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Anthropology and Religion

Arts and Crafts

page 92

Arts and Crafts

Changes were also effected in the field of material culture. The scanty apparel suited to a tropical climate offended the missionary ideas of decency. The converts attempted to copy their teachers by substituting white bark cloth for the brown colored material hitherto worn, and later a demand for textile cloth was created. The missionaries carried a stock of cloth for their own needs and for trade purposes. The native women, on acquiring textiles, masked their beautiful figures in unsightly garments made on the pattern of nightshirts and termed "Mother Hubbards." The product of Western looms supplanted the native material, and the manufacture of bark cloth became a neglected and, ultimately, a forgotten craft. It is the irony of fate that, at the present time, civilized people in scantiness of attire have literally outstripped the natives.

A change in houses also took place. The white missionaries introduced a type of architecture that had been evolved in a temperate climate to keep out the cold. The native walls of upright stakes that allowed ventilation through the interstices were replaced by thick walls of wattled wood plastered with lime obtained from coral. The single-roomed house was supplanted by dwellings divided into many apartments page 93adorned with Venetian blinds, but even the windows did not give such free ventilation as the native houses. When the tubercle bacillus was introduced by Europeans, the lime-walled houses retained the bacilli far more than did the open native houses.

The new types of houses were grouped on either side of a street in the neighborhood of a church. This entirely new arrangement was inaugurated by the missionaries in order that their converts could be near the church and the missionary school. The scattered inland house sites near the cultivations were deserted, and the population was grouped into villages for the first time.

The changes that occurred in the island of Mangaia are an example of what occurred in the various island groups throughout Polynesia. The missionaries, naturally enough, could not introduce their religion without carrying with it the foreign culture of which Christianity formed a part. Though traders and government officials have aided some of the changes, the most potent factor in the destruction of the old-time native culture was the death of the Polynesian gods.