The Economic Intensity of the Political Order

Two words are used for feasts [among the Sa'a], ng&uhe and houlaa: the meaning of the first is "eating," of the second "fame" (Ivens, 1927, p. 60).

"Without feasts" [a Wogeo man] said, "we would not collect all our chestnuts nor plant so many trees. We would perhaps have enough to eat, but we would never have any really big meals" (Hogbin, 1938-39, p. 324).

In the course of primitive social evolution, main control over the domestic economy seems to pass from the formal solidarity of the kinship structure to its political aspect. As the structure is politicized, especially as it is centralized in ruling chiefs, the household economy is mobilized in a larger social cause. This impulse transmitted by polity to production is often attested ethnographically. For although the primitive headman or chief may be himself driven by personal ambition, he incarnates the collective finalities; he personifies a public economic principle in opposition to the private ends and petty self-concerns of the household economy. Tribal powers that be and would-be powers encroach upon the domestic system to undermine its auton-. omy, curb its anarchy, and unleash its productivity. "The pace of life in a given Manus village" Margaret Mead observed, "the amount of goods in circulation, and therefore the actual amount of goods in ex­istence depend on the number of leaders in that village. It varies with their enterprise, intelligence, and aggressiveness, and the number of their kin whose cooperation they can enlist" (1937a, pp. 216-217).

Conversely, but to the same rule, Mary Douglas introduces her major monograph on the Lele of Kasai as a study in the failure of authority. And she notes immediately the economic consequence: "Those who have had anything to do with the Lele must have noticed the absence of anyone who could give orders with a reasonable hope of being obeyed. . . . The lack of authority goes a long way to explain their poverty" (1963, p. 1). This negative effect we have seen before, especially in relation to underuse of subsistence resources. As Carnei-ro perceived it for the Kuikuru, and Izikowitz advances a similar appreciation of Lamet, the issue is between a chronic tendency to divide and disperse the community, and, on the other side, the devel­opment of political controls which would check this fission and effect an economic dynamic more appropriate to the society's technical capacity.

I discuss this aspect of the primitive political economy only briefly and schematically.

Everything depends on the political negation of the centrifugal tendency to which the DMP is naturally inclined. Otherwise said (and other factors being equal), the approximation to productive capacity accomplished by any given society is a vector of two contending political principles: on one hand, the centrifugal dispersion inscribed in the DMP—already a kind of reflexive mechanism of peace; on the other hand, the accord that can be installed by prevailing institutions of hierarchy and alliance, whose success is measurable rather by the concentration of population. Of course, more than just the tribal authorities are at issue, and more than their intervention against the primitive reflex of fission. The regional intensity of occupation de­pends too on relations between communities, relations possibly car­ried on as much by marriages and lineages as by constituted authorities. My concern here is merely to indicate the problematique: each political organization harbors a coefficient of population density, thus in conjunction with the ecological givens, a determinate intensity of land use.

The second aspect of the general problem, the effect of polity upon household labor, I discuss in greater detail. This in part because more ethnographic detail is available. It is even possible to isolate certain formal qualities of leadership structure that imply different degrees of domestic productivity, so hold out the hope of analysis in terms of a social intensity profile. Before these flights of typology, however, we should first consider the structural and ideological means by which power in the primitive societies is realized in production.

The impact of the political system upon domestic production is not unlike the impact of the kinship system. But then, the organization of authority is not differentiated from the kinship order, and its eco­nomic effect is best understood as a radicalization of the kinship function. Even many of the greatest African chiefs, and all those of Polynesia, were not disengaged from the kinship nexus, and it is this which renders comprehensible the economics of their political acts— as well as the politics of their economics. Thus I specifically exclude from this discussion true kings and states, to speak only of societies where kinship is king and the "king" only a superior kinsman. At the most we have to deal with "chiefs" properly so-called, and chieftain­ship is a political differentiation of a kinship order—as kingship is usually a kinship differentiation of a political order (State). Moreover, what is true of the most advanced form, chieftainship, is a plus forte raison true of all other kinds of tribal leaders: they hold positions in and of a network of kinship. And as it is structurally, so ideologically and in practice the economic role of the headman is only a differentia­tion of kinship morality. Leadership is here a higher form of kinship, hence a higher form of reciprocity and liberality. This repeats itself in ethnographic descriptions from all over the primitive world, even to the dilemmas posed by chiefly obligations of generosity:

The [Nambikwara] chief must not merely do well: he must try, and his group will expect him to try, to do better than the others. How does the chief fulfill these obligations? The first and main instrument of his power is his generosity. Generosity is among most primitive peoples, and above all in America, an essential attribute of power. It has a role to play even in those rudimentary cultures where the notion of property consists merely in a handful of rudely fashioned objects. Although the chief does not seem to be in a privileged position, from the material point of view, he must have under his control surplus quantities of food, tools, weapons, and ornaments which, however trifling in themselves, are nonetheless considerable in relation to the prevailing poverty. When an individual, a family, or the band as a whole, wishes or needs something, it is to the chief that an appeal must be made. Generosity is, therefore, the first attribute to be expected of a new chief. It is a note which will be struck almost continuously; and from the nature, discordant or otherwise, of the sound which results the chief can judge of his standing with the band. His "subjects" make the most of all this. . . . The chiefs were my best informers; and as I knew the difficulties of their position I liked to reward them liberally. Rarely, howev­er, did any of my presents remain in their hands for more than a day or two. And when I moved on, after sharing for several weeks the life of any particular band, its members rejoiced in the acquisition of axes, knives, pearls, and so forth from my stores. The chief, by contrast, was generally as poor, in material terms, as he had been when I arrived. His share, which was very much larger than the average allowance, had all been extorted from him (Levi-Strauss, 1961, p. 304).

The same refrain appears in the complaint of the Tahitian priest-chief, Ha'amanimani, to the Duff missionaries:

"You give me," says he, "much parow [talk] and much prayers to the Eatora [God], but very few axes, knives, scissars, or cloth." The case is, that whatever he receives he immediately distributes among his friends and dependents; so that for all the numerous presents he had received, he had nothing now to shew, except a glazed hat, a pair of breeches, and an old black coat, which he had fringed with red feathers. And this prodigal behaviour he excuses by saying that, were he not to do so, he should never be a king (sic), nor even remain a chief of any consequence (Duff Mission­aries, 1799, pp. 224-225).

This benevolent interest of the headman in the process of distrib­ution, and the political energy he accumulates therefrom, are generat­ed by the field of kinship in which he moves. In one respect it is a matter of prestige. Insofar as the society is socially committed to kin relationships, morally it is commited to generosity; whoever, there­fore, is liberal automatically merits the general esteem. Generous, the chief is a paragon among kinsmen. But more profoundly, his generosi­ty is a kind of constraint. "Gifts make slaves," the Eskimo say, "as whips make dogs." Common in any society, this constraint gains in force where the norms of kinship are dominant. Because kinship is a social relation of reciprocity, of mutual aid; hence, generosity is a manifest imposition of debt, putting the recipient in a circumspect and responsive relation to the donor during all that period the gift is unrequited. The economic relation of giver-receiver is the political relation of leader-follower.¹⁵

15. We shall see shortly that the principle is organized in various ways. But in some instances the entire scheme of rank is left to the free play of generosity, as in Busama, where: "The relation of debtors to creditors forms the basis of the system of leadership" (Hogbin, 1951, p. 122).

This is the working principle. More ex­actly, it is the operative ideology.

"Ideology" that is revealed as such from the beginning by its contradiction with the larger ideal in which it is fixed, that is, with reciprocity. Always the rank relation, faithful to the qualities of a society it would not abolish, is compensatory. It is conceived in terms of balance, a "mutual helpfulness," a "continual reciprocity."¹⁶ But in strictly material terms the relation cannot be both "reciprocal" and "generous," the exchange at once equivalent and more so."Ideology," then, because "chiefly liberality" must ignore the contrary flow of goods from people to chief—perhaps by categorizing this as the chiefs due—on pain of canceling out the generosity; or else, or in addition, the relation conceals a material unbalance—perhaps rationalized by other kinds of compensation—on pain of negating the reciprocity. We shall find that material unbalances in fact exist; depending on the system, they are borne by one or the other side, headman or people. Yet the conjunction of a norm of reciprocity with a reality of exploita­tion would not distinguish the primitive political economy from any other: everywhere in the world the indigenous category for exploita­tion is "reciprocity."¹⁷

16. "Mutual helpfulness" (Mead, 1934, p. 335), "continual reciprocity between chief and people" (Firth, 1959a, p. 133), "mutually dependent" (Ivens, 1927, p. 255). For other examples see Richards, 1939. pp. 147-150, 214; Oliver, 1955, p. 342; Drucker, 1937, p. 245. See also Chapter 5. In speaking of "reciprocity" I refer here to the ideological economic relation between headmen and the underlying population, not necessarily to the concrete form. The latter may be technically, "redistribution." Even so, redistribution is conceived and sanctioned as a reciprocal relation, and is in form but a centralization of reciprocities.

17. One reason (or rationale) why Western social science, with its disposition to accept or even privilege the native models, has so much difficulty with "exploitation," Or is it that, having trouble with "exploitation," it is disposed to privilege the native model?

Considered at a more abstra'ct level, the ideological ambiguity of the chiefly office, at once generous and reciprocal, expresses perfectly the contradiction of a primitive nobility: between power and kinship, inequality in a society of amicability. The only reconciliation, of course, is an inequality that is generally beneficial, the only justifica­tion of power its disinterestedness; which is to say, economically, a distribution of goods from the chiefs to the people that deepens at the same time it offsets the latter's dependence—and leaves no interpreta­tion of the distribution from people to chiefs but as a moment in a cycle of reciprocity. The ideological ambiguity is functional. On the one hand, the ethic of chiefly generosity blesses the inequality; on the other, the ideal of reciprocity denies that it makes any difference.¹⁸

However it is realized, one thing the ideology of headmanship does not admit: the economic introversion of the DMP. The "liber­ality" of the chief must stimulate production beyond the usual aims of domestic livelihood, if only in the chiefs own household; reciprocity between the ranks will do the same on a more or less general scale. The political economy cannot survive on that re­strained use of resources which for the domestic economy is a satisfactory existence.

We return thus to the original point: the political life is a stimulus to production. But it is so to varying degrees. The following para­graphs trace some of the variations in political form that seem to connote differing domestic productivities, beginning with the Melanesian big-man orders.

Open systems of status competition, such as prevail in Melanesia, develop economic impact in the first place from the ambition of aspiring big-men. Intensification appears in their own work and the labors of their own household. The New Guinea Busama clubhouse leader, as Hogbin reports, has to work harder than anyone else to keep up his stocks of food. The aspirant for honours cannot rest on his laurels but must go on holding large feasts and piling up credits. It is acknowledged that he has to toil early and late—"His hands are never free from earth, and his forehead continually drips with sweat" (Hogbin, 1951, p. 131).19

18. If again this ideology seems more widespread than primitive society, perhaps in that respect it can be taken in confirmation of Marx's dictum that what is not visible in modern economy is often seen en clair in primitive economy—to which Althusser adds that what is seen en clair in primitive economy is that "/' economique n'est pas directment visible en clair" (Althusser et al., 1966a, Vol 2, p. 154).

19. Cf. Hogbin, 1939, p. 35; Oliver, 1949, p. 89; 1955, p. 446, for similar passages, or more generally, Sahlins, 1963. One could easily collect the same observations from outside Melanesia. For example: "A man who can afford to acquire all these expen­sive things which are connected with the cult of the ancestors, and sacrifice so much at these rites, must be a particularly clever person, and thus his reputation and his pres­tige grow with every feast In this connection social prestige plays an excessive part, and I should even like to assume that the feast of the ancestors and all connected with it is the driving force in the entire economic and social life of the Lamet. I (forces the more aspiring and ambitious to produce more than what is required for the necessities of life . . . This striving for prestige plays a particularly important part in the economic life of the Lamet, and urges them to a surplus production" (Jzikowitz, 1951, pp. 332, 341, emphasis mine).

To this end of accumulation and generosity, the Melanesian leader typically attempts to enlarge his domestic working force, perhaps by polygyny: '"Another woman go garden, another woman go take fire­wood, another woman go catch fish, another woman cook him— husband he sing out plenty people come kaikai [eat]"' (Landtman, 1927, p. 168). Clearly the Chayanov slope begins to suffer a political deviation; against the rule, certain of the most effective groups are working the most. But the big-man would quickly surpass the narrow base of autoexploitation. Deploying his resources carefully, the emerging leader uses wealth to place others in his debt. Moving beyond his household, he constructs a following whose production may be harnassed to his ambition. The process of intensification in production is thus coupled to reciprocity in exchange. So the Lakalai big-man, with a view toward sponsoring memorial festivals and par­ticipating successfully in external trade, must not only show personal industry but also be able to call on the industry of others. He must have a following. If he is blessed with many junior kinsmen whose labor he actually commands, he is under less pres­sure to build up a following. If he is not so blessed, he must acquire his following by assuming responsibility for the welfare of remoter kinsmen. By displaying all of the necessary attributes of a responsible leader, by dutifully sponsoring festivals on behalf of his children, by being ready with wealth to meet his obligations to his in-laws, by buying magic and dances for his children, by assuming whatever burdens he can feasibly carry, he makes himself attractive to older and younger kinsmen alike. . . . His younger kinsmen court his support by volunteering to help him in his undertakings, by cheerfully obeying his calls to work, and by catering to his wishes. They tend increasingly to entrust their wealth to him as trustee in preference to some senior relative (Chowning and Goodenough, 1965— 66, p. 457).

Drawing then from a local group of followers economically en­gaged to his cause, the big-man opens the final and socially most expansive phase of his ambition. He sponsors or contributes heavily to great public feasts and distributions that reach outside his own circle to establish his dignity, "build his name" Melanesians say, in society at large. For the purpose in owning pigs and pig-wealth is not to store them nor to put them on recurrent display: it is to use them. The aggregate effect is a vast circulating flow of pigs, plumes and shells. The motive force of the flow is the reputation men can gain from ostentatious participation in it… The Kuma "big men" or "men of strength" . . . who command much wealth, are entrepreneurs in the sense they control the flow of valuables between clans by making fresh presentations on their own account and choosing whether or not to contribute to others. Their profit in these transactions is incremental reputation… The aim is not simply to be wealthy, nor even to act as only the wealthy can act: it is to be known to be wealthy (Reay, 1959, p. 96).

The big-man's personal career has a general political significance. The big-man and his consuming ambition are means whereby a seg­mentary society, "acephalous" and fragmented into small auton­omous communities, overcomes these cleavages, at least provisionally, to fashion larger fields of relation and higher levels of cooperation. Through concern for his own reputation, the Melanesian big-man becomes a point of articulation in a tribal structure.

It should not be supposed that the big-man of Melanesian type is a necessary condition of the segmentary societies. Chiefs of the North­west Coast Indian villages achieve the same sort of articulation, and if in their potlatches it is by external feasting similar to the prestige quest of many Melanesian leaders, the chief has an entirely different relation to the internal economy. A Northwest Coast chieftain is a lineage head, and in this capacity is necessarily accorded a certain right to group resources. He is not obliged to establish a personal claim by the dynamic of an autoexploitation put at the others' dispos­al. Of even greater contrast, a segmentary society may dispense with all but minimal ties between its constituent parts; or else, as in the celebrated case of the Nuer segmentary lineage system, the relations between local groups are fixed mainly and automatically by descent, without recourse to a differentiation among men.

The Nuer pose an alternative to the segmentary politics of personal power and renown: the anonymous and silent government of struc­ture. In classic segmentary lineage systems, headmen have to be con­tent with a local importance at best, and perhaps proven by attributes other than their generosity. The interesting deduction is that the segmentary lineage system has a lower coefficient of intensity than the Melanesian polity.

The Melanesian system can be put to another speculative purpose.

Beyond the contrast it suggests between tribes with and without rul­ers, in its successive phases of generous autoexploitation and an accu­mulation funded by reciprocity, the career of the Melanesian big-man makes a transition between two forms of economic authority that elsewhere appear separately and appear to have an unequal economic potential. Autoexploitation is a kind of original and underdeveloped economics of respect. It is often encountered in the autonomous local groups of tribal societies—the Nambikwara "chief" is an example of the genre—and most commonly in the camps of hunters and gather­ers:

No Bushman wants prominence, but Toma went further than most in avoiding prominence; he had almost no possessions and gave away ev­erything that came into his hands. He was diplomatic, for in exchange for his self-imposed impoverty he won the respect and following of all the people there (Thomas, 1959, p. 183).

Authority of this kind has obvious limitations, both economic and political—and the modesty of each sets limits to the other. Only the domestic labor immediately under the control of the headman is politically engaged. While his own household labor pool is expandable to a degree, as by polygyny, neither through structure nor gratitude does the headman gain significant command over the output of other domestic groups. The surplus of one house put to the benefit of others, this politique is closest to the ideal of noble liberality—and the weakest economics of leadership. Its principal force is attraction rather than compulsion, and the field of this force is principally restricted to people in direct personal contact with the leader. For under the simple and often capricious technical circumstances, with the labor of so few provisioning it, the headman's "fund of power" (as Malinowski called it) is meagre and rapidly exhausted. Furthermore, it is necessarily diluted in political efficacy, the influence to be had by its distribution, as this distribution is stretched out in social space. The greatest divi­dends of influence, then, are accrued in the local cohort, and in the form of the respect due a self-effacing generosity. But no one is thereby rendered dependent, and this respect will have to compete with all the other kinds of deference that can be accorded in face-to-face relations. Hence the economic is not necessarily the dominant basis of authority in the simpler societies: by comparison with generational status, or with personal attributes and capacities from the mystical to the oratorical, it may be politically negligible.

At the other extreme is chieftainship properly so-called, as it devel­oped, for example, in high islands of Polynesia, among nomads of interior Asia, and many central and southern African peoples. The contrast of economic and political form seems complete: from autoex-ploitation—by the sweat of the leader's brow—to tribute, accompa­nied sometimes by the idea that even to shoulder a burden is beneath the chiefly dignity: for that matter, dignity may require that he be carried; from a respect personally accorded to a command structural­ly bestowed; and from a liberality something less than reciprocal to a reciprocity less than liberal. The difference is institutional. It lies in the formation of hierarchical relations within and between local groups, a regional political frame maintained by a system of chiefs, major and minor, holding sway over segments of greater and lesser order and subordinate all to the one paramount. The integration of parochial groups tenuously broached by Melanesian big-men, if uni­maginable to prestigious hunters, is achieved in these pyramidal socie­ties. They are still primitive. The political armature is provided by kinship groups. But these groups make positions of official authority a condition of their organization. Now men do not personally con­struct their power over others; they come to power. Power resides in the office, in an organized acquiesence to chiefly privileges and organ­ized means of upholding them. Included is a specific control over the goods and the services of the underlying population. The people owe in advance their labor and their products. And with these funds of power, the chief indulges in grandiose gestures of generosity ranging from personal aid to massive support of collective ceremonial or economic enterprise. The flow of goods between chiefs and people then becomes cyclical and continual:

The prestige of a [Maori] chief was bound up with his free use of wealth, particularly food. This in turn tended to secure for him a larger revenue from which to display his hospitality, since his followers and relatives brought him choice gifts.... Apart from lavish entertainment of strangers and visitors, the chief also disbursed wealth freely as presents among his followers. By this means their allegiance was secured and he repaid them for the gifts and personal services rendered to him. . . . There was thus a continual reciprocity between chief and people___It was by his accumulation and possession of wealth, and his subsequent lavish distribution of it, that such a man was able to give the spur to... important tribal enterprises. He was a kind of channel through which wealth flowed, concentrating it only to pour it out freely again (Firth, 1959a, p. 133).

In advanced forms of chieftainship, of which the Maori is not particularly an illustration, this redistribution is not without material benefit to the chief. If an historical metaphor be permitted: what begins with the would-be headman putting his production to others' benefit, ends, to some degree, with others putting their production to the chiefs benefit.

Eventually the ideals of reciprocity and chiefly liberality serve as mystification of the people's dependence. Liberal, the chief only re­turns to the community what he has received from the community. Reciprocal then? Perhaps he did not return all of that. The cycle has all the reciprocity of the Christmas present the small child gives his father, bought with the money his father had given him. Still this familial exchange is effective socially, and so is chiefly redistribution. Besides, when the timing and diversity of the goods redistributed are taken into consideration, the people may appreciate concrete benefits otherwise unobtainable. In any case, the material residue that some­times falls to the chief is not the main sense of the institution. The sense is the power residing with the chief from the wealth he has let fall to the people. And in a larger vantage, by thus supporting commu­nal welfare and organizing communal activities, the chief creates a collective good beyond the conception and capacity of the society's domestic groups taken separately. He institutes a public economy greater than the sum of its household parts.

This collective good is also won at the expense of the household parts. Too frequently and mechanically anthropologists attribute the appearance of chieftainship to the production of surplus (for example, Sahlins, 1958). In the historic process, however, the relation has been at least mutual, and in the functioning of primitive society it is rather the other way around. Leadership continually generates domestic surplus. The development of rank and chieftainship becomes, pari passu, development of the productive forces.

In brief testimony, the remarkable ability of certain political orders distinguished by advanced ideas of chieftainship to augment and di­versify production. Again I use Polynesian examples, partly for the reason that in earlier work I had argued the exceptional productivity of this polity by comparison with the Melanesian (Sahlins, 1963); partly also because a few of the Polynesian societies, Hawaii partic­ularly, take the primitive contradiction between the domestic and public economies to an ultimate crisis—revealatory it seems not only of this disconf ormity but of the economic and political limits of kin­ship society.

Comparison with Melanesia would not only compliment the Po­lynesian achievement in overall production, but for the occupation and improvement of once-marginal areas effected under the aegis of ruling chiefs. To this process the chronic struggles between neighbor­ing chiefdoms often supplied decisive force. Competition probably accounts for a remarkable tendency to invert by culture the ecology of nature: many of the poorer regions of Polynesian high islands were the more intensively exploited. The contrast in this respect between the southeast peninsula of Tahiti and the fertile northwest moved one of Captain Cook's officers, Anderson, to reflect positively Toynbeean: "It shows," he said, "that even the defects of nature . . . have their use in promoting man to industry and art" (cited in Lewthwaite, 1964, p. 33). The Tahitian group is even better known for the integration of offshore atolls in mainland chief doms. Here was a political combi­nation of economies so different as to constitute in Melanesia, and even other parts of Polynesia, the basis of entirely different cultural systems. Tetiaroa is the most celebrated example: "the Palm Beach of the South Seas," a complex of thirteen "spit-of-land" coral islets 26 miles north of Tahiti, occupied for marine and coconut production by men of the Pau district chief and as a watering place of the Tahitian nobility. By forbidding all cultivation except coconut and taro on Tetiaroa, the Pau chief forced a continuous exchange with Tahiti. In a punitive action against the chief, Cook once seized 25 canoes en route from Tetiaroa with a cargo of cured fish. "Even in stormy weather, the missionaries [of the Duff] counted 100 canoes on the beach [of Tetiaroa], for there the aristocracy went to feast and fatten, and their flotillas returned 'rich as a fleet of galleons' " (Lewthwaite, 1966, p. 49).

Then again, one might consider the impressive development of taro cultivation in the Hawaiian Islands, notable for its extent, diversity and intensity: the 250-350 different varieties, often recognized for suitability in different microenvironments; the large irrigation net­works (as in the Waipio Valley, island of Hawaii, site of a single complex three miles by three-fourths to one mile); irrigation re­markable for the complexity of ditching and protective works (a canal in Waimea, Kauai runs 400 feet around a cliff and up to 20 feet above level, while in the Kalalau Valley a sloping sea wall built of great boulders shelters a broad stretch of shoreward flats); irrigation remarkable again for the utilization of tiny pockets of soil inter­spersed through rocky lava, and for the terracing of narrow gorges deep into the mountains, "where the least available space has been won." Nor is this to catalogue the manifold ecological specialization of agricultural techniques, the several types of forest as well as wet taro cultivation, and in the swamps a form of chinampa, the "mud-dyback method."²⁰

20. See Handy, 1940 for these and other details of Hawaiian irrigation. W. Bennett reported of Kauai: "The impressive feature of the agricultural terracing is its tremen­dous extent. In the valleys in which little disturbance has gone on, particularly the Napali section, the maximum of tillable'soil was utilized. On the sides of the valleys the terraces run almost to the base of the great cliffs, where the nature of the talus slopes is not too rocky. Though all these terraces were not irrigated, a great proportion of them were, and the ingenuity of the engineering is remarkable" (1931, p. 21).

The relationship between Polynesian chieftainship and the in­tensification of production can be given historic depth. In Hawaii, at least, the political transformation of marginal areas knows legend­ary depth: a chief who used his authority to squeeze water out of rocks. On the western side of the Keanae valley, Maui, is a peninsula that stands a mile out to sea and a much longer distance beyond ecological reason: fundamentally barren and rocky, without natural soil, but covered nevertheless with famous acres of taro. Tradition lays the miracle to an old chief, his name now forgotten, ... who was constantly at war with the people of Wailua and determined that he must have more good land under cultivation, more food, and more people. So he set all his people to work (they were then living within the valley and going down to the peninsula only for fishing), carrying soil in baskets from the valley down to the lava point. The soil and the banks enclosing the patches were thus, in the course of many years, all trans­planted and packed into place. Thus did the watered flats of Keanae originate (Handy, 1940, p. 110).

Perhaps the Hawaiian tradition is not truly historical. Still it is the true history of Polynesia: a kind of paradigm of which the entire archaeological sequence of the Marquesas as presented by Suggs, for example, is only another version. All Marquesan prehistory recounts the same dialogue between intervalley competition, the exercise of chiefly power, and the occupation and development of marginal areas of the islands (Suggs, 1961).

Is there evidence in Hawaii or Tahiti of political crises comparable to the episode Firth and Spillius described for Tikopia? Do we discov­er, that is to say, analogous crises revelatrices, here exposing the vertical contradiction between the household economy and the chief­tainship, as the Tikopian exposed the horizontal contradiction be­tween household and kindred? But then, the Tikopian famine is not irrelevant either to the first question, for the same hurricanes of 1953 and 1954 that shook the kinship structure also almost brought down the chiefs. As the supply of food diminished, economic relations between chiefs and people deteriorated. Customary dues to the clan leaders were neglected; while, to the contrary, stealing from chiefly gardens "became almost barefaced." Said Pa Ngarumea: "When the land is firm people pay respect to the things of the chief, but when there is a famine people go and make sport of them" (Firth, 1959b, p. 92). Moreover, reciprocity in goods is only the concrete mode of the Tikopian political dialogue; its breakdown meant the whole sys­tem of political communication was in question. The Tikopian polity had begun to unhinge. An uncommon rift appeared between chiefs and the underlying population. Somber traditions were resurrected— "myths," Spillius considers them—telling how certain chiefs of old, when pressure on the local food supply became unsupportable, drove the commoners en masse off the island. To the present chiefs the idea seemed fantastic, but one private meeting of notables unwittingly provoked a mass mobilization of the people of the Faea district, forewarned by a spirit medium and forearmed to resist a chiefly conspiracy to expel them (Firth, 1959b, p. 93; Spillius, 1957, pp. 16-17). Still the antagonism remained incomplete, the commoners in an undeveloped stage of political consciousness and the chiefs in command throughout. Battle was not given. Indeed, it was never even conceived by Tikopians in the classic form of a popular uprising against the powers that be. On the contrary, it was the chiefs who constituted the danger to the commoners. And to the last, everyone continued to concede the chiefs' traditional privilege of survival, whoever else might have to die—and however much food was being stolen from them. The Tikopian political crisis was thus aborted.²¹

21. Perhaps in part because of the intervention of the colonial power—and the ethnographers who at times acted in quasi-governmental capacity (Spillius, 1957).

Let us then consider Hawaii, where one can follow conflicts of the same general type to the conclusion of a successful rebellion. Conflicts "of the same general type" in the sense they brought forth the opposi­tion between the chieftainship and domestic interests, but the differ­ences are also important. In Tikopia the political stress was externally induced. It did not unfold from the normal working of Tikopian society, which normally does work, but in the wake of a natural catastrophe. And it could have happened any structural time, at any phase in the development of the system. The political upset in Tikopia was exogenic, abnormal and historically indeterminate. But the rebel­lions with which Hawaiian traditional history fascinated itself, Ha­waiian history had made. They were produced in the normal course of Hawaiian society, and more than endogenic, they were recurrent. These troubles, besides, seem incapable of realization at just any historic stage. They mark rather the maturity of the Polynesian sys­tem, the working through of its contradictions to the point of denoue­ment. They reveal the structural limits.

The paramount chiefs of old Hawaii reigned each and independ­ently over a single island, a section of one of the larger islands, sometimes over districts of neighboring islands. The variation is al­ready part of the problem: the tendency, on which traditions discourse at length, for chiefly domains to enlarge and contract, extended once by conquest only to be partitioned again by rebellion. And this cycle was geared to a second, such that the rotation of one would set off the other. Ruling chiefs showed a propensity to "eat the power of the government too much"; that is, to oppress the people economically, which the chiefs found themselves forced to do when the political domain was enlarged, despite their obligations as kinsmen and chiefs to consider the people's welfare, which they nevertheless found diffi­cult to do even when the polity was reduced.

For the administration of merely an ordinary domain would bite deeply into the labor and goods of the common people. The population was dispersed over a wide area; the means of transportation and communication were rudimentary. The chieftainship besides enjoyed no monopoly of force. It had to meet its diverse problems of rule organizationally then, by a certain administrative formation: a bloat­ed political establishment that sought to cope with a proliferation of tasks by a multiplication of personnel, at the same time economizing its scarce real force by an awesome display of conspicuous consump­tion as intimidating to the people as it was glorifying to the chiefs. But the material weight of this chiefly retinue and the sumptuary airs it affected fell, of course, on the ordinary people. It fell especially on those nearest the paramount, within a range that made transport worthwhile and the threat of sanctions effective. Conscious, it seems, of the logistic burdens they were obliged to impose, the Hawaiian chiefs conceived several means to relieve the pressure, notably includ­ing a career of conquest with a view toward enlarging the tributary base. In the successful event, however, with the realm now stretched over distant and lately subdued hinterlands, the bureaucratic costs of rule apparently rose higher than the increases in revenue, so that the victorious chief merely succeeded in adding enemies abroad to a worse unrest at home. The cycles of centralization and exaction are now at their zenith.

At this point, Hawaiian traditions will hint of intrigue and conspir­acy mounted against the ruling chief by local followers, perhaps in collusion with distant subjects.²²

22. Here is one example of this geopolitics of rebellion: Kalaniopu'u, supreme chief of the large island of Hawaii—the same who was paternal uncle and predecessor of Kamehameha I—held court for a time in the Kona district of the southwest. But, tradition relates, "scarcity of food, after a while, obliged Kalaniopu'u to remove his court to the Kohala district [in the northwest], where his headquarters were fixed at Kapaau" (Fornander, 1878-85, Vol. 2, p. 200). What had apparently rendered food scarce in Kona was now repeated in Kohala: "Here the same extravagant, laissez-faire, eat and be merry policy continued that had been commenced at Kona, and much grumbling and discontent began to manifest itself among the resident chiefs and cultiva­tors of the land, the 'Makaainana' " (ibid). The local grumbling was echoed by a distant rumbling from the outlying district of Puna, across to the island to the southeast. The two factions apparently combine, and the tale then takes on its customary Olympian form, a story of battle joined between great chiefs. The principal rebels were Imakakaloa of Puna and one Nu'uanu, a chief of Ka'u who had once lived in Puna but was now in attendance at Kalaniopu'u's court. These two, as Pomander writes, were "the heads and rallying points" of the unrest. Prom distant Puna, Imakakaloa "openly resisted the orders of Kalaniopu'u and his extravagant demands for all kinds of property." Nu'uanu, at the side of the paramount, "was strongly suspected of favoring the growing discontent" (ibid,) This time, however, the gods were with Kalaniopu'u. Nu*uanu died of a shark bite, and after a series of battles, Imakakaloa was trapped, captured, and duly sacrificed. 23. Hakau is described by another collector of tradition as "rapacious and extortionate beyond endurance of either chiefs or people" (Fornander, 1878-85, vol. 2, p. 76).

The rebellion is launched always by important chiefs, who of course had their own reasons for challenging the paramount, but had their power to do so as personifications of a more general discontent. The revolt takes form as a court assassina­tion, an armed struggle, or both. And then, as one ethnological bard said, the Hawaiians sat cross-legged upon the ground and told sad stories of the death of kings:

Many kings have been put to death by the people because of their oppres­sion of the makaainana [the commoners]. The following kings lost their lives on account of their cruel exactions on the commoners: Koihala was put to death in Kau, for which reason the district of Kau was called the Wier. Koka-i-ka-lani was an alii [chief] who was violently put to death in Kau . . . Enu-nui-kai-malino was an alii who was secretly put out of the way by the fishermen in Keahuolu in Kona . . . King Hakau was put to death by the hand of Umi at Waipio valley in Hamakua, Hawaii.²³ Lono-i-ka-makahiki was a king who was banished by the people of Kona. ... It was for this reason that some of the ancient kings had a wholesome fear of the people (Malo, 1951, p. 195).

It is important that the death of tyrants was taken in charge by men of authority and chiefs themselves. The rebellion was not then a revolution; the chieftainship if overthrown was replaced by a chief­tainship. Delivering itself of oppressive rulers, the system did not consequently rid itself of basic contradictions, transcend and trans­form itself, but continued instead to cycle within the confines of existing institutions. In the object of replacing a bad (exacting) chief by a good (generous) one, the rebellion would have a fair chance of success. In its aftermath, the enlarged political domain would proba­bly fragment, as recalcitrant outdistricts regained their independence. The chieftainship thus decentralized, its economic weight was re­duced. Power and oppression returned to the nadir—for the time being.

The epic quality of Hawaiian traditions conceals a more mundane causality. Manifestly, the political cycle had an economic base. The great struggles between powerful chiefs and their respective districts were transposed forms of the more essential struggle over domestic labor: whether it was to be more modestly employed in household livelihood or more intensively deployed to political organization. That the chiefs had the right to levy the domestic economy was not contest­ed. The problem was, on one hand, the customary limit to this right, as established by the existing structure, and on the other hand, the regular abuse of it set off by a structural exigency. Hawaiian chieftain­ship had distanced itself from the people, yet it had never definitively severed the kinship relation. This primitive bond between ruler and ruled remained in force, and with it the usual ethics of reciprocity and chiefly generosity.²⁴

24. On genealogical idiom see Malo, 1951, p. 52.

Malo says of the great storehouses maintained by ruling chiefs that they were "means of keeping the people contented, so they would not desert the king"—this in a passage otherwise re­markable for its political cynicism: "as the rat will not desert the pantry . . . where he thinks food is, so the people will not desert the king while they think there is food in his storehouse" (Malo, 1951, p. 195).

In other words, the chiefly toll on the household economy had a moral limit consistent with the kinship configuration of the society. Up to a point it was the chiefs due, but beyond that, highhandedness. The organization set an acceptable proportion between the allocation of labor to the chiefly and domestic sectors. It set a fitting proportion also between retention of the people's goods by the chief and redistri­bution to the people. It could tolerate only a certain unbalance in these matters. Besides, some propriety ought to be observed. Exaction by force is no customary gift, nor is pillage the chiefs due. The chiefs had their own lands, set aside for their support, and received many gifts regularly from the people. When a ruling chiefs men seized the people's pigs and plundered their farms, the "makaainana were not pleased with this conduct on the part of the king"—it was "tyranny," "abuse of authority" (Malo, 1951, p. 196). Chiefs were too much inclined to work the makaainana: "It was a life of weariness .. . they were compelled at frequent intervals to go here and there to do this and that work for the lord of the land" (p. 64). But then let the leader beware: "The people made war on bad kings in old times." Thus did the system define and maintain a ceiling on the intensification of domestic production by political means and for public purposes. Malo, Kamakau and the other custodians of Hawaiian tradition refer habitually to the paramount chiefs as "kings". But the trouble was precisely that they were not kings. They had not broken structur­ally with the people at large, so they might dishonor the kinship morality only on pain of a mass disaffection. And without a monopoly of force, the probability was that the general discontent would come down on their particular heads. In a comparative perspective, the great disadvantage of the Hawaiian organization was its primitive-ness: it was not a state. Its further advance could only have been secured by an evolution in that direction. If Hawaiian society discov­ered limits to its ability to augment production and polity, this thresh­old which it had reached but could not cross was the boundary of primitive society itself.

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 898