Polynesians

Polynesian is a heading rather than a religion, and the atlas records that plainly. It covers peoples spread across a triangle running from Hawaii to Aotearoa New Zealand to Rapa Nui, related by descent and by language but politically separate for centuries, and no custodian could consent on behalf of the rest of them.

What recurs across the group is a vocabulary. Mana is effective power, held by persons, places and objects, and capable of being increased or lost. Tapu, the word English took as taboo, is restriction, the state of being set apart and requiring care, and its opposite is the ordinary or released state. Together they order who may touch what, who may eat with whom, and what must be done to lift a restriction once it is in place.

Names recur as well, although not always the same stories with them. Tangaroa, Tane, Tu and Rongo appear across the region, becoming Kanaloa, Kane, Ku and Lono in Hawaiian, and the trickster Maui, who fishes up islands and slows the sun, is known almost everywhere. Because the accounts belong to particular peoples and are held by them, the atlas describes the shared framework here and treats the specific traditions under the peoples who hold them, rather than merging them into a composite that belongs to nobody.

The settlement of the Pacific is one of the great feats of navigation, and its explanation was for a long time argued over by people who did not ask the navigators. Nineteenth and twentieth century theories ranged from deliberate voyaging to accidental drift, and Thor Heyerdahl's raft expedition of 1947 argued for settlement from South America, a thesis the linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence does not support.

The answer came from doing it. The Polynesian Voyaging Society built Hokulea, a double hulled canoe on traditional lines, and in 1976 sailed her from Hawaii to Tahiti with the Micronesian navigator Mau Piailug guiding her without instruments, reading stars, swells, wind and birds. The voyage settled the question of capability and began a revival of wayfinding that has since carried Hokulea around the world and trained navigators across the region.

The religious dimension is not incidental to that. Voyaging knowledge was held by specialists, was taught within families, and carried the same weight of restriction as other held learning. The revival has run alongside language revitalisation, the reassertion of land claims and the reopening of ceremonial centres. Niko Besnier's work on gender liminality in the region documents another respect in which Polynesian social categories were flattened by outside observers and are now being reasserted.