Cultures from the South Pacific have provided anthropologists with a rich array of words and concepts: “mana” (power, charisma), “hau” (life’s energy), “tapu” (taboo) and its antonym “noa”, “hara” (a violation of tapu) and “wairua” (spirit) all originate in the languages of Polynesian cultures. These terms first came to the attention of western anthropologists through the reports of missionaries in the Pacific islands. Armchair theorists like James Frazer or Marcel Mauss used the observations of the first ethnographers to lay the foundation of their discipline. Their theories were built on the idea that it is possible to isolate cultural traits from their social context and bundle them together to draw comparisons and infer anthropological laws. Surveying the practice of gift-giving, Marcel Mauss famously came to the conclusion that it involved belief in a force binding the receiver and giver, which he labeled “hau” after the word used by the Māori. Such concepts derive their theoretical potential precisely from the lack of equivalence in common language. But as Claude Levi-Strauss later argued, the indiscriminate use of indigenous categories hampers the analysis of symbolic systems, which he proposed to process through the description of unconscious structures. Anthropological words have nonetheless entered common language, from totem to taboo and to tattoo, while anthropologists still use words like mana and hau as specialized vocabulary in their profession.More recently, many Māori words or phrases that describe Māori culture have become part of New Zealand English, and have even entered global English. “Tā moko”, or tattooing, has become a globalized symbol of Māori’s cultural reach, with rock stars and football players exhibiting intricate design patterns on their legs and shoulders. So has the rite of the haka, the war song and dance popularized by the All Blacks rugby team. Young New Zealanders learn to “show their pūkana in the haka” by rolling their eyes and sticking out their tongue, or to practice “hongi” by pressing together their noses as a greeting. "Kia ora" (literally "be healthy") is a Māori term of greeting that is often used in Aotearoa (New Zealand). According to Kiwitanga (“Kiwi” culture), we can all claim Te Ao Maori (the Maori world) as part of our identity, regardless of the color of our skin, where we were born or what our passport says. As long as we walk the talk and speak the language (Te reo Māori).According to Tony Ballantyne, the incorporation of native words into everyday vocabulary has become a hallmark of New Zealand’s state ideology of biculturalism. So has the narrative of the first encounter between natives and missionary settlers in the Bay of Islands. The early activities of the mission stations provide a kind of national prehistory of Māori and Pākehā (European) coming together. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, has acquired the status of the nation’s founding document, and marks the start of its official history. There is a black legend and a rosy version to this period’s history. The dark narrative postulates that missionaries were the “advanced party of cultural invasion” and that they committed nothing short of an ethnocide by undermining Māori communities and their cultural traditions. The white fairy tale is framed in terms of “first encounter”, “inter-cultural exchange” and the birth of “biculturalism”. This version postulates two homogeneous groups coming into contact and adding their “differences” to form a distinctive whole. New Zealanders have even found their Pocahontas in the figure of Hongi Hika, a local chief or rangatira who travelled to England and met with King George IV and who later assisted the missionaries in developing a written form of the Māori language.Tony Ballantyne takes issue with both versions of the national narrative. Both produce the cultural difference that seem to separate the evangelized from the evangelizers, the natives from the settlers, the colony from the empire. Both versions too readily conflate missionary work with the project of empire-building and also offer misleading assessments of the sources, directions, and consequences of cultural change. Both use the colony to illuminate European history, either as the cradle of genocidal imperialism or as the crucible of multicultural Enlightenment. The colonized counts as little in these narratives: they are reduced to the receiving end of imperial projection, or to the role of the spectator (the native’s “gaze”) of a destiny on which they have no hold. According to Ballantyne, much of the recent work on encounters between Māori and Europeans in the late eighteenth century and earlier nineteenth has seen these cross-cultural engagements as anticipating the bicultural social formations that have become central to state policy and national identity in New Zealand. This conventional image of New Zealand’s past has been cultivated by the state through agencies such as the Waitangi Tribunal (aimed at national reconciliation between Māori and Pākehā) and Te Papa Tongarewa (the national museum).To the tropes of “contact”, “meeting”, “collision” or “exchange” between “two worlds”, Ballantyne prefers to develop the metaphor of “entanglement”, showing that Protestant missionaries and Māori tribes were enmeshed in “webs of empire”. He portraits the British empire as “a dynamic, web-like formation, a complex and shifting assemblage of connections that ran directly between colonies.” The words “web” or “entanglement” refer to something that is complex, intricate, involved, interlaced, with each part connected with the rest and dependent on it. Webs or threads entangled in a fabric have long been a metaphor of history. Think about Penelope in the Odyssey, untangling the webs she spun during the day to delay the time she would have to give in to her suitors. Think of the Bayeux tapestry, an embroidered cloth nearly 70 meters long which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England, and which hasn’t revealed all its mysteries. Similarly, spiders make webs which are nearly invisible until the dew fall on them. They are made with threads stronger than steel and take their shape from the surrounding circumstances and from the spider herself. History is not made by stable and discrete cultural formations coming together in a “clash of civilizations” or a bicultural exchange: it is composed of forever shifting realities, composite cultural patterns, and identities in flux. History is an accumulation of threads, pathways and contingencies that embed human action over time. It doesn't have any ultimate directionality; it is simply the sum of a long series of inventions, actions, interventions, and accidents over decades or centuries.From the beginnings of the mission on the ground in the Bay of Islands in December 1814, missionaries and Māori were linked by complex, shifting, and often unpredictable forms of connection. Europeans visiting or living in the Bay of Islands entered a world that remained governed by Māori ritenga (customs, practices) and tikanga (rules, protocol). The missionaries were not only dependent on the ability of the people and chiefs of the northern alliance to furnish them with basic foodstuffs, but also dependent on them for labor. They were unable to undercut the authority of leading rangatira, such as the great warrior-chief Hongi Hika, or to effectively challenge local customs such as polygamy or the centrality of slavery in Maori social formations. The great rangatira were able to administer justice though traditional methods, make war, trade with European vessels for weapons, procure, and if they wished, kill slaves in open defiance of the missionaries. At the same time, they enjoyed the benefits of close association with Europeans, gaining access to new skills (like reading and writing), as well as tools, seeds, livestock, and weapons. They adopted some of the missionaries’ beliefs and practices, turning them into domestic institutions by blending them with native concepts. For instance, Sunday became known as “ra tapu”—the day that is set apart or the sacred day—and working on the Sabbath was seen as a “hara”, a violation of tapu, or in the language of the missionaries, a “sin.”The “threads of association” between the British Empire and its South Pacific outposts were also webs of texts and documents. Textual production and circulation helped lay the foundation for the making of empire itself. It was the dense body of information collated on James Cook’s first and second voyage that fed the imaginations of imperial visionaries. They were excited by the potential role that New Zealand might play within the empire in the future—whether as a site for refitting and resupplying, a source of “naval stores”, a site of colonization, a destination for convicts or even a purveyor of tea. Later on, the missionaries’ writings, maps, sketches, engravings, and reports emphasized the commercial acuity of Maori, as well as the potential of the islands of New Zealand for imperial activity and future colonization. In their celebration of mission stations, both missionary propaganda and the narratives of European travelers in the 1830s offered very partial readings of the development of missionary work. These narratives tended to underplay the uneven progress of missionary settlements and marginalized the role of Māori in the genesis of mission stations. Mission archives were also littered with gossip, rumors, innuendo, allegations, and outraged reports of wrongdoing. In one chapter, Ballantyne recaptures the story leading to the dismissal of William Yate in 1836, from his arrival when his coreligionists “were sorry to learn that there was no Mrs. Yate” to his spectacular accusation with “the crime alluded to in Romans I.27.”Like a mosquito caught in a spider’s web, the incorporation of peripheral territories into empires had vast consequences. Once communities were connected to these webs of interdependence, it was often hard for them to assert control over the direction and consequences of the cultural traffic that moved through these meshes of connections. While Māori still typically exercised control over such encounters on the ground in Te Ika a Maui, their ability to ultimately direct the long-term consequences of these relationships was heavily constrained by British commercial power and military capacity and the sheer scale of British society (when measured against te ao Maori. The narratives, handwritten reports, journals, letters, maps, and sketches that laced Maori and New Zealand into the empire created knots that could not be undone. Metropolitan publications tended to produce the cultural differences that were seen to separate the evangelized from the evangelizers. Social practices such as slavery, whakamomori (suicide), the execution of slaves, the taking of head as trophies, warmaking, and cannibalism were read as emblematic of the moral corruption of “natural man” and evidence of Satan’s hold on Maori. In the 1830s, humanitarian campaigns painted an alarming picture of social crisis and population decline among the natives, produced by the combination of alcohol, tobacco, venereal disease, prostitution, and infanticide. This image of an indigenous society in a state of crisis induced through contact with Europeans was pivotal in prompting British intervention in 1840.By reading the archives against the grain, Ballantyne is able to convey the anxieties, uncertainties, and even fear that were an integral part of empire-building. There were profound limits to the missionaries’ ability to remake Māori beliefs and practices, or even to recreate European conditions of living in their settlements. Missionaries not only found that it was hard to get Maori to follow new modes of thinking, but that it was difficult for their own families to maintain many of the practices that they understood as routine parts of “civilized” life. For instance, burial practices on the mission stations diverged from practices in Britain. Christians were buried in close proximity to missionary homes, a practice that reversed British trends where there was a growing separation between the worlds of the living and the dead. It was often those Māori attached to missions—as workers, converts, or even chiefly patrons—who were the most potent critics of the old gods and old ways of doing things, a dynamic entirely glossed over by arguments that attribute cultural change to the “cultural imperialism” of missionary work. Although the presence of missionaries precipitated cultural change, Māori were primary agents in the actual spread of Christianity. These “entanglements of Empire” show the complexity of the early history that modern New Zealand obfuscates by peppering its modern culture with Māori words and cultural traits. Neither a melting pot nor a salad bowl, the British empire as experienced from its Pacific edge was a spaghetti plate.