Hero, Savage, or Equal? Representations of the Moral Personhood of Pacific Islanders in Hollywood Movies

Abstract

In Whale Rider, the protagonist, a contemporary senior Maori chief, hears unusual, plaintive cries coming from the beach just below his house. A pod of whales has beached itself on the foreshore and we then see him standing by one of the animals asking in Maori, rather than English, "Who is to blame?" That is, he understands the alarming scene in vernacular forms of moral causation, which is to say, in sociocentric, or local, terms. Somebody must be at fault. Now, of course, Durkheim (1912; see also M.
Douglas 1979) would have agreed: totemism differentiates sacred from profane categories of experience, categories which must be kept separate, lest the former infect the latter. The sacred is moral, and the moral arises from, and is synonymous with, nothing other than collective forms of the social. Asocial concepts of causation may enter peoples' understanding of illness
and misfortune, but ultimate cause is determinate; it stems from local violation (see also Evans-Pritchard 1976). Now Fortes (1962) would later add an important refinement to this selfsame sociology of ethical order. Moral personhood is a status that may be ritually conferred or withheld in whole or in part by society (see also Read 1955). Thus the Maori chief in Whale Rider
desperately seeks a successor, a firstborn male heir and disqualifies his granddaughter because ofher gender.