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Beyond Betrayal: Trouble in the Promised Land—Restoring the Mission to Maori

taming and training wild songbirds like the tui (109–11), or in the adoption of the nocturnal, flightless and unprepossessing kiwi as a national ‘totem animal’ (11). Secondly, Maori cultural formations and particular patterns of resource use and management have had a determining effect. Whether from kahu kuri to rua manu (dog fur and feathered cloaks, respectively, worn as markers of prestige) (168), to ‘big fish tales’ that figure as origin stories (76), to artistic conventions representing animals in ‘a timeless realm devoid of landscape features’ (172), Maori interactions with non-human animals were rich, multiple, and have persisted and proliferated since the arrival of Europeans. Finally, the particular experience of British colonialism shaped, and continues to shape, the form of human–animal interactions in New Zealand. The logic of ‘pastoral colonialism’ (44) that depended on imported ideologies of use, representation and affection was part of a broader imperial phenomenon, but no less formed by its immediate context, especially existing Maori– animal patterns of interaction. Together, the authors suggest, these have produced unique ‘“Aotearoan” understandings of indigeneity, identity, location and settlement’ (109) that have, in turn, profoundly shaped the nature of local human–animal interactions in the period since 1800. While the authors find much that is exceptional in this story, they are careful always to situate Aotearoa New Zealand’s experience in broader context: mythologising the moa in the nineteenth century, for instance, took place in the context of both ‘local and global developments in science and politics’ (10), while the figuring of cetacean intelligence in both Maori and Pakeha literature in the 1980s ‘expresses both a local structure of feeling and a global one’ (90). Distinctly ‘Aotearoan’ perspectives formed and evolved in ‘complex and intimate exchanges’ (109) with broader patterns of human–animal relations, the latter distinguished as essentially Western phenomena. Such tensions in scale are just one of the several contradictions that deliberately mark the project. The authors focus their attention on the conflicts and incongruities that trouble, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, the complacent assumptions New Zealanders hold with respect to non-human animals. Rather than turn away from the jarring juxtaposition of affection and consumption, for instance, in Maori relationships to kune kune in the nineteenth century, where pigs were pets and playmates before they were pork (123–6), or in Pakeha narratives about childhoods spent on the farm, in which the family pet lamb often ended up on the dinner table (236–8), the authors dwell on these points of discomfort, using them to bring to light precisely those unconscious assumptions that make any attitude towards non-human animals necessarily ‘incomplete and partisan’ (2). In the spirit of the growing academic field of human-animal studies, A New Zealand Book of Beasts is staunchly interdisciplinary. The authors hail from diverse academic backgrounds in sociology, English literature, and art and architectural history, and unusually for a collaborative project on this scale, the volume is coauthored rather than edited. Each author takes primary authorship of one of the book’s four parts (Potts authors two), and yet the tone, quality and analytic focus remain consistent throughout, even where the topic of study and evidentiary bases (which range from works of literature, to artistic representations, to surveys conducted with ‘cruelty-free consumers’ (226)) differ. Such a breadth of study lends credence to the authors’ claim to be ‘opening the book of our culture’ (5) to their readers, and journeying with them into this modern bestiary will be a profit and pleasure for generalists in the humanities and specialists in human-animal studies alike.