Wrong-headed
by Chantel Tattoli
[ places - june 10 ]
Journalist Lewis Grossberger's nutshell is the best one: "That great menacing Easter Island face," he said. It was in an article for New York Magazine published in 1980 about Lee Marvin. It was actually Grossberger's likening of Marvin (too true), but doesn't that reference speak to the impression the Maoi statues have made?
Science, oftenest pretending to be value-neutral, isn't disconnected from zeitgeist at all - science is à la mode, taking its cue from popular culture and cueing popular culture in turn. And so, I speculate that the tiki-culture which came to a head in the 1950s and 60s spurred scholarly interest in Easter Island. The suburban Baby Boomers were in need of escapism, and they ate that "primitive"/exotic stuff up. It was the mid-century: A heyday for Martin Denny and Gene Rains, when the Mafia frequented the Bamboo Lounge; the golden age of decanters atop credenzas against wood veneer walls, when men and women guzzled gimlets and highballs, oft from tiki mugs. It helped, too, that Hawaii was admitted as a state in 1959.
I recently found a copy of Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific By Raft on my grandparents' shelf. The nonfictional book, first published in 1950, recounted Thor Heyerdahl's adventure to test the theory that pre-Columbian people had voyaged from South America to settle Polynesia. They built a historical balsa raft and set out from Peru on April 28, 1947.
"Bengt," [Heyerdahl] said, pushing away the green parrot that wanted to perch on the logbook, "can you tell me how the hell we came to be doing this?"
Goethe sank down under the red-gold beard.
"The devil I do; you know best yourself. It was your damned idea, but I think it's grand."
On August 7, 1947 the Scandinavian crew of six (five Norwegians and a Swede) ran onto a reef off one of the Tuamotu Islands, in Polynesia. Everybody made land and, in one of the first trials in experimental archaeology, they had demonstrated the feasibility of South American-Polynesian exchange. (NB. All the preferred models these days indicate expansion from Southeast Asia, not the Americas.) The book was a bestseller, believe it or not, enjoying twenty-five printings by 1969 - everything island was all the rage.
It was during this time that Easter Island naturally became the darling of much archaeological research. Easter Island with its square jawlines and jutting chins, 887 of them to be exact. About a quarter of those are lined up along the island's coastline; the others never left the quarry or are bestrewn, presumably en route to coastal destinations. When Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen located the island in 1722, I can only imagine his manner apposite these startling monolithic statues. At least, I like to do so. Reportedly there were 2,000-3,000 natives too, who indicated this as their first run-in with Europeans. But the imagery - Roggeveen in breeches, locking eyes with the stern volcanic Maoi - it's perhaps more heady (pun intended).
Neither Heyerdahl nor Swiss writer Erich von Däniken (big in the 60s) believed that the Eastern Islanders were even Polynesian. How could that primal type, they asked, engineer the incredible Maoi? Some of them stood at 65 feet, no. Heyerdahl thought advanced Native Americans had peopled Easter Island, themselves descendants from the Old World, while von Däniken imaginatively attributed the Maoi to paleocontact, meaning extraterrestrial astronauts. Heyerdahl is become a smug Viking on this note, and von Däniken a head case (no pun intended), and both are mentionably ethnocentric.
Easter Island, properly Rapa Nui, was one of my childhood ensorcellments. I also labored the whole of recess, painstakingly unearthing baby dinosaur femurs (aka trees roots) with brush tools (aka bird feathers); was an Atlantis truther; and a dilettante Greek mythologist. Needless to say, I believed word-for-word what I'd read in my ancient history books for children, and it was what the adults were peddling too: Easter Island as a cautionary tale of environmental degradation, a cause célèbre of imprudent natives outstripping their island's natural resources and spelling the end of their neat civilization.
Guns, Germs, and Steel author Jared Diamond - whom other (real) anthropologists don't like for his facile, albeit best-selling, explanations - denotes the slant we all know and love:
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island, isolated in the Pacific Ocean - once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own (world) we won't be able to get help.
(And incidentally, Diamond accredits his interest in Easter to his reading of Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki.) This is the Darwinian view of islands as natural laboratories, or microcosms, which are obviously bellwethers and which, in turn, are appreciably minatory. As Diamond has said, "My main hope for my sons' generation is that we may now choose to learn from the fate of societies like Easter's."
It's poignant to be sure, but probably as untrue. Easter Island is like Don Quixote, whose bare bones everyone can parrot in you-know tones. But who's actually read that elephantine text? Mostly we know just enough to make a half-ass windmill analogy from. Like that, Easter Island is taken for granted. It's axiomatic, we're assured - the islanders' ecological footprint was too big, and thus undid themselves.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, says archaeologist Paul Rainbird:
This story of self-induced ecodisaster and consequent self-destruction of a Polynesian island society continues to provide the easy and uncomplicated shorthand for explaining the so-called cultural devolution of Rapa Nui society.
Having reassessed the ream of research on Easter Island, Rainbird wants to put the story straight. In brief: it apparently was not the islanders' fault; it was "the impact of aliens," rather, the arrival of Europeans and the diseases, invasive species, and material culture they brought with them, which destabilized and ultimately wrecked little Rapa Nui. The decades and centuries after European contact saw the indigenes decimated by illness and slavery, and the flora destroyed by the introduction of browsing animals, and so it went.
Interestingly enough, most of the data to disprove the orthodox model was always there, just downplayed. Seems that opinions on Rapa Nui across the historical stretch were not homogenous, but the "'Quantitative Revolution' or 'New Geography' of the 1960s [..] pushed positivism and general models to the fore at the expense of different interpretations." The arrival of postmodernism is to thank for opening up the discussion, letting the discounted explanations have their say at the round table. It's funny that so many of the most interesting discoveries are occurring at sites everyone figured they knew like the back of their hand. Often, as in the case with Rapa Nui, evidence has long-existed to redirect discourse, but that evidence must be dug up (again).
So what's the problem with touting a timely, finger-wagging story about self-induced eco-disaster? The problem is that we are billing it as history, and that's not alright. We can keep our beloved parable, only we must update it: Once, there was a little island in the middle of an ocean with no other islands nearby. The island didn't have much in the way of natural resources, but over the course of many, many years the islanders made do, living pretty well within their means. In fact, they were okay, until people from another part of the world showed up and accidentally messed up the delicate balance. That's how it happens. We cannot afford to mess up the balance and go spiraling out of control, past the point of possible recovery. It could be a pop-up book. And maybe the Maoi should narrate it.
