Rupture and renewal in the Polynesian iconoclasm Sissons, Jeffrey (2014) The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 160 pp, USD85.00, hbk, ISBN: 9781782384137.

In this splendid book, Jeffery Sisson returns to an old puzzle: the abrupt overthrow of the indigenous religious order in eastern Polynesia in the early nineteenth century and seemingly complete replacement with a puritanical form of Christianity. The dramatic events in Tahiti and Hawai'i have been interpreted over time as a natural evolution from ‘savagery’ to ‘civilization’; as the culmination of the ‘fatal impact’ of European secular and religious imperialists on vulnerable island populations and as the expression of a ‘Polynesian imperialism’ during which ambitious chiefs secured the alliance of missionaries and their powerful god to forge new kingdoms. Sisson's approach is directly inspired by Marshall Sahlins' influential analyses of the reception of Europeans in terms of a Polynesia ‘mythopraxis’ ‘in which enduring cultural schemas, precoded in myth and tradition’ shaped historical actions (2). Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's practice theory, particularly the concept of habitus, Sisson argues that the core of the religious revolution lay more directly in ritual practices than mythic structures, introducing the concept of ‘rituopraxis’. Ritual practices reflected and reinforced underlying commonsense dispositions of chiefs, priests and commoners. This habitus was at once backwards looking, drawing upon familiar practices, and future oriented, opened to continual innovation as circumstances and ambitions allowed. From the point of view of rituopraxis, the Polynesia iconoclasm appears less a replacement of one religious system with another than a particularly dramatic instantiation of a pre-existing dynamic of ritual rupture and renewal, albeit under revolutionary circumstances leading to irrevocable change. Sissions' analysis rests on a correspondence between the ritual seasonality of eastern Polynesian religion and politics at contact and the early course of Christian conversion, as governed by the position of the Pleiades constellation. The period of Pleiades rising (‘Pleiades above’) ushered in a period of games, feasting and ritual desecration of god images and sacred places as the hierarchical order governed by chiefs and their gods gave temporary place to a kind of Turnerian communitas. During the season of ‘Pleiades below’ as the constellation descended, the hierarchical order was restored: god-images wrapped, ritual spaces restored or built anew, chiefly mana most powerful, and ritual tabus most restrictive. This rhythmic cycle of hierarchical relaxation and restoration contained within itself a revolutionary dynamic as rival chiefs and their associated gods fought for supremacy. This is exactly what happened when Pomare II abandoned 'Oro for Jehovah in his quest to establish himself as paramount chief over Tahiti and Mo'orea. The Pleiades above season of 1815–1816 opened with dramatic ritual challenges to the old order including the burning of god-figures and desecration of marae, challenges that quickly spread to Ra'iatea and Huahine. Sissons suggests that from a Polynesian perspective, the iconoclasm is best understood as a seasonal sacrifice that affirmed Pomare's new ritual authority rather than the adoption of a new Christian order. The Tahitian example appears to have inspired, at least in part, the 1819 overthrow of kapu in Hawai'i and a wave of emulations through the southern Cook Islands in 1823, all in advance of a missionary presence and all during the season of Pleiades above. They were, Sissons argues, ‘connected episodes of a single regional event’ as chiefs in distant islands emulated Pomare's example, accruing power by becoming ‘the ritual centres for new, more centralized politics’ (79). In accordance with the ancient pattern, each episode of iconoclasm was followed by a season of re-establishment of order. Pleiades above was marked in many islands by the building of monumental churches and impositions of stringent Christian tabus. Missionary presses became sites of sacred power, with grammars and prayer books, often wrapped in tapa, taking the place of the former god-images thus ‘materializing a hierarchy that had Pomare and Jehova at the apex’ (109). Yet, to borrow an old anthropological term, churches and marae, laws and tabus, were not simply functional substitutions. The new Christian order, as increasingly enforced by missionaries and their chiefly allies, lacked the seasonality of the Polynesian system. Revelry, including mocking of Christian ways, broke out during seasons of Pleiades above in the late 1820s and 1830s as ever weakening echoes of the traditional habitus gave way to a more uniform ritual practice. This is an enormously rewarding book, marshalling an abundance of historical and ethnographic evidence in support of a compelling argument that the Polynesian iconoclasm, despite outward appearances, was a very ‘traditional’ type of rupture in which missionaries and their god initially played supporting roles. Yet they clearly were actors that in concert with other external forces impinging on the Polynesian world soon brought permanent structural change. Sissons' analysis suggests that these later changes came in response to the differing rituopraxis of the missionary church. This leaves the intriguing question of how Christian teachings, as they became accepted, impacted local world views. It also questions the adequacy of the terms with which anthropologists tend to discuss conversion. It would be hard to find a more dramatic example of continuity in rupture than the Polynesian iconoclasm.

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