This review of Haun's excellent book appeared in the Journal "Pacific Affairs" (2009) and is written by one of the world's experts on Easter Island, Professor Terry Hunt of the University of Hawai'i
Beverley Haun's Inventing Easter Island' provides a timely and
perceptively critical analysis of the Euro-American colonial
narratives--"shaped truths"--constructed to make sense, at least for
outsiders, of the nature of this famous island. These "shaped truths"
engendered in colonial encounters live on in modern thinking, both
popular and academic, yet as critical examination and modern research
reveal, many are little more than myths. Haun takes a decidedly
postmodern perspective; one she describes among other adjectives as
"postcolonial." Her goals include deconstructing historical and
contemporary narratives for Easter Island (Rapa Nui), developing a new
postcolonial consciousness, and shaping a hopeful future (23) that
returns the island's narrative of history and identity to the Native
Rapanui.
As Haun recounts in her introduction, Rapa Nui has both a dynamic,
sometimes enigmatic pre-contact history, and an incredibly tragic,
downright cruel colonial history. Today some scholars conflate the
so-called mystery of the Rapanui's pre-contact monumentality with the
island's catastrophic post-contact history of disease, slave-trading,
theft and imprisonment. Thus, today we endure the narrative of an
island people who destroyed their environment, and as a consequence,
destroyed themselves. Haun's analysis will shed critical light on such
contemporary, indeed politicized narratives, including some
perpetuated by academic writers with little if any basis in
archaeological or historical evidence.
Haun analyzes "forces at play" that shaped the European cultural
context of their experience with people of the Pacific and elsewhere
in their global imperial pursuits. Her analysis, like Anne Salmond's
Two Worlds (Viking, 1991) detailing European-Maori interactions,
places Europeans in an essential critical, historical and ethnographic
context.
Chronicling the first European encounters, Haun offers a detailed
account of Dutch journals. There are two salient points: the Dutch
narrative initiates a dividing process, between the people and their
island, or between the Rapanui descendents and their history. For
example, Roggeveen, it seems, downplayed the impressiveness of the
moai (monumental statues); to acknowledge such accomplishments would
threaten Eurocentric notions of superiority. Haun writes that this
process continues today. I concur. Second, she notes a disturbing
selective use of elements in early texts in contemporary accounts,
where scholars cite what supports their views, and omit what does not.
The Spanish arrived in 1770 with a mandate to claim new lands for the
Empire. Haun illustrates these colonial interests in Spanish notions
of "domesticating" islanders with conversion to Christianity, yielding
a pliable native workforce and land for productive exploitation,
anticipating the South American slave raids of Rapa Nui. The Spanish
visit brought significant impacts, including perhaps devastating
epidemic Old World diseases for which the Rapanui had no natural
immunity. Perhaps this catastrophe set the stage for the dismal
impressions formed by the English (in 1774) and the French (in 1786)
who arrived following the Spanish, and with different intentions. Haun
is among only a handful of scholars who recognizes how this likely
chronicle of events, including disease and depopulation, helped to
shape and distort historical impressions.
Finally, Haun outlines how eighteenth-century imagery and "shaped
truths" persist in popular and academic narratives for Rapa Nui today.
Representations in popular culture and impressions of modern tourists
reproduce the "mystery" and effective separation of today's Rapanui
descendents from their moai-making ancestors. And from the early
impressions coupled with some contemporary field research come the
myths of people who committed "ecological suicide." In recent popular
accounts such as Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to
Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2005) and Ronald Wright's A Short History of
Progress (Anansi, 2005), the Rapanui, as Haun writes, "have been
resuscitated only to become representatives of the rest of the earth's
population heading into self-destruction" (254). Indeed, much of the
doomsday metaphor of "ecocide" rests on flimsy interpretations of
selected archaeological, palaeo-ecological, or oral historical
referents.
Beverley Haun provides a useful critique at an important juncture in
our understanding of what happened on this Polynesian island. She
correctly points out that "it is the very instability of the invented
Easter Island that allows it to be transformed into different versions
to suit the zeitgeist of the time" (254). As an archaeologist working
on Rapa Nui, I would add that her critique can be extended to much of
the narrative constructed for prehistory as well. It has been shaped
by some of the same historical threads she identifies, particularly as
the early impressions are pushed back in time to loosely interpret the
sometimes mute stones of archaeology. Yet, in contrast to the ultimate
relativism of some postmodern arguments (where all knowledge is
subjective), I envision a competing scientific narrative that now
challenges the colonial invention of Easter Island. In its place
"postcolonial knowledge" can be constructed on the critical approach
and empirical standards that embody scientific research. Bad "science"
does not negate the value of science in the pursuit of knowledge, but
instead demands critical reassessments. Empirical standards for
archaeological (and sometimes historical) questions also offer the
potential to build "postcolonial" knowledge and bring empowerment to
Rapanui people in reclaiming their history.
TERRY L. HUNT
University of Hawai'i Manoa, Honolulu, USA
