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architectural styles, in social structure, in religion, in political organization, and in ideology. No Caribbean ethnography or ethnology can be complete if such influences remain unrecognized.

Politics of the New Zealand Maori: Protest and Cooperation, 1891-1909. JOHN A. WILLIAMS. Seattle & London: Univer- sity of Washington Press, 1969. vii + 164 pp., photographs, notes, glossary, bibliog- raphy, index. $8.50 (cloth).

Reviewed by THOMAS K. FITZGERALD University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Ultimately Williams study could be of particular interest to historians, political scientists, and all other behavioral scientists interested in adaptations of minorities in culture contact situations. Despite the title, however, Politics of the New Zealand Maori is primarily history rather than political science and, as such, has special relevance for anthropology.

Williams, an historian, concentrates on the post-land-war period in New Zealand history and analyzes some of the Maori protest movements that followed. Most accounts of Maori history have treated the period following the so-called Maori Wars as a transition from a dark ages to a renaissance, led by a group of young educated Maori men known collectively as the young Maori reformers or the young Maori party. Williams study points out that this picture is oversimplified. Although the years after 1890, in many ways, do mark a real turning point in Maori history, the advances in material welfare were by no means direct responses to the efforts of these young reformers. The recovery had much deeper historical roots which preceded the 1890 period.

Nor can withdrawal and isolation of Maoris after the wars be taken as uniform. Even in areas where land confiscations were greatest and the withdrawal assumed a kind of reservation character, such resistance to European influence must be seen in a political rather than in a cultural sense. The notion that Maoris manifested resistive acculturation (Ausubel 1961) surely is a misuse of the concept of acculturation, for

economic and cultural adjustments t o European ways continued virtually un- checked from the 1890s on. Maoris rejected only those elements of European culture that they associated with a violation of their right t o choose their own cultural destiny. Maoris resisted cultural assimilation in the form of political subjugation, land-grabbing, and other such restrictions on freedom of choice. They never, however, resisted accul- turation per se. From the beginning of colonization, much of European culture was admired and emulated; never was it com- pletely rejected. Rather, Maoris borrowed political forms through which to organize resistance to European domination. Both the Maori Parliament and the Maori Press are examples of Maoris consciously taking up European culture traits while rejecting changes that meant forced assimilation into European culture.

The Maoris managed to adopt and adapt much of the European heritage while retain- ing what was valuable in the Maori tradition. They belied the European critics by doing this successfully, while preserving their com- munal social organization . . . (Williams 1963:20).

It is inadequate, then, t o measure stages of Maori acculturation only in terms of the progressive adoption of European material culture. Maori acculturation is not a simple substitution of Pakeha (European) culture traits for Maori ones. Such is too crude a model of culture change. A study of the protest movements of the 1890s helps t o put this fact into perspective. Rejecting the old view of a dark ages, Williams reexamines the significance of the post-1890 renais- sance.

Does this study have anything to say to anthropologists interested in modern Maoris? Yes, a tremendous amount. For one thing, the past is so often directly relevant in explaining the present. Most anthropologists appreciate the fact that some knowledge of the past is a help in understanding the present ( Evans-Pritchard 1973:763). Furthermore, peoples ideas about their past-whether fact or fiction-constitute an intrinsic part of their present reality. My own study of the Maori university graduate (the first generation of which Williams touches on in his 1890s analysis) would have been quite inadequate without an historical

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perspectivewhether documentary or merely recorded as oral tradition. The anthropologist, then, uses history to describe contemporary culture(s). Though historians and anthropologists often must approach their data differently (documentary evidence vs. direct observation), the subject matter and conclusions are similar and relevant to both; and, as Beattie (1968:25) reminds us, The difference is largely one of emphasis.

References Cited Ausubel, David P.

1961 The Maori: A Study in Resistive Acculturation. Social Forces. No. 3, 39 : 2 18 -2 27.

Beattie, John 1964 Other Cultures. New York: The

Free Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E.

1973 Fifty Years of British Anthro- ~o10m. The London Times Sutmle- men