Ethnology Monographs, no. 21. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 2012. viii, 225 pp. (Maps, illus.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-945428-15-2.
This book problematizes a classificatory convention we have come to take for granted: that the 22 Polynesian outlier societies (from Nukuoro in the Caroline Islands to West Uvea in New Caledonia) are starkly distinct populations isolated among culturally Melanesian or Micronesian archipelagos in the western Pacific. Feinberg, Scaglion and their contributors demonstrate that the outlier concept is an imperfect response to the limitations of Dumont d’Urville’s reductive early nineteenth-century demarcation of Oceania into Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Moreover, these 12 ethnological essays compile and analyze a wealth of information on the complexity of Oceanic settlement processes and cultural interaction over the last three millennia. The thematic chapters are highly interdisciplinary and shift from archaeology, linguistics, material culture and economy, to kinship, social structure, performing arts and religion. In its own way, each essay asks how the Polynesian outlier societies are similar and different, and attempts to identify the settlement processes, cultural interactions and independent transformations each has undergone to alter an initially Polynesian people into 22 diverse and hybrid populations.
Following Feinberg and Scaglion’s clear and synthetic introduction, the prehistory of outlier settlement is reconstructed by essays from Patrick Kirch, Mike Carson and Robert Early. Originally published in 1984, Kirch’s chapter synthesizes data drawn from lexicostatistics, voyaging simulations, excavation and ceramic analysis to overturn the relict hypothesis that the outliers were anciently settled from the west, in favour of the (now dominant) blow-back model of easterly settlement from West Polynesia circa 1500 AD. Kirch also emphasizes the complexity of the archaeological record, acknowledging the presence of post-Lapita plainware ceramics on some outliers as one part of several intricate histories comprising multiple, successive occupation events. Carson updates the archaeological representation to 2012, and assesses each outlier’s history, economic interactions and identity formation to develop a sophisticated model of diverse outlier settlement processes. He concludes that outlier societies flourished by developing successful strategies for utilizing marginal atoll environments, minimizing competition and suppressing conflict with pre-existing populations. Early considers the linguistic relationship between the outliers and broader Polynesia, and observes that, although language contact and word borrowing make outlier languages more complicated than those of triangle Polynesia, all sit comfortably within the Samoic language group. He characterizes two outlier language clusters, Futunic and Ellicean, which imply two distinct expansions; the former westwards from the vicinity of ‘Uvea or Futuna, and the latter north-westwards from Tuvalu.
In chapter 5, Feinberg and Marianne George shift the book’s emphasis towards recent human-environment interactions by examining the material culture and techniques of outlier seafaring. These cultural elements are more locally hybridized than language, it seems, with sailors in the northern Solomon Islands outliers using typically Micronesian outriggers and shunting sails, while those of Tikopia and Anuta followed the pre-kalia West Polynesian form. Paul Roscoe’s essay on outlier economic activity observes that poverty of materials motivated considerable long-distance trade networks, but supports Raymond Firth’s longstanding assessment that such trade barely impacted on subsistence itself. Roscoe describes a fairly typical Polynesian economy of taro, banana, coconut, fish and birds exploited by small household units, although the rarity of yams and pork undoubtedly reflects the marginal environments of many outliers. Tim Bayliss-Smith’s discussion of root cultivation briefly considers the virtual absence of yams and sweet potatoes from the outliers, before exploring the cultivation and ceremonial use of turmeric and taro on Ontong Java. He interprets turmeric as a signifier of mana in liminal ritual phases, and highlights taro’s continuing significance as the pre-eminent food of ritual presentation. Both Roscoe and Bayliss-Smith comment significantly on the gendered division of labour in outlier economies, which exhibit typically Polynesian complementarities within alternating phases of the same economic activity.
Feinberg and William Donner’s exploration of outlier kinship systems equally emphasizes core Polynesian terms and relationships, reflecting a basically conservative approach to familiarity. They argue that outlier kinship is notably simpler than that of West Polynesia, due to the development of a more flexible approach to descent as a rational response to scarcer resources, more frequent natural disasters and more different neighbours. This is a theme which recurs in Scaglion’s assessment of hereditary chiefship, that most Polynesian of political institutions. Although he recognizes the typically West Polynesian emphasis on inherited rather than achieved status, that region’s complex political and class hierarchies either failed to develop, or were wholly abandoned, on the outliers. Whatever the stressors, the authors make a convincing case that outlier conditions fundamentally transformed West Polynesian culture into something new.
As well as highlighting the retention of cognate dance leader roles and dance-song forms throughout the outliers, Richard Moyle’s review of performance arts examines the centrality of song as ritual practice and religious observance, and explores its resultant importance as an ideological battleground during Christian conversion. This leads nicely on to Feinberg, Judith MacDonald and Roger Lohmann’s discussion of religious practice, which recognizes an unconcern for sorcery among outlier populations when compared to their Melanesian neighbours. Equally, they read the notable absence of Tu, Rongo and Tane cognates in the outlier pantheons as a significant divergence from Polynesian norms. These absences are entirely consistent with the West Polynesian pantheons, however, and this illustrates a key challenge to any ethnological undertaking of this kind: each essay enters into dialogue with a specific regional construction of Polynesian-ness, which inevitably erases the finer differences between its many societies. As Anne and Keith Chambers observe in their closing discussion, it is a remarkable collective achievement for the authors to have identified as much cultural uniformity and distinctiveness in the outliers as they have. Like all good scholarship, this volume raises more questions than it answers, but it establishes a new level of debate and interpretation in outlier studies, and should be indispensable reading for anyone keen to understand Oceanic culture and history.
Andy Mills
University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom
pp. 406-408