a bonobo humanity?

a Maori meeting-gate, entrance to a Pa (fortified village). the figure on the left is female, with chin tattoo

Canto: So we spent time at the Ibis Hotel, Hamilton, NZ, which is owned and run by a Maori organisation. Many but not all the staff were Maoris – of course I can’t always tell who is Maori and who isn’t, and I’m ignorant of what precisely constitutes being a Maori (or an Australian Aborigine, or a native American, or a Jew, or an Arab, or a Kurd, or a Romany etc etc etc) – and they were unfailingly friendly and helpful. Many of the guests, too, or at least people milling around at the reception and bar/dining area, appeared to be Maori, including the occasional bloke with facial tattoos associated with Maori culture.

Jacinta: Presumably you didn’t have any doubt that they were Maoris. So I know you’re not a big fan of the tattoo fashion that’s everywhere these days.

Canto: No, this has been a trend for way over twenty years now and I thought it would pass but it seems to have intensified. But as with all things designed or pictorial, there’s the crass and the clever, the subtle and the silly, the banal and the truly tragic…

Jacinta: Okay, but the Maori tattoos that we’ve seen here, in the Ibis and elsewhere, these apparently deeply culturally significant tattoos of Maori identification, what do you think of them? Do you dare to voice an opinion?

Canto: Well I’ll give voice to an observation. I’ve never seen a woman with those kinds of tattoos.

Jacinta: Would you be happier if you saw women with them?

Canto: Not happier. As you’ve said, I’ve never been and never will be a big fan of tattoos – a fact of no major significance of course. Nobody needs to pay the slightest attention to me on these matters. But I like the raw, unadorned human body, the product of many hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. It would be sacrilege to tattoo a leopard, or a lion, or an antelope – their bodies are magnificent evolutionary products…

Jacinta: But you miss the point. Those animals don’t tattoo themselves. We tattoo ourselves. Because we can. That’s our magnificent evolutionary product, a brain that can transform our bodies, not to mention our planet.

Canto: Okay, I grant that, but I still object to tattoos on aesthetic grounds. I just think they’re mostly fugly. And as you know I hate trendiness and groupthink.

Jacinta: Okay, let’s get back to Maori tattoos and women. As you know, women in general are getting tattoos at a greater rate than men, and, yes, Maori women are getting tattoos in increasing numbers. Sacred chin tattoos – so, different from the blokes.

Canto: Hmmm, well as you know, I’ve always been more comfortable with the profane than the sacred…

Jacinta: Well, ‘sacred’ sounds a bit heavy; they seem to be ‘belongingness’ tattoos, but that sounds a bit wishy-washy. In any case there’s a whole history behind Maori ‘skin art’ or Kiri Tuhi…

Canto: Which sounds to be strictly regulated on gender lines – those aggressive ‘warrior’ facial tats for men and the more restrained ones for subordinate women.

Jacinta: Maybe. You’re worried about ‘heavy culture’ aren’t you?

Canto: Heavy and patriarchal culture, which I’ve always been pretty down on. I prefer nature over culture, to be simplistic about it. Or rather, I prefer a culture which questions itself, so deeply as to undermine itself, usually through understanding the nature of culture. It’s binding and blinding nature.

Jacinta: Very good. So maybe we should look at Maori culture in particular, and the way it binds and blinds.

Canto: So what about chin tattoos? Are they for women only?

Jacinta: Well the traditional Maori tattoos are called Ta Moko, and they’re carved into the skin with chisels rather than drawn with skin-puncturing needles. Every tattoo is individualised, and they represent family and tribal history, status and the like.

Canto: You can’t get more heavily cultural than that, to have your cultural pedigree, such as it is, inscribed on your face. I myself haven’t the slightest awareness of my cultural pedigree and I want to keep it that way. Does that make me a pariah?

Jacinta: It makes you just another feature of life’s rich tapestry. Women were traditionally tattooed only on the chin, around the mouth and sometimes the nostrils. All this tattooing faded for a while in the nineteenth century, with increasing assimilation pressures, many of them internalised, but it’s come back with a vengeance with renewed emphasis on native pride and such.

Canto: Hmmmm. I presume Maori culture was very patriarchal? Once were warriors and all that?

Jacinta: Yes, a warrior culture but strongly influenced and supported by women, in maintaining the stories of an oral culture, and in the upbringing of children. The Maori argue that, at the time of the ‘white invasion’, Maori women generally had more status in their society than white women had in theirs. They retained their own names after marriage, they dressed similarly to men, and their children didn’t consider their maternal kinship group as less important than the paternal. I presume the chiefs were male, but overall, Maori culture was no more patriarchal, historically, than our own.

Canto: Yes, I have to say they all look pretty scarily macho, male and female, but they turn out to be so nice and friendly.

Jacinta: It’s good for business. Yes I haven’t seen too many gracile Maoris, they all seem to belong to the robusta domain. Maybe it’s the diet.

Canto: The genes, more likely. Influenced by diet. Kumera’s a pretty robust vegetable.

Jacinta: You are what you eat? But to get back to culture and its binding and blinding, it’s perhaps a good thing that a culture can bind people in a shared history and a collective memory, even if memory often plays false, but one of the problems is that it blinkers them to other connections, other perspectives on the world…

Canto: And it’s often backward-facing…

Jacinta: And it has a reifying effect, making these connections to a shared history – which is often mythical – more real than real, so that a ‘Maori perspective’ becomes entrenched and valorised above a collective, largely progressive, open-ended, human perspective.

Canto: The problem of identity politics. It’s actually a difficult one for those cultures that feel themselves under the gun – oppressed, minority… I’ve said that I don’t really care about my Scottish-Australian cultural pedigree – or is it mongrel-ness – but I suppose it’s because I belong to the dominant culture; white, anglo-saxon and increasingly atheist. That culture is so broad and deep that, although you can easily lose your way in it, you’re rarely ever challenged for being a part of it.

Jacinta: And as part of this dominant culture we get to look at these minority cultures – which of course add to that all-embracing diversity we’re so proud of – with fascination, with condescension, with alarm, with disgust, with starry eyes, with guilt, with humour, with exasperation, with a mixture of some or all of these feelings or impulses, without being called out for it in any serious way.

Canto: But aren’t we being called out for having the wrong attitudes? Isn’t that what political correctness is all about?

Jacinta: Well, political correctness is a fascinating thing, and not such a bad thing. It’s a kind of unspoken, largely unconscious vigilante force to avoid hurt – to old people, fat people, gay people, disabled people, people who look, dress or act differently (in a more or less harmless way) from the norm. So we internalise our criticisms and anxieties, we restrict them to our internal monologues, or to conversations with like-minded others, and we never quite know whether this is civilised or cowardly behaviour.

Canto: It certainly helps us to get along.

Jacinta: Well, more than that, I mean it doesn’t just help us to avoid unnecessary battles, it helps us to reflect on first impressions, to question them, to challenge them, to deepen them. There’s more to political correctness than meets the eye.

Canto: You mean we shouldn’t judge political correctness by first impressions…

Jacinta: Which takes us back to Maori culture. We’ve not just seen the Maoris running our hotel in a professional and friendly way, we’ve been to a traditional Maori ceremony, somewhat ‘westernised’ for us tourists, and we’ve watched their men and women perform for us, in mock-warrior and lyrical mode, with dignity humour and a lot of tolerance for the goggle-eyed, muttering global trade of people shuffling through and holding up their mobile phones and clicking distractingly, while obscuring the view of we polite, politically correct watchers, pathetically torn between appreciating the Maori scenes on the stage, and being irritated at those around us who weren’t being as politically correct as ourselves…

Jacinta: That’s modern life, in the ‘first world’….