Abstract
The aim of the chapter is to examine sociopolitical terms in Polynesian Outlier societies, propose their etymologies and derive possible historical implications from these. Outliers represent several independent migrations from West Polynesia into Melanesia and Micronesia, many developed in significant isolation under severe ecological constraints. Their typical size is a few hundred persons; some were reduced to fewer than twenty in the nineteenth century and later restored their size. Surprisingly, these societies are complex, stratified into ‘nobles’, ‘commoners’ and ‘slaves’, with a wide range of variation regarding how leadership is organized. We can speculate that their way of life is largely due to the ideas inherited from the great ancestors who lived on big islands in West Polynesia. Etymologies of sociopolitical terms in six Polynesian Outliers imply that the institutions of leadership and larger social groups were constantly created and reinvented in the history of these islands, frequently in accordance with the principle of the growing conical clan. Interestingly enough, many terms for social groups are derived from the words denoting places of residence, indicating that the social groups are constructed as landholding corporations. Expectedly, the words ‘chief’ and ‘noble person’ are more stable than ‘commoner’ and ‘slave’ in the history of Polynesian Outliers.
There are many things in the sea which do not have names.
Nukeria saying, from author’s fieldwork diary of 2013
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Notes
- 1.
The shortening of the vowel is difficult to explain (cf. Donner 1988).
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Acknowledgements
Many friends, colleagues and accidental foreigners have helped this work to be born, but it is impossible to mention all. I would like to thank here in the first place Aruka Kareva, Brendon Wells, Rumano Mahara and Tom Puaria. I am also grateful to Aymeric Hermann, Mikhail Zhivlov, Richard Moyle, Richard Feinberg and William Donner.
Support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics is gratefully acknowledged, too.
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Davletshin, A.I. (2020). Building Societies on Outer Islands: Sociopolitical Institutions and Their Names in Polynesian Outliers. In: Bondarenko, D.M., Kowalewski, S.A., Small, D.B. (eds) The Evolution of Social Institutions. World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51437-2_27
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