“Ko te hau tēnā o tō taonga…”: The words of Ranapiri on the spirit of gift exchange and economy

Abstract

In the 1890s, a dialogical exchange of ideas of people and cultures started with Tāmati Ranapiri, a Māori scholar of Aotearoa New Zealand, and Elsdon Best, an Anglo-New Zealand ethnographer. Their exchange of letters, in Māori and English, impacted profoundly on the nascent discipline of sociology, and the spirit of the gift in rituals of gift exchange. This paper traces an extraordinary cross-cultural Pacific-Europe dialogue that led to Māori concepts of reciprocity being enshrined by French sociologist Marcel Mauss. According to Mauss’s sociology, exchange theory and gift exchange present themselves in the form of a set of propositions: that a gift economy is animated by hau ‘the spirit of the gift’; that exchange is a fundamental social system; that gift exchange is a prior economic system; the effect of the spirit of the gift creates an indissoluble bond between persons engaged in the exchange; and that it was Anglo-Western societies who were responsible for the separation of persons and things. The propositions are particularly informed by Māori thinking as articulated by Ranapiri, whose texts reflect the metaphysics of a spiritual world of the South Pacific Islands. By returning to the primary sources in Māori language, I find Best both mistranslated and misinterpreted the hermeneutics of Ranapiri. In effect, Best reduced Māori metaphysics to a secular materialist’s explanation, thus reflecting his Anglo-world view more than that of Māori. Ultimately, Ranapiri articulates a Māori notion of economy described elsewhere as an economy of mana, or economy of affection, which exists to maintain the four well-beings of Māori and the Pacific—spiritual, environmental, kinship and economic.