Hermeneutics and the culture of birds: the environmental allegory of ‘easter island’

Abstract

It has become commonplace to interpret ‘Easter Island’ in terms of an environmental allegory, a Malthusian morality tale of the consequences of over-exploitation of limited natural resources. There are, however, ethical dangers in treating places and peoples allegorically, as moralized means (lessons) to satisfy others’ edificatory ends. Allegory reductively appropriates the past, presenting a specific interpretation as ‘given’ (fixed) and exemplary, wrongly suggesting that meanings and morals, like islands, are there to be ‘discovered’ ready-formed. Gadamer's hermeneutics suggests an alternative understanding which expresses something of the ethical ambiguities involved in giving meaning to the environmental history of Easter Island.

Notes

 Form of life is here used in the sense of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. See Wittgenstein (1981).

 There may be, as Derrida (1992) argues, a paradox insofar as this ‘duty’, if recognized as such by either giver or gifted, seems to risk annuling the gift since it too implies the necessity of a contractual obligation and a symbolic exchange in some negative form. But as Derrida also argues, although there may be a limit to what can be truly given, the ethical importance of giving is not thereby diminished.

 Father Sebastian Englert (1970), who dates the sealer's visit as 1805, states that the islanders’ own oral history, as heard by himself, records that one of the captives, a man of the family Vaka Tuku Onge, actually survived and managed to swam back to the island.

 Although miraculously Thor Heyerdahl's expedition found one surviving tree that later perished. The seeds they collected from this tree germinated in botanical gardens in Norway and some have now been reintroduced.

 Although Rapa Nui at least says something of the island's relations to its broader locality and emphasizes its original cultural ties with Polynesia.