In New Zealand, where European sailors had planted potatoes in the 1770s, the tubers were quickly adopted into Māori agriculture both as a foodstuff and trade good. As a food they supplemented sweet potatoes but unlike the sweet potato, which was embedded in a web of ritual restrictions governing cultivation, the newly arrived American potato was free of such prohibitions. They proved a popular addition to village agriculture, and were consumed in huge quantities at the hui or festive gatherings that punctuated Māori life. Our object image shows a Māori man named Watikini eating a potato. The Scottish naval officer who sketched his portrait noted that he cleaned the plate. Together with pigs, potatoes were used as a currency when trading with Europeans for muskets and other goods. By the early 19th century, Māori farmers were growing the plant on a commercial scale for this purpose.
POTATOES AMONG THE MAORI
J. C. Crawford, Watikini Eating Potato, pencil and ink drawing, 1861 (courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, E-041-046).
Rebecca Earle
Further reading
- Earle, R. (2019) Potato (London: Bloomsbury). Harrison, R. (1989) Signs, Songs and Memory in the Andes (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press).
- International Year of the Potato (2008), ‘Why potato?’, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, http://www.fao.org/ potato-2008/en/aboutiyp/index.html (accessed on 25 May 2018).
- Lloyd, D. (2007) ‘The political economy of the potato’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 29 (2–3): 311–35.
- Murra, J. (1960) ‘Rite and crop in the Inca state’, in Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, edited by S. Diamond, 393–407 (New York, NY: Octagon).
- Petrie, H. (2013) Chefs of Industry: Maori Tribal Enterprise in Early Colonial New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press).
- van der Ploeg, J. D. (1993) ‘Potatoes and knowledge’, An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance, edited by Hobart (London: Routledge), 209–27. Reader, J. (2011) Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
- Salaman, R. (2000) History and Social Influence of the Potato [1949], edited by J.G. Hawkes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
- Zimmerer, K. (1996) Changing Fortunes: Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihood in the Peruvian Andes (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
