The Octopus

Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.
—Edward Said
Culture and Imperialism (1993)

hey are saying terrible things about the anthropologist Pierre Maranda in the Solomon Islands.

The accusations began in the heart of the South Pacific archipelago of Melanesia, just off the coast of Malaita, on an artificial island in the middle of the vast Lau Lagoon. They were passed from shore to shore by canoe, skiff, and freight barge, and by 2002 they had made it across the water to Guadalcanal and Honiara, capital of the Solomon Islands.

I first heard them from a man with images of the sun—marks of the Lau Lagoon clans—carved into the soft flesh of his cheeks. The man was drunk and possessed by a desperate anger. He insisted that the foreigner had stolen his clan’s octopus and was holding it captive in a swimming pool on his own faraway island, which was called Canada. “And now,” he said, “this Maranda is using the magic power of our octopus to make himself rich and famous.”

To understand this accusation it is helpful to look back to a point near the beginning of time. Some Lau historians remember the beginning this way:

The ancestors, who were descended from worms, lived on a mountain above the jungled folds of Malaita. One day, a hero named Golo’au ventured forth from the mountain to discover the promised land, which was not land at all but a vast, reef-protected lagoon fringing the island’s northwest coast. Golo’au and his kin built rafts from bamboo and they paddled out onto that calm water. They pulled hunks of coral rock from the shallow bottom and piled them upon each other until they had created islands on which they could build thatch houses. The Lau raised their children on the water, safe from the headhunters and mosquitoes that populated the bush. Fish filled their nets. Life was good. When the ancestors died, their spirits did not leave the lagoon. Instead, they inhabited the bodies of sharks and birds and, together with other spirit creatures, they were able to protect their descendants with their magic.

For centuries the Lau people honoured the spirits by following their edicts and killing pigs for them. The priests of the Rere clan offered regular blood sacrifices to the speckled octopus that inhabited the reef near the island of Foueda, ensuring the octopus would protect them from the dangers of the sea. “The octopus took care of people,” the man with the scarified cheeks told me. “If they were lost at sea, he would bring them home. If they were drowning, he would save them.” Sometimes the octopus would crawl right up out of the sea into a priest’s canoe to let him know it was time for a sacrifice. It would crawl onto land, too. If you left a basket of food outside your door, the octopus would plunk himself down on top of it and engulf it. He preferred pork to fruit.

The Rere priests had kept the octopus’s name a secret so that lay people, fools, and enemies could not abuse its power. But, said my friend, all that changed half a lifetime ago. That’s when Maranda tricked the priests into giving him the secret names of their ancestors. He used those words to beguile the octopus, lure it through the reefs and away across the Pacific. The creature did not go willingly. It used its power to strike Maranda with a terrible illness and it killed his wife. But still it did not return. The octopus had not been seen near its coral sanctuary in years. Now, with no spirit to protect them, the people of Foueda have become vulnerable, falling victim to mysterious diseases or drowning inexplicably in the empty and unforgiving sea.

ou could call this story a myth, which is to say that historical accuracy is irrelevant to its truths. The archipelago that surrounds the Lau Lagoon has gained a reputation as a veritable Disneyland for anthropologists interested in this kind of narrative. The big guns of early twentieth century anthropology—Bronis?aw Malinowski, W. H. Rivers, Maurice Leenhardt, and others—were convinced by their time in Melanesia that the real function of mythic stories was not to entertain but to serve as vehicles for moral and existential truths. They carried rules for living, values, messages from the ancestors. They told islanders about the most essential parts of themselves. They were metaphors, yes, but they were always sustained by lived experience. And as far as the islanders were concerned, whenever they obeyed the rules set out by their ancestors, they prospered.

But in an era of global cultural convergence, myths can shift as fluidly as the tides that push in and out of the Lau Lagoon. Waves of Christian evangelists have now convinced most Pacific islanders, including the Lau, to trade their guiding myths for those of the Bible. The octopus story—which I heard over and over in the Solomons—signalled a rupture, a brokenness in the spiritual life of the Lau. But nobody was blaming missionaries for the theft of that mythical creature. They were blaming an anthropologist. Who was the foreigner ascribed the role of thief, villain, and myth-breaker, and how had he fallen into this story