Phrenology mediated everyday moments in Aotearoa New Zealand. It became associated with the spiritual leadership and healing practised by Māori tohungas and featured in the tactics of a stage performer during a tense diplomatic exchange in Te Rohe Pōtae (the King Country) in 1878. Meanwhile, for members of the colonial government and its administrators – both Māori and Pākehā – phrenology became a symbol of the irrational and anti-modern, a smear on the idea of progress at a time of debate over Māori survival. Phrenology’s critics were right to apprehend the authority that it garnered. As an appropriated European ’science’, it became one among various practices and technologies that shaped evolving Māori cultures and polities. Although moments of phrenological encounter are pebbles in the broader terrain of Māori life during this period, they nevertheless illuminate the questions that Māori were forced to ask themselves when navigating an upturned world