Egalitarianism in Hawii

The suggestion is essentially that, in fundamental respects, modern Pacific cultures and practices are organized oppositionally. This condition can be further documented with material from contemporary traditionalist Hawaiian society, through Jocelyn Linnekin's (1985) study of a settlement on Maui. Keanae is “a taro place,” a marginal settlement of about fifty households, seen both by outsiders and residents as having a “real Hawaiian” feel; it was still, in the mid-'seventies, a “reservoir of tradition” (Linnekin 1985, 18–22). This traditionalism was of course starkly different from that of anti-Christian Melanesians such as the Malaitan Kwaio and Sa speakers of Pentecost (Keesing 1982; Jolly 1982), and even from that inscribed in Christian “kastom,” because contact history in Hawaii has greater temporal depth and was marked by some savage moments of dispossession or displacement (for an overview, see Kent 1983). Continuity with early religious beliefs might be expected to be virtually nonexistent, given the celebrated chiefly abrogation of the kapu system in 1819 and the extent of subsequent development of various missions and indigenous churches.

Linnekin effectively demonstrates that what is now taken to be authentically Hawaiian as opposed to what is haole (foreign or white) is largely invented tradition:

A key concept in the organization of the cultural revival is that of 'ohana, a term for extended family … [which] appears rarely in texts and archival materials from the nineteenth century, but today it refers to an idealized version of the Hawaiian family unit, characterized by cooperation (kokua ), internal harmony,

and aloha (love, affection). The word evokes Hawaiian kinship and solidarity…. 'Ohana also describes an ethic of egalitarianism and thus represents the rejection of certain historical aspects of Hawaiian society [i.e., stratification and chieftainship]. (1985, 12)

This point is made in relation to contemporary and partly urban Hawaiian nationalism, but the overall pattern applies in such places as Keanae: “the egalitarian ethic does have a correlate in rural society, although aloha and kokua represent the ideals rather than the reality of village social relations” (1985, 12). The assertion of rural Hawaiian identity was and presumably still is thus based more on generalized notions about the importance of wide bilateral networks of relatives (in which one has aunties and uncles) and the value of gift-giving as opposed to purchase and sale, rather than upon a Melanesian-style retention of specific practices such as revalorized gender taboos and menstrual segregation.

Exchange is one of the central concerns of Linnekin's study. She notes that while Keanae Hawaiians are deeply and indisputably embedded in various capitalist relations, there is a strong ethic that within the village things, and especially food, should be given rather than sold. In practice food is offered constantly, both in the contexts of casual visiting, and in luau —feasts celebrating marriages, anniversaries, and the like. “The luau celebrates relatedness and the ideal of aloha” (1985, 114).

The larger interpretation of local gift exchange foregrounded in Linnekin's book is entangled with a knotty set of issues in the history of anthropological ideas: the Melanesia-Polynesia division, and the conflation of that pair of ethnological terms with the social conditions of “equality” and “inequality.” It might seem that Linnekin's work makes a further healthy step toward undermining these tired and very misleading labels, since her suggestion is essentially that the “important people” of Keanae, those who mobilize labor and offer major luau—are like Melanesian big men (1985, chap. 8) (although certain points of contrast, and especially the fact that the Hawaiians understate prestige, are consistently noted). Yet whereas the concept of Polynesian ascribed rank has retained currency (despite its limitations), the stereotype of the egalitarian, competitive Melanesian system is now discredited (see Douglas [1979], Jolly [1987a ] for extended critique). Linnekin's argument introduces the most dubious and problematic aspects of the Melanesian construct into the contemporary Polynesian situation.

As was the case with Kahn's book, it could not be complained that Children of the Land is an ahistorical work that suppresses the extent to which the people studied have been affected and indeed absolutely transformed by historical changes. It is not only an unlikely work to be flawed by colonial history; taken together with some of Linnekin's articles (e.g., 1983), it directly addresses the mutability and social basis of notions of tradition in Hawaii.

My interest here, however, is not in criticizing Linnekin's work, which more recently (1990) has included a valuable synthesis and development of the debate about tradition and identity in the Pacific; I am concerned rather with the way in which anthropologists' analytical frameworks can often obscure the oppositional character of substantivized traditions.^[5] Hence the elucidation of the status of “important people” through reference to Melanesian big men, which is central to Linnekin's book, seems to deflect a more effective contextualization of Hawaiian ideology in history.

Although it is true that Melanesian big men, like chiefs (among other Pacific political figures), might be restrained or cut down to size if perceived to be despotic or overly domineering, the antihierarchical nature of Keanae egalitarianism seems to have a rather more specific character. Linnekin notes at several points that the ideology is at variance with actual inequalities of property, but that much is made in practice of diminishing these differences: “the Hawaiian social ethic demands that individuals deny their achievements, repudiate special status, and avoid differences in social position” (Linnekin 1985, 135, 142–145, 209–210, etc.). This case thus almost amounts to an inversion of what Sahlins reported from Moala, where mechanisms such as kerekere removed material inequalities by transforming them into “social” asymmetries, that is, into prestige relations associated with giving and receiving (1962, 146). In Hawaii, actual differences are sustained while equality in interaction and behavior is upheld: “the Hawaiian big-man's role is notable in its understatement and in the public denial of any special status” (1985, 212). While Linnekin discusses the contrast with Melanesian systems in this regard, it is not explained beyond further reference to “the Hawaiian ethic of egalitarianism” (1985, 235–247).

This “ethic” need not, however, be the end point of analysis; it has some singular features that are consistent with a comparative model of egalitarianism in poor and marginal societies. I refer here to Jayawardena's argument about the interrelationship between “the existence in a complex society of a local community whose members occupy a uniformly low status in the wider system” and “a dominant egalitarian ideology that provides the norms [and] the basis of social solidarity” (1968, 425, 426). The people

are, or believe themselves to be, economically and politically under-privileged. They are not reconciled to their position and therefore are antagonistic to the social order and the upper class that represents it, whom they think are responsible for their deprivation and subjection…. The norms derived from the [egalitarian] ideology conflict with a degree of differentiation that actually exists [within the marginal community]. (1968, 425–426)

This argument is based primarily on Guyanese plantation workers of Indian origin who were obviously extracted from their own societies and

severely oppressed in a way that was rare in the colonial Pacific (although the conditions of Chinese laborers on Hawaiian plantations were probably as severe [Kent 1983, 41]). There are few parallels to the “violent collective protests” reported by Jayawardena (1968, 418–423; see also Jayawardena 1963).

However, Jayawardena's argument becomes more appropriate to the Pacific case if the significance of egalitarian ideology is seen less in terms of its function for a lower-class community, than in terms of an oppositional cultural process whereby the ideals of a particular group are produced through an inversion of the values of the dominating external world. The members of the marginal community invert the values they perceive as the ones that energize a larger set of discriminating relations. Hence formulations such as “you are money people, we are taro people.” This is part of a reactive process of positive collective self-identification within which a local group distinguishes itself, and expresses its own worth, by articulating and elaborating features of local practice which contrast with attributes of wider social relations. This process frequently operates in conjunction with a sense that the Europeans who perpetrate discrimination in workplaces or elsewhere, are also (generically) the producers of valuables, the possessors of wealth, and the means of obtaining and appropriating such valuables. The foreigners must often therefore be dealt with, perhaps through indentured labor, and are therefore represented in specific, ambivalent, and emotionally salient ways.

Partly through the influence of the “invention of tradition” paradigm, Pacific anthropologists have become aware of the extent to which traditional culture now operates as a “political symbol” (Keesing 1989), but it is important to examine the sense in which foreigners and colonizers were not a self-evident intrusion and presence but were also worked into an image by Melanesians and Polynesians, which then provided a foil for their own reactive self-identifications. The strength of fraternal (male) solidarity and egalitarianism among those who engage or have engaged in migrant labor must clearly be seen in this context (see Jolly 1987b ).

Hawaiian egalitarianism has a longer history in a whole sequence of displacements and cannot be seen as an immediate reaction to specific work conditions; it is rather a generalized reversal of the principles that order the external world. Gift-giving, as one of the main elements of the asserted local culture, is not a self-subsistent category but something that is defined in opposition to the sorts of transactions conducted by outsiders:

Hawaiians say that monetary transactions have no place within the village. As one informant explained, “Keanae is a small place. The minute you sell, you going to get in trouble. You give, don't sell. When you give, something tastes good; but when you sell, it not going to taste so good.” (Linnekin 1985, 137)

The “ethic” of egalitarianism of course upholds precisely what is absent, both in the general relationships that constitute the minority or oppressed group as such and in the differentiation within that group. Jayawardena argued that the combination of an egalitarian ideology with actual discrepancies of wealth led to “frequent disputes between individuals over real or alleged breaches of egalitarian norms” (1968, 426). It is notable that there are direct parallels between the “eyepass” disputes he reports from Guyana and a process noted by Linnekin of “talk stink”: critical gossip about objectionable behavior, in reaction to unseemly status seeking, reflecting the acute disapproval of those who “act high,” leading in some instances to the almost complete ostracism of offenders (1985, 146). As a Portuguese garage foreman told Linnekin, “[T]hey cannot stand the minute you little bit higher than them” (1985, 145).

Since writing the body of this paper I have spent some time in the western interior of Viti Levu, the largest island of the Fiji group. It would be inappropriate to extend the arguments of this essay with substantial ethnographic detail, but it may briefly be said that contemporary rural Fijian culture has a strong “oppositional” character of the kind postulated here. The constitution of “the Fijian way” (which has been discussed by Toren [1984] among other recent writers) places great emphasis on sharing, kinship, reciprocity, and respect. Fijian customs (itovo ) or manners (varau ) also entail hospitality and the welcoming of others. Here, the cruder and more rhetorically positive constructions seem to have been influenced by, or at least share imagery with, tourist constructs of “Fiji—the way the world should be.” However, from the rural perspective the emergence of these values from a distinctive Fijian-Christian social order constituted both hierarchically (through chieftainship) and on the basis of loloma (Christian affection and kin solidarity) is more significant. The polarities are between the way of the land (na itovo vakavanua ) and the path of money (na calevu ni lavo ); Indians and foreigners are dedicated to the latter, and are rhetorically said to be inhospitable, indifferent to kinship, and to be concerned much more with work and the money it generates than with children and wider family ties.^[6]

It should perhaps be made clear that the argument about the oppositional character of these Fijian cultures—which I think is true with permutations and to a greater or less degree of all contemporary Pacific societies—does not in some sense apply to the “whole” of Fijian culture. The reactive selfconstruction does influence practice in many spheres of daily life, but is particularly salient in rhetorical discussions that are specifically concerned with collective self-presentation. It follows from this that visiting foreigners, and particularly ethnographers, are extensively exposed to this form of ideological difference, but it would be wrong to suppose that these statements are made only to foreigners. Their internal relevance has, of course, been

magnified as the specter of interracial political conflict has been raised over recent years—small wonder that a Fijian anthropologist should bring out a work entitled The Fijian Ethos in the year of the coup (Ravuvu 1987). But the contrast between the way of the land and the path of money is perhaps even more significant as a way of encoding social difference within the Fijian community. People of the interior and others in villages and outlying islands make much of their commitment to the way of custom, setting themselves up as the “real” Fijians in opposition to those in town, who may have done well in money terms but have abandoned their Fijian-ness. Speaking of this, a man who had fought the Japanese most of the way through the Solomons before settling for the rest of his life in a tranquil interior village, said of Fijians in town, Eri sa qulu na itovo ni vavalagi —they have picked up the customs of foreigners—because, he said, they watch videos. This is, of course, a stereotype: urban Fijians are no more Westernized than the lives of rural Fijians are really mirrored in the positive but highly selective constitution of “the way of the land.”