TABERNACLES, FEAST OF SEE SUKKOT
TABOO is a social prohibition or restriction sanctioned
by suprasocietal (innate) means or a socially sanctioned in-
junction alleged to have the force of such a prohibition.
Taboo stands at the intersection of human affairs and the
forces of the larger universe. Generally it is determined by
divine or animistic mandates; but it may involve “punish-
ment” by inherent circumstances as well, for instance, the
real, but exaggerated, danger of genetic damage to the off-
spring of incestuous unions implied in the incest taboo of
American folk culture.
The word taboo (from the Tongan tabu, a variant of the
more general Polynesian term tapu and the Hawaiian kapu)
reached the West through Captain James Cook’s account of
his third voyage. He was introduced to the term at Ton-
gatapu, in the Tonga, or Friendly, Islands, and commented
that the word had a very comprehensive meaning but gener-
ally signified a thing that is forbidden (Webster, 1942, p. 5).
In fact, the general Polynesian usage implies that what is tapu
is interdicted through its relation to the sacred, or its relation
to cosmic forces. Tapu, then, relates the cosmic to human
actions, and the realm of tapu amounts to a comprehensive
system of religious mandate controlling individual and social
life.
In Polynesian religion, tapu has the function of segregat-
ing persons, objects, or activities that are divine or sacred, or
those that are corrupt or polluting, from the common, every-
day realm. Thus chiefs, high-ranking persons, and their lin-
eages were surrounded with tapu; the heads of all persons,
and especially of chiefly persons, were tapu; but also the
clothing and sleeping places of women in their menstrual pe-
riods were dangerous to men, who were tapu in relation to
them (Best, 1905, p. 212). An “eating tapu” required men
and women, and often all classes of persons of unequal status,
to eat separately, or even to have their food prepared sepa-
rately and with different utensils.
Consecrational tapu applied in circumstances of wor-
ship and labor performed for the gods and temples, and those
involved entered a tapu state, which had to be neutralized
later. Life-crises events (birth, marriage, illness, death) in-
volving chiefly persons, wars, and fishing expeditions im-
posed community-wide restrictions on common activities,
including the preparation and eating of food, movement, the
lighting of fires, and noisemaking. Tapu could also be in-
voked through appealing to the gods to enforce a prohibition
on some object, crop, or piece of land; in the Marquesas Is-
lands a chief could taboo land in this way by calling it his
“head.” A temporary taboo laid on crops, trees, or fishing
grounds was called a rahui (Handy, 1927, p. 46).
Tapu, as a state of sacred interdiction, stands in contrast
to the neutral, or common, state, noa (whatever is free from
tapu restriction). Fresh as well as salt water was used through-
out Polynesia for the removal and neutralizing of tapu and
of polluting influences harmful to one’s tapu (Handy, 1927,
pp. 51–55). Fire and heat were also used ritually against
baneful influences, especially spirits. Many communities
maintained a “sacred water” or spring specifically for the re-
moval of tapu.
The cosmic principle or force behind the restrictions
and prohibitions of tapu is conveyed in the general Polyne-
sian conception of mana. Mana is invisible and abstract,
knowable only through its efficacy and through its manifes-
tation in things, yet it is universal. Like the Arabic barakah,
mana combines sacredness with the sense of “luck” or
“power” in the most encompassing terms. Chiefs, chiefly
persons and their possessions and doings, and rites involving
the gods are tapu because they are suffused with mana. The
danger of polluting influences is that they may discharge the
mana of persons or objects that are more highly endowed;
common persons, on the other hand, run the risk of being
struck or overcome by mana greater than theirs. Tapu may
be seen as the “insulator” between unequal degrees of mana.
Thus Handy suggests that electricity may serve as a useful
analogy in illustrating the nature of the concept of mana
(ibid., p. 28), though of course it is fundamentally a religious
rather than a naturalistic concept.
Even modern curers and others who have recourse to its
manipulation consider mana distinct in its operation from
the world of ordinary life processes, exchanges, and human
interaction. Curers who use mana may not accept compensa-
tion in money (MacKenzie, 1977). As a universal power,
mana is evidenced in every kind of efficacy: a woodcarver
manifests mana in his talents and in the tools and circum-
stances of his work, and canoe makers, gardeners, curers, sor-
cerers all have their mana, capable of being lost or dispersed
unless the proper tapu are observed. Of these examples of
mana the chiefly mana is the highest and most concentrated,
and it poses a serious danger for the unprotected commoner.
As an abstract and generalized conception of power,
mana is analogous to Lakota wakan, Iroquois orenda, and
other concepts of power found among indigenous North
American groups. The term is by no means universal among
Austronesian-speaking peoples, though many have cognate
notions. Among the major world religions mana has counter-
parts, perhaps, in the Islamic notion of barakah, the Hindu
notion of sakti, and possibly in the Greco-Christian concept
of charisma.
The notion of the “psychic unity of mankind,” that is,
that human cultures everywhere must pass through certain
necessary stages of evolutionary growth, allowed speculative
writers around the turn of the twentieth century to draw con-
spicuous examples of primitive religious concepts from par-
ticular ethnographic areas and universalize them. The Poly-
nesian notions of tapu and mana lent themselves
extraordinarily well to this search for the epitomizing evolu-
tionary trait, for they were already quite abstract and, in Cap-
tain Cook’s phrase, “very comprehensive” in their meanings.TABOO 8947