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"Kinship Polynesia."
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Living Kinship in the Pacific
Unaisi Nabobo-Baba observed that for the various peoples of the Pacific, kinship is generally understood as \"knowledge that counts.\" It is with this observation that this volume begins, and it continues with a straightforward objective to provide case studies of Pacific kinship. In doing so, contributors share an understanding of kinship as a lived and living dimension of contemporary human lives, in an area where deep historical links provide for close and useful comparison. The ethnographic focus is on transformation and continuity over time in Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa with the addition of three instructive cases from Tokelau, Papua New Guinea, and Taiwan. The book ends with an account of how kinship is constituted in day-to-day ritual and ritualized behavior.
eBook
Conditions and Mechanisms for Peace in Precontact Polynesia
An examination of interpersonal and intergroup violence in a selection of precontact Polynesian islands suggests that violence was lowest when two conditions were met. First, most peaceful islands had populations under about 1,000 people. Second, within this group, the most peaceful societies were those located more than 100 km from their nearest neighbor. The mechanisms by which peace was maintained in small societies included some measure of egalitarianism and direct representation in decision making, a rigorous program of individual sanctions of antisocial behavior, a network of gift‐generated mutual obligation, and a strong kinship network. Interpersonal violence and warfare were correlated in Polynesia, but rather than interpersonal violence creating a foundation for war, it would appear that warfare socialized violence within the society. Given the wide range of violence in Polynesian societies, all of which shared a common heritage, conflict appears to have been a cultural response to the geographic and environmental conditions in which a society found itself.
Journal Article
Queer Kinship Practices in Non-Western Contexts: French Polynesia's Gender-variant Parents and the Law of La République
French Polynesia is an overseas collectivity of France whose kinship practices accommodate transgender parenting through the involvement of gender-variant (mahu) people in childrearing, including as adoptive parents in customary (faamu) adoption. While the existence and visibility of gender-variant people in French Polynesia is well documented, there is no literature on their involvement in parenting, reflecting a more general dearth of research on LGBT parenting in non-Western contexts. Drawing on the author's fieldwork in French Polynesia, this article fills this gap. The article also discusses the negative implications of France's ambivalence towards LGBT parenting for French Polynesian gender-variant parents and the children they raise.
Journal Article
Tuakana-Teina Relationship and Leadership in Ancient Mangaia and Aotearoa
The relationship between tuakana and teina (the older and younger sibling or cousin of same sex) is the tumu (foundation, origin, cause) of rank in eastern Polynesia. By examining historical documents from selected island societies, namely, Mangaia and Aotearoa, we can understand the dynamics of this relationship as part of their world-view. Normally tuakana and teina had close, cooperative, mutually respectful and loyal relationships; the teina supporting their elder. Sometimes, however, the moral balance between them was affected either by one of them acting inappropriately towards the other, or by hostile acts from others. To remedy these threats to social cohesion, various strategies were adopted, including peace-making, flight or spatial separation, or fighting. Stories about this relationship continue to serve as the tumu for today's younger generations.
Journal Article
Demography as the Human Story
This symposium takes as its point of departure two books by Massimo Livi Bacci, Conquest and El Dorado in the Marshes, published in English in 2008 and 2010. Livi Bacci assesses widely varying estimates of the demographic dimensions of the collapse of the native populations following their contact with Europeans and elucidates the proximate causes of that catastrophe. Drawing on models that combine production potential with demography, environment, and technology, Shripad Tuljapurkar discusses analogous historical experiences of the populations of Polynesia and the social transformation they entailed. David S. Reher argues that explanations of the estimated demographic dynamics need to take into account the negative fertility responses of the indigenous population to the disruption of their traditional way of life. Focusing on the biological aspects of immunity to diseases such as smallpox, Andrew Noymer demonstrates that infectious diseases alone could not account for the Indios' population collapse. The contributions to this symposium are based on presentations at a session at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, held in Dallas, Texas, that examined the demographic consequences of the Spanish Conquest of the Caribbean region and of South America in light of the two books.
Journal Article
Structural Parallels between Vaeakau-Taumako and the Vanuatu Outliers: Capell Revisited
This paper examines a set of structural parallels between Vaeakau-Taumako (Pileni), a Polynesian Outlier spoken in Temotu Province in the Solomon Islands, and the Vanuatu Outliers Emae, Ifira-Mele, and Futuna-Aniwa. It shows that these four languages share a set of structural features that is not, as a whole, shared by other known Polynesian languages; other languages may show one or two of the features under discussion, but not all four. It argues that the parallels are too detailed to be coincidental, and asks why it should be that just these four languages show such detailed similarities in structure. While it is not possible on the basis of the available data to decide whether the similarities should be assumed to result from shared origins or contact (or both), it is proposed that they may be seen as tentative support for the suggestion made by Bayard that the Vanuatu Outliers (and West Uvean) received their primary settlement from the Vaeakau-Taumako area, rather than directly from Triangle Polynesia.
Journal Article
PROTO OCEANIC SOCIETY WAS MATRILINEAL
This article considers the distribution of matrilineality in the daughters of Proto Oceanic (POc) society and asserts that this distribution is most conveniently explained by Per Hage's (1998) suggestion that POc society/Ancestral Lapita society may have been matrilineal. The article dismisses the possibility that the modern distributions could be the result of a patrilineal, cognatic or double descent POc society, and states there is little patrilineality or double descent to explain and Oceanic cognatic societies are viewed, in the present model, to have become cognatic locally or at the level of one of their post-POc society interstages. Like Oceanic speaking double-descent societies, patrilineal societies and, of course, those that are still matrilineal, the Oceanic speaking cognatic societies show high levels of matricentricity compared to other world cultures (Hage 1998). The matrilineal distributions are best explained by common history and not by diffusion or parallel development.
Journal Article
Illegitimate Sons, Contentious Affiliations: Mixed Marriages and \Half-Identities\ in French Polynesia
This anthropological analysis of the anomic cases of sons born to ' illegitimate ' couples made up of a Chinese man & a Polynesian woman focuses on the process leading to the formulation of a mixed identity, which is understood as a conflict resulting from a contradictory process of affiliation. In this respect, the itinerary of the sons of a Chinese father & a Polynesian mother is quite telling: though initially adopted in the maternal family, they are later recuperated by the paternal family. As the analysis of a biographical account shows, full-fledged integration in the lineage fails because of contradictions within Chinese kinship. This family is torn between an agnatic ideology & a uterine logic, between its tendency to deny the marital alliance & the necessity of such alliances. Given the colonial situation in Polynesia, this conflict assumes an ethnic dimension. These contradictions impede the full-fledged integration of these illegitimate sons in the lineage & in the Chinese group as a whole. References. Adapted from the source document.
Journal Article
The mysterious bath of Tu'i Tonga Fefine. Kinship, incest and sacred marriage in Polynesia, part I
According to the accounts of the French navigator Dumont d'Urville, in the ancient chiefdom of Tonga (South Pacific), during the ceremony of investiture of a new Tu'i Tonga, or paramount chief, the Tu'i Tonga Fefine, or the late Tu'i Tonga's sister, went to purify herself in a sacred fountain, and nobody would take a bath in this fountain under punishment of death. Replaced in Tonga's symbolical system, this ritual suggests that the Tu'i Tonga Fefine has given birth to an offspring who can be but the new Tu'i Tonga himself and refers simultaneously to an incest between the late Tu'i Tonga and his sister. However, oral traditions and royal genealogies tell that the Tu'i Tonga Fefine was, because of her exalted rank, prohibited to marry till the seventeenth century and, then, used to be married with `a stranger' - a prince of the Fijian royal House. What, under these conditions, could be the signification of the incest - which could be seen also as a sacred marriage - inferred by the great lady's ablution? We propose to enlighten the mystery of the Tu'i Tonga Fefine's bath by trying to understand firstly the relationships which linked these prominent personages at the top of the Tongan hierarchy. Secondly, we will examine how Tongan society conceived some of the events of the life-cycle - fecundation, pregnancy, birth. In the conclusion, we will present an interpretation of the ritual bath and give an explanation of the royal incest as it is phantasmed in the rite. The aim of this article is to show how political logics could be conjugated with elements pertaining to the construction of the personal subject. Reprinted by permission of Anthropos Institut
Journal Article