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From Post to Pillar

God-Houses and Social Fields in Nineteenth-Century Rarotonga

Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

The establishment of Christianity in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, was as much a material process of indigenization as it was a local appropriation of foreign ideas. In this article I argue that the introduction of Christianity to Rarotonga in the 1820s entailed the creation of two competing social fields, one materialized through churches and the other materialized through marae (ceremonial enclosures with god-houses in which were stored wrapped wooden poles, representing divine ancestors). The argument for regarding churches and marae as materializations of social relations is developed against Gell's analysis, in Art and Agency, of Maori meeting houses in which he proposes that we approach such structures as indexes of agency.

Key Words: Cook Islands • materialization • missionaries • social fields

Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1, 47-63 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1359183507074561


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