Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. xxii, 386 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$44.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-29281-9.
When I began studying the anthropology of the Pacific Islands fifty years ago, I had to choose between pursuing ethnography or archaeology. One of the most compelling reasons I decided on ethnography was the then-widely-held notion that environmental conditions in the humid tropics made preservation of human-made features and artifacts nearly impossible. There simply wasn’t much to be dug up, went the bromide.
Patrick Kirch’s revised version of his near-classic On the Road of the Winds appears only eighteen years after the original edition and makes it clear that that received wisdom was very much mistaken. While the broad outlines of settlement and social processes in the Pacific Islands have become well-known, ongoing excavations in the past two decades have rewritten a great many of the details. Some of these are especially salient, including increasing recognition of the importance of trade networks and the environmental and ecological changes wrought by human agency.
Kirch especially underscores the pivotal role played by exchange networks. During the era when the first settlers were making the islands habitable, and throughout their own histories as well, continual interisland voyaging made kinship and marriage relations, trade and exchange, and political integration possible. Representatives of the islands that became the Federated States of Micronesia underscored their own appreciation of this point when they drafted their constitution in the mid-1970s, writing in its preamble: “The seas bring us together, they do not separate us.” This was not idle public relations rhetoric, but rather an expression of a fundamental truth, and it was placed in such a prominent position to ensure that future generations remained conscious of it.
Two other aspects of Kirch’s book drew my attention. One of them looms large, while the other is of perhaps marginal interest—but together they strike me as ways to prise open some of what underlies his perspectives. The first of these has to do with Kirch’s privileging of Polynesia as having a singularly noteworthy place in the study of cultural history. The other has to do with his pathbreaking work on human-environmental dynamics in the histories of the Pacific Islands.
Kirch holds that of the three regions into which ethnologists and geographers divide the Pacific Islands, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, “only Polynesia has stood the test of time as a meaningful unit for culture-historical analysis” (188). He grounds this argument in the notion that “only in Polynesia do we find a group of peoples and cultures who share a common history” (188, his emphasis). I confess that I cannot quite grasp the logic underlying this conclusion. Pre-contact Polynesia may well be the only extensive area on earth that has both been settled by only one population movement and has no neighbors (other than their close kin the Fijians, whose islands represent the Polynesians’ original point of entry) immediately adjacent to its borders. Polynesia certainly presents an interesting case, but it is not particularly instructive regarding the sorts of cultural historical processes that the rest of the world undergoes. Precisely because this is a one-of-a-kind history, it provides us with a model that isn’t especially relevant to historical processes in the rest of the world, where land and life are intermittently, if not continually, contested by migrants, invaders, traders, and other assorted visitors.
Given the immediacy of climate change, global warming, and rising sea levels, on the other hand, this book offers all of us great insights into islanders’ adaptive skills. Farming practices and population growth and movement have long threatened catastrophe on some of the islands, and necessary adaptations to environmental challenges—whether natural or human induced—have always proved a part of reality in Oceania.
Perhaps the most striking cases are in some of the geologically older islands, where soil fertility depended in part on the guano of the millions of seabirds nesting in their forests. When farmers cleared the trees to plant crops they disrupted ancient nutrient cycles. Erosion washed soil off the slopes, and farming techniques, labour practices, and social organization were all transformed as intensive pond-farming of taro and other crops supplanted much less-intensive practices. Land increased in value, and systems of land tenure—and thus of kinship and chieftainship—changed, and with them new notions of conflict resolution arose: in some places, warfare became endemic while in others, leaders became increasingly autocratic.
Important lessons can be drawn. It’s entirely possible that climate change won’t necessarily render these islands uninhabitable, but they are likely to become very different places, with very different societies in the years to come.
Glenn Petersen
City University of New York, New York City, USA