Tapu, Mana and the Māori Body: A Complete Guide

How to read this text

You need no prior knowledge. Every term is explained the first time it appears.

Four honest notes before we start

First: it is not one people

“Māori” is a collective term for over a hundred iwi — tribes with their own histories, their own variants of the myths, and in some cases real doctrinal differences.

The word māori itself means “ordinary, normal”, and was used as an ethnonym only after contact — when a word was needed to distinguish the locals from the newcomers.

Where traditions differ in substance, this guide says so.

Second: the sources have an unusual property

Māori adopted writing with remarkable speed. Within a few decades of its introduction in the 1830s, literacy was very high — and they wrote themselves: letters, newspapers, testimony in land courts, genealogical notebooks.

This is rare and valuable.

And at the same time: a portion of the material in circulation as “classical” passed through European editorship in the early 20th century, and is seriously disputed (chapter 4). This guide marks where.

Third: part of the knowledge is explicitly restricted

Some things are tapu — and this is not metaphor, it is the central concept of the text (chapter 5).

This guide describes; it does not quote. You will not find here karakia texts, specific iwi genealogies, or ritual details that belong to specific people.

Fourth: it is living and institutionally active

Approximately 900,000 people identify as Māori in New Zealand — about one in six of the population — and tens of thousands more in Australia.

The language has been official since 1987. There is a standing tribunal for breaches of the Treaty. And two rivers and a mountain are, in New Zealand law, legal persons (chapter 21).

We are not writing about something that ended. We are writing about something that legislates.

A short introduction to Māori thought, for the reader who is new

Before any of the technical material lands, it helps to have five things in mind. If you already know them, skip to the Contents.

Where this comes from, in time and place

Māori ancestors arrived in Aotearoa / New Zealand from eastern Polynesia, in multiple voyages, between approximately 1250 and 1350 CE. (The older “Great Fleet” narrative of a single organised arrival is no longer current; see chapter 4.)

Contact with Europeans begins intermittently with Tasman (1642), opens with Cook (1769), and intensifies through the first half of the 19th century. The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, between the British Crown and over 500 Māori chiefs. The two language versions of the Treaty differ in a way that matters, and this is still legally live.

The 19th and 20th centuries brought epidemics, land wars, massive land loss, suppression of language and healers (chapter 19), and a near-collapse of Māori society. The late 20th century brought the recovery described in Part E.

Today there are approximately 1 million Māori in New Zealand and across the Tasman, with a vigorous political, legal and institutional presence.

There is no “the” Māori tradition

The guide uses “Māori” where generalisation is warranted, and names specific iwi where it matters. Some of the most-cited iwi in this guide:

• Ngāti Raukawa — central North Island; the hau text that reached Marcel Mauss (chapter 9) came from here.
• Whanganui — “I am the river” is theirs (chapter 21).
• Tūhoe — people of the Te Urewera forests; granted the first legal personhood (chapter 21).
• Ngāti Toa — the “Ka Mate” haka is theirs (chapter 23).

What kind of body-knowledge this is

The body material in this guide comes from four kinds of source:

• 19th-century Māori writing in te reo Māori — letters, newspapers, land-court testimony, genealogical notebooks. Primary and under-used.
• Early-20th-century ethnography — valuable but to be read with caution, since much of it passed through European editing (chapter 4).
• Contemporary Māori scholarship — above all Mason Durie, Hirini Moko Mead, Cleve Barlow, Rangimarie Rose Pere, Ranginui Walker.
• New Zealand law and public policy — because much of what elsewhere is “tradition” is here current statute (chapters 15, 17, 20, 21).

What this material is not

It is not pre-contact “pure” tradition. Māori society has been in continuous contact with the European world for over two centuries, and the tradition described here has absorbed, resisted and reshaped that contact.

It is not a unified doctrine. Iwi differ. Scholars differ. Where they do, the guide says so.

It is not a menu for cultural borrowing. Chapter 23 is dedicated to this.

It is not a dead tradition under threat. It is a living tradition that writes statute.

A word on names

The orthography is settled. The guide uses the macron throughout, with original iwi names and the names of concepts, since the macron carries meaning. Where a term has entered English (taboo from tapu, mana as such), the guide uses the Māori form in context and the English only where it is the loan being discussed.