui, a world perception that does not please a number of patriotic citizens of that South American country. Most books about Rapanui will have materials derived from other sources; no one ever has personally researched all areas of the place, whatever they might write. Many as well contain accounts of the visit of the author(s) to the island with some first hand perceptions. This will not be in the manner of a guidebook, but reflections on the actual experience of the place, although there are some exceptions. Two recent books contain little of the author s actual experience of Rapanui, but a good deal of material and interpretation of the work of others: the texts by Fischer and Haun, although they are very different in approach and intent. Fischer s idea is to present a complete picture of Rapanui history, from its human beginnings to the last few months before publication. There is little of Fischer himself in this book: he is at a distance in the library and, occasionally, in the archive. I get a picture of him at a table with books and papers opened at different places, the author taking from one source, checking it with another and, then, putting his gloss on the material. Even though Fischer claims linguistic expertise, I am not convinced by his etymologies of place and personal names: they seem fanciful and serve only to bolster an already existing narrative. They are touches that could have been left out or explained in more detail. Surprisingly for someone who published a decipherment (Fischer 1997) there is little on this topic here: one would have thought it might have been a selling point. Fischer, using the work of many others, as we all do, sketches a fairly complete picture of Rapanui s history with some speculations about its present-day and future. There are some interpretations with which I would not agree but, certainly, Fischer would differ with some of the things I have published. That is natural in any field. If I have a main criticism, it is that there is little archive coverage in this book. Research seems to have been confined almost entirely to published

3 Grant McCall 379 sources, with little reference to Spanish language ones, which are crucial since there is a considerable bibliography in that language published in Chile. As well, of course, historical sources since 1888 are Chilean based; ones previous to that in French and located in France also do not appear to have been consulted. Still, as a comprehensive narrative, it is useful to the general reader and Pacific specialist as a source about the island in English. One gets the feeling, though, that Fischer really has not spent a lot of time on Rapanui itself, but rather in the arm- (or desk-) chair. Haun s book is not at all comprehensive and does not purport to be. In fact, in a way, the book is not about Rapanui at all, but what outsiders have made of the place. It is a post-modern text about images and representations of Rapanui in popular culture and how this has affected some more scholarly understandings. The book abounds with illustrations from various sources showing the large ancestral moai figures. These moai really are what is represented, so her title could have been Inventing the Moai, since that is the illustration that dominates. As well as the megaliths, Haun takes up the mystery and threat of the place in the popular imaginary, bringing in the more recent environmental message element that has been around, as she shows, from early visitor descriptions and depictions of the island. Haun s book is not a history of Rapanui, but a history of the idea of Easter Island. I distinguish between those two names of the place since the former is the name most Islanders use today while the latter in all languages is the one known to outsiders. Sometimes this is distorted to Eastern Island, even on a website of the Chilean Government, which should know better. For the record, there is an Eastern Island in the Pacific: it is located east of Midway Island in the Hawaiian archipelago and is uninhabited. For that matter, there is one other Easter Island on the planet: in Nunavut, at Latitude and Longitude 77º 49' 0" North 77º 49' 59" West! Returning to Haun, though, her book has that same distant feeling to it as Fischer s. I get the impression that the author has spent very little time on the island itself. Given her topic is not the island itself, but perceptions of it, that is not surprising. I do have two criticisms of Haun, though, and perhaps they are not fair since they never were her intention. Firstly, there is little to contextualise the nissograph (image of an island) in Polynesian fantasies that have been around for two centuries or Great South Land ones for longer than that. And, which is more fair, Haun does not contextualise her insights and speculations within the general tiki and exotic South Seas imagery of which the moai such a part; there is nary a tiki bar to be seen or mentioned, even in the more playful section on comic book figures.

4 380 Recent Books about Rapanui Amorós I Gonell, Verdugo-Binimelis, and Pauly can be analysed together in spite of their separate origins and languages of publication: all three are about particular people who have been associated with Rapanui in different ways and they seek to praise the focus of their biography, setting part of the main character s life within their work with Easter Island. Pauly differs from the other two in that her account is of her life and love (with Carlos Huki) on the island. Pauly lives on Rapanui with Carlos, and the two have a kind of rustic encampment outside the main settlement area. The book is a personal account of her Liebe (love) for Karlo, as she names him, and does contain some of her speculations about the island and its main features. For the reader (of German, of course) who ever has dreamed about getting away from it all, this very much is the theme of this book. There have been few autobiographical accounts of outsiders who have settled on Rapanui in the past, but most outsiders have gone there for the short term: Pauly seems intent on staying for quite some time with her partner and his island. Amorós I Gonell was a friend and collaborator with Easter Island enthusiast Antoni Pujador. Pujador had participated in a part tourism and part amateur study of Rapanui in the 1980s and was bitten by the island s bug. He continued to travel to the island whenever he could, working with local islanders on various projects and carrying out his studies, which were collections of various sorts. Sales representative for a Spanish hardware manufacturer, he had the opportunity and money to travel and the interest to do so. The book features photographs of Pujador, standing next to various people associated with the island, such as Thor Heyerdahl. The sueño imposible of the title refers to Pujador s goal of residing on the island itself in retirement; his ashes were scattered there after his death. Amorós I Gonell has written a very sincere tribute to his friend and readers may find some of themselves in Pudador s obsession with all things Rapanui. There are a number of rapanuiphiles, as they call themselves, members of the public who are strongly attracted to the world s most remote place. But few have had such a warm tribute written about them as this book. Verdugo-Binimelis has written of his father s time on Rapanui as a medical doctor and retells anecdotes remembered from that residence. Certainly when his ancestor was there, Rapanui was a lonely Chilean territory, a hardship posting where people went sometimes for adventure and often because there was an extra loading on one s salary to work in such a place. The Rapanui described here had few contacts, and there was only a small expatriate Chilean community, surrounded by Islanders resentfully penned up in their own village. Indeed, during much of Chile s care for Rapanui, the Rapanui not only were not permitted to leave their island, but they had to live within the walls they had been forced to build around their own village: Rapanui

5 Grant McCall 381 could venture out of their settlement (until 1966) only with the permission of the Naval Governor, a scandal of which few in Chile and fewer in the world were aware until the Islanders themselves staged a forceful revolt, eventually gaining the rights of other ordinary Chilean citizens in But this is not part of Verdugo-Binimelis s purpose: he wants to show what life was like for a Chilean middle class person living in such a place far from the comforts of home and in the puzzled predicament of a foreign, colonial environment. Peteuil and the Vargas and Cristino co-authored volume are the last pair in this review of recent publications. Both are serious studies of Rapanui not focusing on personalities or biography: they represent in their different ways 21st century research on Easter Island, each in their own area. Peteuil delves into published material and archive to expose the shameful history of Chile s tutelage of Rapanui. Acquired through a Chilean Naval Captain in 1888 for national glory and personal family profit, it has resulted in neither. The Captain s plans for a sheep ranch (to be managed by his brother) foundered on inexperience and, probably, incompetence, at the task. Chile never realised its ambition to take on the mantle of Spanish dominance of the Pacific largely because they never got around to it. The Chilean concept of the mar presencial that shades a section of Chilean maps of the Pacific, stretching from that long coastline to Easter Island and its claims in Antarctica, is not recognised by the rest of the world: the Chilean Sea remains in the Chilean mind and nowhere else. That did not prevent Chile from behaving as badly as any other colonial power, harassing their natives and imprisoning them in their own village. Until the 1950s, Chile required anyone going to Rapanui to clear customs and immigration in Valparaiso, some 3,700 km distant. It was intended to limit access to Rapanui, and it did just that very effectively for more than the first half of the 20th century. Especially, it closed off access to Polynesia. Peteuil details this sorry history between 1944 and 1958, when there were a series of Rapanui escapes (évadés, in the title) towards Polynesia, the place where Easter Islanders feel still most at home, Chile being a foreign land to most of them. These daring voyages took place with small locally constructed craft and lasted from a month or so to over three months, the longest. The author details eight such escapes; some never were heard from again and presumed by their families to have been lost at sea. Only one of these escapes was in the direction of Chile, and those who took part in that told me that it was a mistake: they just had gotten the direction wrong, although that is not what they said to Chileans authorities and the press at the time. Peteuil s starting point was that she was a schoolteacher in Tahiti and like many from France who work on contracts there she took advantage of the

6 382 Recent Books about Rapanui direct flights from Papeete to Rapanui to visit another part of the Pacific. As she writes, she went to see the moai and discovered the Rapanui. Some of the personages she discusses in her text are the long-serving priest there, Padre Sebastian Englert (not very approving), Thor Heyerdahl (sceptical), and her compatriot Francis Mazière whose book in various editions was the first non-chilean publication to expose the colonial oppression on the island. As well, there is a bit of context and a description of her own travel. From her French sources she does not seem to have used any Chilean Spanish language ones she also describes how this period came to a close when in the mid- 1960s influences from Chile and elsewhere produced a change on Rapanui: there was the revolt (the first since 1914) I mentioned above. Peteuil includes also some commentary from the Rapanui she met during her stay there, and, probably met in Tahiti where over one hundred migrants live today. The book should be translated for its subject matter, but the writing is awkward, sometimes convoluted. There needs also to be Chilean Naval material to complete what happened to those escapees since most were repatriated to Chile. Petreuil is quite correct that the Chilean state was oppressive and unfeeling, that Chilean officials stationed on the island cruel and arrogant. But what she does not seem to know is that there were many Rapanui who escaped their island hiding on the rare ships that came from Chile. All eventually were discovered, but many were taken in, even hidden in, private homes by Chileans, some of whom had official positions in the government and armed forces. Rapanui remember the Chilean little kings and political injustices, but they also remember the kindness and generosity of individual Chileans, who for many years have had an affection for the island and done their best to help its people in various ways. As Rapanui pavos ( stowaways in Chilean Spanish) were discovered on landing in the port of Valparaiso, Chileans, including the late former dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, when he was a young army officer, formed groups to look after the illegally arrived Islanders. With each arrival, articles I have read in the Chilean press railed against the cruelties on Rapanui and urged (to no effect) Government improvements in its facilities and governance. By the late 1950s, Rapanui school children and some adults as their caretakers had been permitted to come to Chile; by the early 1960s, there was a small colony, mainly around the main port of Valparaiso. It was precisely members of that small colony and the school children educated in Chile who returned to cause the revolt that freed their island from the yoke of the Chilean military, as described by Peteuil. Of the books in this review, the one that is a unique scientific work is the archaeological text by Vargas and Cristino. This husband and wife team have a more than thirty-year association with Rapanui and know each part of the

7 Grant McCall 383 island very well. They have lived on the island, presided over excavations, restorations and conducted the most complete survey of sites ever undertaken, published as a huge (both in content and dimensions) Atlas in With their long-time colleague, surveyor and draftsman Izaurieta, they are the founders of the Institute of Easter Island Studies at Chile s oldest (1842) and most prestigious university: the University of Chile. Owing to that long association and residence, they have an intimate contact with many Rapanui who have worked with them over the years. Their knowledge of the island itself is second to none. The 1981 Atlas contained a tantalising series of large-scale maps with points noted, but not identified. The Vargas and Cristino team, separately and together, have published their research extensively in articles and reports, not only about the island with which they mostly are identified, but also on topics in Eastern Polynesia where they have also worked. As well, they have published edited volumes of the work of others and were the conveners of the first Easter Island Studies Conference, held in 1984 on the island itself for the first and, so far, last time. The most recent meeting in that series the VII International Conference on Easter Island and the Pacific Islands happened on Gotland, Sweden, in This new publication deserves to be translated to English, the language of most archaeology on Easter Island. Vargas and Cristino bring together their conclusions about Rapanui s development, including the distribution of sites over the island s surface that they know so well. At some points, they take issue with colleagues who have worked on Rapanui, but mostly they present their own research and chronology of settlement. The book serves as a valuable reference work, summary of their research so far and will be consulted for some time. Since composing this review, there have been other books in various languages mooted and published. One set to appear in 2010 is by José Miguel Ramírez-Aliaga, director of the Centre for Rapa Nui Studies at the University of Valparaiso and long-term resident and student of the island. His book is heavily illustrated with sophisticated graphics and carries the Spanish title: Rapa Nui: El Ombligo del Mundo (Rapanui. The Navel of the Earth), which that has been much used. The publication is financed lavishly by the Santander Bank in Chile and is a publication of the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino (Chilean Museum of Precolombian Art, see precolombino.cl). While the initial publication is to be in Spanish, there is an English language text as well. REFERENCE Steven Roger Fischer 1997, Rongorongo: The Easter Island Script: History, Traditions, Text, Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, 14, Clarendon Press)

8 Ancestral Voices of Mangaia A History of the Ancient Gods and Chiefs Michael P.J. Reilly Ancestral Voices discusses the stories told about the Island s ancient gods and ruling chiefs from its creation origins up to the early mission period in the 19th century. The stories of the gods describe encounters with the domain of tuärangi spirit beings, among whom are included the Island s principal gods, visitors from other Pacific Islands and European explorers such as James Cook. The Island s ruling chiefs controlled access to the economic and spiritual resources of Mangaia. Their stories relate the struggles for dominance over the lands and peoples, and the ritual sacrifices that were performed to ensure recognition of that chiefly rule by the gods. Ancestral Voices transcribes and interprets a series of indigenous historical texts, including proverbs, songs and narratives, as told by generations of Mangaian scholars, notably the tribal historian, Mamae, and by outsider scholars, particularly, the missionary, William Wyatt Gill, and Te Rangi Hiroa. Available from The Polynesian Society, c/- Maori Studies, The University of Auckland, Private Bag Auckland. jps@auckland.ac.nz $NZ40 / $NZ34 for Polynesian Society members (plus postage and packing)