The article begins by noting the unfair denigration that the Māori and their culture received after the British colonized the islands. That culture is is, says Bartholomew (an “Honorary Senior Lecturer in Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland,” and a prolific author), a rich culture that makes empirical claims, some of which can be verified by modern science. But Bartholomew’s thesis is that the indigenous (lunar) calendar, while having some minimal value in predicting regular events, is “not science.” That disparity was, of course, was the subject of the infamous 2021 Listener letter that got its Auckland University authors unfairly demonized, with some suffering professional consequences.
Māori knowledge often holds great spiritual significance and should be respected. Like all indigenous knowledge, it contains valuable wisdom obtained over millennia, and while it contains some ideas that can be tested and replicated, it is not the same as science.
. . . we should [not] discount the significance of indigenous knowledge—but these two systems of looking at the world operate in different domains. As much as indigenous knowledge deserves our respect, we should not become so enamoured with it that we give it the same weight as scientific knowledge.
And onto the Calendar Craze:
Infatuation with indigenous knowledge and the fear of criticising claims surrounding it has infiltrated many of the country’s key institutions, from the health and education systems to the mainstream media. The result has been a proliferation of pseudoscience. There is no better example of just how extreme the situation has become than the craze over the Māori Lunar Calendar. Its rise is a direct result of what can happen when political activism enters the scientific arena and affects policymaking. Interest in the Calendar began to gain traction in late 2017.
You can see how the calendar is constructed here, and the Skeptic article also gives a diagram. The figure below from the article shows how its usage in the news, from the Dow Jones Factiva database, has changed since 2016. Mentions been decreasing over the last two years, but they’re still much, much more numerous than in 2016:
As the author notes, the calendar was useful to the Māori for tracking the seasons in a way that could help the locals schedule hunting, fishing, and planting. But it’s gone far beyond that:
Two studies have shown a slight increase in fish catch using the Calendar. However, there is no support for the belief that lunar phases influence human health and behavior, plant growth, or the weather. Despite this, government ministries began providing online materials that feature an array of claims about the moon’s impact on human affairs. Fearful of causing offense by publicly criticizing Māori knowledge, the scientific position was usually nowhere to be found.
And so, as happens in New Zealand, the calendar took off as a way to schedule all kinds of things for which it wasn’t appropriate. The ways it’s been used are amazing:
Since [2017], many Kiwis have been led to believe that it can impact everything from horticulture to health to human behavior. The problem is that the science is lacking, but because of the ugly history of the mistreatment of the Māori people, public institutions are afraid to criticize or even take issue anything to do with Māori culture. Consider, for example, media coverage. Between 2020 and 2024, there were no less than 853 articles that mention “maramataka”—the Māori word for the Calendar which translates to “the turning of the moon.” After reading through each text, I was unable to identify a single skeptical article. Many openly gush about the wonders of the Calendar, and gave no hint that it has little scientific backing.
. . . Soon primary and secondary schools began holding workshops to familiarize staff with the Calendar and how to teach it. These materials were confusing for students and teachers alike because most were breathtakingly uncritical and there was an implication that it was all backed by science. Before long, teachers began consulting the maramataka to determine which days were best to conduct assessments, which days were optimal for sporting activities, and which days were aligned with “calmer activities at times of lower energy phases.” Others used it to predict days when problem students were more likely to misbehave.
As one primary teacher observed: “If it’s a low energy day, I might not test that week. We’ll do meditation, mirimiri (massage). I slowly build their learning up, and by the time of high energy days we know the kids will be energetic. You’re not fighting with the children, it’s a win-win, for both the children and myself. Your outcomes are better. The link between the Calendar and human behavior was even promoted by one of the country’s largest education unions. Some teachers and government officials began scheduling meetings on days deemed less likely to trigger conflict, while some media outlets began publishing what were essentially horoscopes under the guise of ‘ancient Māori knowledge.
The Calendar also gained widespread popularity among the public as many Kiwis began using online apps and visiting the homepages of maramataka enthusiasts to guide their daily activities. In 2022, a Māori psychiatrist published a popular book on how to navigate the fluctuating energy levels of Hina—the moon goddess. In Wawata Moon Dreaming, Dr. Hinemoa Elder advises that during the Tamatea Kai-ariki phase people should: “Be wary of destructive energies,” while the Māwharu phase is said to be a time of “female sexual energy … and great sex.” Elder is one of many “maramataka whisperers” who have popped up across the country.
The calendar, while having these more or less frivolous uses, still demonstrates the unwarranted fealty that Kiwis, whether Māori or descendants of Europeans, pay to indigenous “ways of knowing,” for you can well suffer professionally if you push back on them. In fact, the author, who wrote a book on this topic, was discouraged from writing it because Māori claim that they have “control over their own data.” This is a common claim by indigenous people, whether in New Zealand or North America, but it makes their data totally unscientific—off limits to those who wish to analyze or replicate it.
Further, some uses are not so frivolous. The author notes that people have managed contraception using the calendar, and even used it to discontinue medication for bipolar disorder. Again, remember that there is no evidence that the calendar has any connection with human behavior, health, or well being.
Once again we see that indigenous “ways of knowing” may be useful in conveying a bit of observational knowledge useful to locals, but have now been appropriated to a state that is coequal to science. (The debate still continues in New Zealand about whether Mātauranga Māori, the sum of indigenous “ways of knowing” (and which also includes religion, ethics, superstition, legend, and other non-science stuff), should be taught in science classes. That is a very bad idea, and if really implemented would ruin science in New Zealand. Adopting the lunar calendar as having epistemic value would be part of this degradation.
Bartholomew finishes this way, and I hope he doesn’t get fired for saying stuff like this—for these are firing words!
This is a reminder of just how extreme attempts to protect indigenous knowledge have become in New Zealand. It is a dangerous world where subjective truths are given equal standing with science under the guise of relativism, blurring the line between fact and fiction. It is a world where group identity and indigenous rights are often given priority over empirical evidence. The assertion that forms of “ancient knowledge” such as the Calendar, cannot be subjected to scientific scrutiny as it has protected cultural status, undermines the very foundations of scientific inquiry. The expectation that indigenous representatives must serve as gatekeepers who must give their consent before someone can engage in research on certain topics is troubling. The notion that only indigenous people can decide which topics are acceptable to research undermines intellectual freedom and stifles academic inquiry.
While indigenous knowledge deserves our respect, its uncritical introduction into New Zealand schools and health institutions is worrisome and should serve as a warning to other countries. When cultural beliefs are given parity with science, it jeopardizes public trust in scientific institutions and can foster misinformation, especially in areas such as public health, where the stakes are especially high.
Respect for indigenous people is not only fine, but is proper and moral. But it should not extend to giving scientific credibility to untested claims simply because they are part of “traditional knowledge.”
Professor Jerry Coyne is an American biologist known for his work on speciation and his commentary on intelligent design, a prolific scientist and author. This article was first published HERE
23 comments:
Once again, our spineless and unprofessional media should be highlighting this issue. They will be responsible in equal parts with politicians and academics for NZ becoming a tribal third world country just like Zimbabwe.
If you don't believe it, just think how differently this would be viewed if people were only aware of what is happening. We can be grateful for the internet for information we do get. Even then it is suppressed or censored. MC
Pre-European stone age maori were warmongers not horticulturists or scientists.
Take food for example. Where it was warm enough in NZ, the women grew kumera - this tends to be reflected in where people lived. A sometimes tricky crop but none the less sufficienltly ritualused to have enough success to repeat when it was warm enough. Otherwise they were essentially humter/gatherers desperate for survival in harsh natural conditions and violent human conditions - life was short. Their meat sources included each other. To suggest deep agricultural knowledge including the influence of lunar cycles over and above survival, is questionable, to say the least.
As the populations were overall small and disparate, not to mention illiterate, it is hard to really know how much 'knowledge' was in fact credible versus simply habit eg you plant when the sun rises over a certain hill etc etc etc.
Once other cultural influences intermingled it is hard, if not impossible, to identify what so called maori knowledge was in fact appropriated knowledge and even then, whether it is absorbed simply without question because it was better than they had. Again by way of example, corn is easier to obtain and prepare than wild fern roots.
Many cultures have paid homage to the moon, a beautiful natural phenomenon. This homage though, is not per se knowledge.
I have said before that some of our kidswill become more Maori than a lot of Maori.
A reason we don't question or criticize thing Maori in public or a few strangers are gathered is that we cant tell who is or isn't Maori.
Integration has seen to that.
People will find out what fear really is if or when Maori have total control of their lives.
Interesting watching what fear can do.
What an embarrassing country we now live in.
The only myth operating regarding this issue, is that indigenous knowledge existed at all. Western science is so far beyond the rudimentary understandings of primitive stone age cultures, there is no comparison.
I'm off for a hunt this w/nd. I don't need this bollocks, as all that I hunt are introduced. I'm not a plastic maori, or a white guilt apologist. Enjoy your w/nd everybody.
A "low energy" day? Perhaps that teacher should lay off the weed.
Bartholomew has got it right.
I am a retired pharmacist.
Any person with any scientific education knows that myths and legends are not science. They might (or might not) be fascinating or interesting, but they are quite simply NOT SCIENCE !!!!
Like Haiti - Voodoo land. What a tragedy for the once great nation of NZ.
Again: National holds the media portfolio- since 2023 has done nothings to stop the misinformation and daily attack on the Coalition . Makes no sense. Why not?
All of which is no more astonishing than Maori cultural appropriation of macrons, the theory that the harmonics of Maori music/wailing can cure cancer or whale song can reverse kauri dieback. All in the service of fresh, innovative, diverse, equitable and inclusive ways to perpetuate tribal grift.
Part Maori only get away with this bullshit because the MSM doesn't call them out on it.
Then the Maori apologists get on the band wagon and push this nonsense through the academic system.
None of this would be acceptable at any academic institution anywhere else in the world.
I do hope that the individual journalists writing these lies feel guilty every time they are submissive to their editors.
"Just following orders " is not a valid excuse for destroying a nation.
The term 'ethnoscience' refers, amongst other things, to conceptions about how the universe works that are culturally specific. Such belief systems remain very strong in Papua New Guinea where they form a peculiar amalgam with scientific views and Western religious concepts. While working at UPNG Goroka Teachers College in the early 1990s I conducted some research on the relationship between ethnoscience and 'Western' science as seen through the eyes of trainee indigenous science teachers. This work was published in a British refereed academic journal, Journal of Education for Teaching. I found that the students were very well aware of the distinction between the two 'sciences' and most emphatically did not go along with the suggested that ethnoscience be given a place in science education. Most of these students had been raised in villages and attended 'bush. primary schools and high schools in New Guinea towns. If they can understand the mutual exclusivity of the two world views, why can't our so-called 'experts' at Western universities? The reason is ideological, pure and simple!
It was Western culture and many Christians , that developed the scientific method and its paradigm, yet attacking Western culture and having us return to 'nature' has been a self-destructive ideology that developed in the Romantic Era with the likes of anti Christian J, J Rousseau and his 'noble savage 'idea which had a very destructive influence on specifically educational theory and one of the influences in the development of current Progressive Education (PE).
American John Dewy , influenced by Rousseau and Darwinism and an aggressive atheist was the main architect of this PE and one of his main aims was to knock out Christianity. He wished to replace it with secular humanism and socialism. A product of Dewey's ideology was the insidious Whole Language reading method which emeritus professor James Chapman described as a myth. Yes, a myth just like those of native peoples ! Our education system is riddled with unscientific nonsense , in particularly teaching methods and wrong theories . This was even before the arrival of the recent Matauranga Maori emphasis.
Attacking Christianity , the occupation of some aggressive Darwinists , I would suggest is a bad idea since it is opening up the doors for a bizarre 'indigenous knowledge takeover into traditional Western science instead. It also produces myths of its own.
Darwinism is under serious attack in failing to describe certain aspects of life and needs to be dethroned as a fact when it is a theory in crisis.
Darwin had some good theorys. Likewise a lot of Christian beliefs are hard to fathom. Surely we should take something from all beliefs. Some things in life we will never understand. Sometimes we just have to accept that
Anon 1041 does not appear to understand the difference between scientific theories and religious beliefs. "Surely we should take something from all beliefs", s/he says. No thanks. Scientific theories are built up from empirical findings, and are empirically testable. Religious beliefs are not - you can't subject a story about spooks in the sky to empirical tests. Indeed, "some things in life we will never understand", but what I can assure Anon is that none of them are explained by invoking spooks, certainly not the Bronze Age tribal desert spook that the Abrahamic religions present us with. I think it would pay Anon 1041 to do some reading about the state of play in sciences that deal with origins. One of the things s/he would discover is that Darwinian theory morphed into neo-Darwinian theory in the 1930s when the discipline of genetics was merged with the Darwinian model of evolution through natural selection. That was a long time ago, and there have been developments since..... unlike religion, science moves on.
So back when they were all full-blooded Maori, some of the more observant ones noticed things about the regularity of the Moon.
Like every other culture anywhere in the world for hundreds of thousands of years before the wakas sailed.
Now they call it science. Where was their wheel science that most others had mastered long before wakas were invented?
The New Guineans noticed a long time ago that the lunar cycle and the human female cycle are of the same duration. Menstruating women are referred to in Pidgin as having 'sik mun' ('Moon sickness'), thereby implying a cause/effect relationship. But what they couldn't explain was why not all women in a given area were at the same stage of their cycle, given that they were living 'under the same Moon', so to speak.
This is typical of ethnoscience: A correlates with B thereby invoking causality, but there is not even a hint of a mechanism put forward and so no hypotheses can be put forward to explain anomalies. That's one reason why it ain't science.
You can't make wheels on usable carts without iron axles. Even the Aztecs could only made small toys with wheels. Maori were stone age. not iron age. Did they even make toys with wheels ?
Also no scientist has produced an explanation for macro -evolution .
Christianity has a very different, varied and developing history including the reformation from Judaism which did develop in some desert lands of the Middle .East.
James Tour , renowned chemist is calling for time out on the abiogenesis research , since it is a long , long way off from resolving. . He lectures at Harvard on this topic. Darwinists hate him.
Au contraire, gaynor: Historical Reality is that ancient and medieval carts often had wooden wheels and wooden axles.
The axle and wheel could be made from hardwoods and greased with animal fat to reduce friction.
You can make usable carts without iron axles—they just won’t be as durable.
I am reading a book about the Vietnam War written by an English reporter who was there. His conclusion about the main reason overwhelmingly powerful US lost the war was that the Americans never bothered to understand or respect the Vietnamese people. Instead their attitude was one of disdain and arrogance. Not surprisingly, disdain and arrogance very successfully causes the local population to want to see you gone.
Because Americans never change and never learn, Afghanistan was probably much the same, and Iraq too. We are seeing it in another way in Europe where people are getting fed up with troops of overweight American tourists, barging their way from attraction to attraction before getting back on their buses or cruise ships and moving on to the next one. Again, there is no interaction/interest/understanding of the people who live there at all.
These two idiot professors are no different. One is here, the other is not, but both write like anthropologists looking at what they see as interesting tribal beliefs. It’s all totally academic theory intended for other foreign academics to read as accounts of some of the quirky beliefs of that little known distant population of New Zealanders and their native Maoris (correct spelling Maori that they may or may not know).
It's a complete joke. Like Vietnam and Afghanistan they have no understanding of their topic – Maori cultural beliefs and people’s attitudes to them. There’s no research here. It’s as if they predetermined what their findings would be – most New Zealanders use the Maori calendar to guide all kinds of activities – and wrote about that as their “findings” – so interesting those Kiwis, actually believing and following a make believe scientifically ridiculous mythical code. These academics may have found one or two people who do that and scaled it up to 5 million.
Their work is pure fiction that happens when you have no clue about people you are studying, when your attitude is as an anthropologist working in faraway, little-known places with unusual, easily influenced people.
Let’s have a reality check of what approximates to the average New Zealanders’ usual understanding of the Maori cultural world. Somewhere along the line – probably at school, we learnt about Maui pulling up the land, and that there are gods of the forest and oceans – some know the gods’ names. We understand Maori have some mystical beliefs about things in the forest but we don’t know what they are. They voyaged across the Pacific so many of us know they used stars and other signs for navigation.
For some reason, the Maori fishing calendar is quite widely known, although what it actually shows, not so much. It’s use goes like this. Some follow it. Some follow it now and again as a not serious way to get catches. If there are good catches on the right Maori calendar days, it's kind of fun to say, well that was the calendar. If there are bad catches, they don’t accuse the calendar of being wrong – it was just a bad day’s fishing.
And that’s it guys. The rest of the garbage you wrote about people using the calendar to plan their activities was just that - garbage – nothing real – just foreign academics inventing a curious tale – all for ignorant Americans including other academics who know no better. It doesn’t work here because people know it’s fiction.
Thank you for your correction Anon 3:59 PM . I believe the Aztecs also didn't have carts with wheels because they had no domesticated beasts of burden to pull them.- only llamas who have little pulling power, can't carry a person, spit and bite and are difficult to domesticate. Also although there were quite good roads the country was also too mountainous. Maori also had no beasts of burden. You would still wonder why no wheelbarrows, though.
Gaynor 9.29: two similarly sized circular cross sections of a tree stump in width and circumference would make for two fine wheels that could be separated by a stiff macrocapa branch shape as an axle with a bit of imagination but seems like no one from the humans in question knew the word, eureka! A cart I do have.
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