Art as Distraction: Rocking the Farm

Monumental architecture, massive statuary, and other art forms fascinate Westerners and tend to inspire positive judgments about past cultural virtuosity and sophistication. Like the pyramids of Egypt or the stone masonry of Machu Picchu, the moai (the statues) and ahu (stone platforms supporting moai) of Rapa Nui (a.k.a. Easter Island) have impressed, mystified, and preoccupied the Western cultural imagination since their encounter by Europeans. Explorers, archaeologists, anthropologists, and tourists are drawn to the monumental like moths to light—which is understandable—but that light also blinds. Here a case is made that for Rapa Nui the obsession for the monumental has led to a certain inability to perceive past Rapanui culture in a holistic fashion. For example, we contend that the labor to sculpt and move the moai has tended to be massively overestimated, in comparison with the enormous energy invested in constructing the more homely horticultural infrastructure that involved billions of rocks. We argue that the loss of the palms did not cause the culture to crash because moai could no longer be transported or because the soils eroded away, as many claim, but rather that the palms became part of that more humble but enduring subsurface realm as amendment for planting pit soil. We also argue that the Western narrative of Rapanui cultural collapse, which hinges in large part on the cessation of moai production, is not based so much on empirical data but on a ubiquitous Western mythic story form of apocalypse, here a secular, Malthusian version. The preoccupation with monumental art and the apocalyptic story model shape the perceived outcomes: cultural Armageddon, collapse, and ecocide. The collapse story tells more about us than about them.