Whispers and Vanities in Samoan Indigenous Religious Culture

origins of his residences or for the meanings and nuances implicit in the languaging of
family chants or songs, this Christian custodian would more often than not become
uncomfortable and his whispers would start to expose the influence of his Christian
hang-ups. In this situation the custodian’s whispered talk would move from being an
exercise in true tala tuumumusu to one that involves elements of taumusumusu.
Although the main instigator of the guilt and shame that is endemic within this culture
of whispers can be traced back to the monocultural biases of early Christian
missionaries, these biases have become, as in other places, ‘indigenised.’ Samoans
now refuse, on what we perceive to be our own grounds, to entertain the thought that
maybe our forebears had something useful and profound in their ancient religious
beliefs and practices for our modern religious lives. While the full impact of early
missionary bias among Samoans has begun to weaken as Samoans search and learn
more about their indigenous history, we have yet to find a way to move beyond our
Augustinian guilt so that we speak of our ancient religious beliefs without fear of
reprimand.
To delve just a little further into the complexity of this culture of whispers, it might be
instructive to also point out that whispering in and of itself engenders exclusivity.
The act of tuumumusu, while an act of reverence, is deliberately exclusive. For those
not chosen to receive such knowledge there can be envy and ill-feeling and this can
give rise to taumusumusu. During ancient times passing on in-depth religious and
cultural knowledge associated with family genealogies, place names, historical
figures, ceremonial rites and honorifics, including everyday practices, would fall to a
select few. Such knowledge gave power and status to these custodians and especially
those respected as custodians of district or national histories. The knowledge of this
inner circle of custodians was generally uncontested.
The process for authenticating the knowledges of custodians included participation in
rigorous debate. Custodians would meet to share and argue about different historical
events, facts and/or theories. Each custodian would be obliged to prove their
arguments or facts by triangulated references to known nomenclature, genealogies,
historical time periods, existing place names, and so on. Each argument or claim of
fact had to hold up against common sense rules of logic and evidence. But implicit in
both the detail and the telling of all these custodial knowledges was an overriding
belief that they were God-given; that the origins of all knowledges, all power and
status, of all that is successful and good is God-derived and God-oriented.
Tala tuumumusu were and are family treasures. They defined family roles and
responsibilities within the village, district and/or national scenes. They determined
political hierarchies (the boundaries and rules for claiming authority over lands and
chiefly titles). They dictated the relevance of social conventions and prescribed moral
standards and religious norms. These knowledges and their custodians gave ancient
Samoan society measures for their religious and moral life.
It is not surprising that Samoan families, villages and districts fought over the
authenticity and legitimacy of their tala tuumumusu and were wary of tala
taumusumusu. Negotiating the boundaries between Christian and indigenous values
has meant for many Samoans a duality in the way we live our everyday lives. The
culture of whispers of taumusumusu identifies the impact of European colonisation on
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