Islands of History

Marshall Sahlins

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226162157
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Marshall Sahlins centers these essays on islands—Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand—whose histories have intersected with European history. But he is also concerned with the insular thinking in Western scholarship that creates false dichotomies between past and present, between structure and event, between the individual and society. Sahlins's provocative reflections form a powerful critique of Western history and anthropology.

1

Supplement to the Voyage of Cook; or, le calcul sauvage

I. Venus Observed: History

7 December 1778. The Resolution and Discovery were beating against the wind off the north coast of Hawai’i Island.* On this day, Captain Cook finally relented and granted Hawaiian women the right to be loved that they had been demanding since the British first anchored at Kaua’i, January last, discovering these Sandwich Islands to the Western world. At Kaua’i, Cook had published orders prohibiting all intercourse with the local women, for fear of introducing the “Veneral Complaint.” But the same pages of his journal that record these orders also convey Cook’s sense of their futility (Beaglehole 1967:265–66).¹ Similar measures had already failed at Tonga, and the behavior of the Hawaiian women was even more scandalous. The invitation in their erotic gestures was “unmistakable,” chroniclers of the voyage relate, and when refused they “abused us most sincerely” (King Journal: 20 Jan. 1778; cf. Riou Log: 28 Nov. 1779). David Samwell—surgeon’s mate, Welshman, and minor poet—found “the Young Women ... in general exceedingly beautiful.” They “used all their arts,” he said, “to entice our people into their Houses, and finding [the sailors] were not to be allured by their blandishments, they endeavoured to force them & were so importunate they would absolutely take no denial” (in Beaglehole 1967:1083).²

The evidence of what had then transpired was quickly made known to the British when they returned to the Islands from Northwest America. At Maui—separated from the events at Kaua’i by ten months, several islands, and over two hundred nautical miles—a number of Hawaiian men applied to the ships’ surgeons in great distress: “They had a Clap, their Penis was much swelled and inflamed” (King in Beaglehole 1967:498).³ Astonished by the possibility that the disease could spread so rapidly, many of Cook’s people refused to believe the Hawaiian allegations that they had been its authors. Still, as surgeon Ellis later reflected, “no people in the world … indulge their sexual appetites as much as these” (1782, 2:153). Captain Cook, in any event, now gave up the pretense of a discipline he was powerless to enforce on anyone but himself.⁴ By the time the Resolution reached the south coast of Hawaii, he was complaining of the difficulty of working the ship with so many women about. Samwell had no complaints: just a wave of the hand, he said, could bring a “handsome Girl” to the deck, “like another Venus just rising from the Waves”; and when the British finally anchored at Kealakekua Bay, “there was hardly one of us that may not vie with the grand Turk himself” (Beaglehole 1967:1154, 1159).

Le’a is the Hawaiian word for it.⁵ It is not just the famous aloha. Aloha can refer to the beloved, but its meaning extends to pitié in the Rousseauean sense, the sympathy we feel for the suffering of any sensible being, especially those like ourselves. In this sense, aloha suggests a kinship of substance with the other, and a giving without thought of immediate returns. But le’a is passion rather than compassion: a relation between beings who are complementary in nature and who—as in a certain famous paradigm of good socialism as good sex—gratify themselves in gratifying each other. The dictionary entry for le’a is virtually a poem, and perhaps will help convince you that we are dealing with Hawaiian history, not European fantasy. Le’a: “joy, pleasure, happiness, merriment: sexual gratification, orgasm; pleasing, delightful, happy, merry,” etc. The causative ho’ole’a means ‘to extol’ or ‘praise’, as in ‘Praise the Lord’ (ho’ole’a i ke Akua)—which is what Hawaiian women were doing on Cook’s ships. Le’a also denotes something done thoroughly, as in ‘thoroughly cooked’ (mo’a le’a)—which, in a Polynesian way, is also what they were doing.

The first men who came off to the Resolution at Kaua’i in January 1778 had made incantations, apparently to consecrate themselves, before boarding. One of them, in open view of the British, then proceeded to carry off the first thing that came to hand, the ship’s sounding line. Halted by bourgeois counterin-cantations of sacred property rights, he said he was merely taking it to his canoe. Everything transpired as if centuries of Hawaiian sacrifice had finally paid off.⁶ And also as if the historical event were the metaphor of a mythical reality. When the English anchored next year at Kealakekua, Hawaiian priests were able to objectify their interpretation of Cook as the Year-God Lono, on his annual return to renew the fertility of the land. In a famous scene at the principal temple, the Great Navigator was made to hold his arms outstretched in imitation of the crosspiece image of Lono, while the priests made the customary offerings.⁷ Two years running Cook had made his advent during the Makahiki, New Year festival of Lono, in the classic Frazerian mode of the dying god. As we shall see in a later chapter (4), Cook obliged the Hawaiians by playing the part of Lono to its fatal end.

In the New Year rituals, Lono’s regeneration of nature is also symbolized as a sacred marriage, a search for his forsaken wife: beautiful chiefess of ancient lineage who had been captured by a political upstart to sire the succession of living kings. Now at Kealakekua, Samwell had remarked that “the Young Women spend most of their time in singing and dancing, of which they are very fond” (Beaglehole 1967:1181). The allusion is to the famous hula, a dance considered blasphemous for its eroticism by later American missionaries, which is just what made it religious for the Hawaiians (cf. Barrère et al. 1980). It was a practice especially of the New Year. The patron of the dance was Laka, known in ancient chant as sister and wife to Lono (Emerson 1965:24). The hula would sexually arouse the returning god of cosmic reproduction, if it did not more directly signify the copulation of Lono with the living daughters of the goddess. One could say, then, that the sexual practices of Laka’s devotées aboard Cook’s ships were just a change of register. Meanwhile, as Fornander remarks, the British seamen were faithful to the complementary and inverse creed of the buccaneers, that “there is no God this side of Cape Horn” (Fornander 1969, 2:163). The women offered themselves because they thought there was a god, and the sailors took them because they had forgotten it.

4 March 1779. The British ships are again at Kaua’i, their last days in the Islands, some thirteen months since their initial visit. A number of Hawaiian men come on board and under the direction of their women, who remain alongside in the canoes, the men deposit the navel cords of newborn children in cracks of the ships’ decks (Beaglehole 1967:1225).⁸

Hommages à Diderot. In the end he was able to put aside his utilitarian explanations of an analogous Tahitian sexuality for one that could perceive in the calculus of practice the premises of a Polynesian theogamy. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville would do as well for Cook. Almost everything the sage Orou says to the naïve French chaplain echoes the words and deeds recorded in the chronicles of Cook at Hawaii:

More robust and healthier than you, we perceived at first glance that you surpassed us in intelligence, and on the spot we selected several of our most beautiful women and daughters to harvest the seed of a race better than our own. It is a trial that we have made and that could work out to our benefit. We have taken from you and yours the only advantage we could take, and believe me, altogether savage as we are, we also know how to calculate (Diderot 1972 [1772/80]:459–60).

But the Hawaiian women’s transcendental calculus of love was not something the British could understand. Neither did it at first merit the title of “prostitution” it was soon destined to receive. The women “were but little influenced by interested motives in their intercourse with us,” runs a characteristic journal entry, “as they would almost use violence to force you into their Embrace regardless whether we gave them anything or not” (Beaglehole 1967:1085).⁹ Yet the British seamen knew how to repay the services done them; more precisely, they reified the women’s embraces as “services” by the gifts they made in return. With transactions such as these, the erotic commerce ceased to repeat tradition and began to make history.

The goods in supply among the British were quickly factored by Hawaiian social demands into men’s things and women’s things. Pieces of iron and iron tools such as adzes were men’s goods. The male category was productive, and the female attractive: bead bracelets, scissors, and the mirrors women wore as necklaces and with which (European travelers remarked for decades) they rarely ceased to regard themselves. (In a comedy by Giraudoux of the same title as this piece, a Tahitian woman consoles her daughter with the observation that: “A mirror is always useful, ma fille, even if it doesn’t reflect England.”) The apparent sexual differences are as Hawaiian values complementary, and resolved in a common finality. They are interrelated modes of human reproduction—which, besides, engage men and women in a common opposition to the divine. For the man the promethean task of wresting the substance of humanity from its divine owners in the form of food. For the woman to attract and transform the divine generative forces—not excluding chiefs with land—into the substance of humanity in the form of children. So also sociologically, Hawaiians knew two alternate ways of creating the relationship of childhood: by ‘feeding’ or hānai (usually glossed as ‘adoption’) and by birth. It is thus not remarkable that men and women of the people immediately developed a common interest in each other’s traffic with the British; or that their own common interest put them in opposition to the Hawaiian powers-that-be.

Men brought their sisters, daughters, perhaps even their wives to the ships. Call it hospitality. Or call it spiritual hypergamy. The sailors showed their gratitude by giving the men iron adzes, beside what they gave the women (Beaglehole 1967: 1152–53, 1182). At the same time, the British trading with Hawaiian men for provisions found these demanding at least part payment in bracelets for their women. A notice of the rates of exchange suggests the relative values Hawaiians were putting on things: a pig that would normally cost the British three good adzes could be had for only one if a woman’s bracelet were included in the price (Ellis 1782, 2:158).¹⁰

The rest, as they say, is history. The collective interest in trade developed among men and women of the people set them as a class against their chiefs, whose own interests ran to the goods of status and politics. It also set the people against the tabu system. The chiefs instituted tabus to control and engross the trade on their own behalf—practice not inconsistent spiritually with the mana they stood to gain. There were also customary tabu periods each month, when chiefs and priests were in the temples; the sea was then interdicted, and the people supposedly confined to their domestic establishments. But the common people showed themselves willing to transgress the tabus of every kind, defiance in which they were sometimes encouraged by the Europeans (Sahlins 1981).

For on board the ships, the sailors were drawing Hawaiian women into their own conceptions of domestic tranquillity. They invited their lovers to sup, on such foods as pork, bananas, and coconuts. So did the women doubly violate the strictest Hawaiian tabus on intersexual dining. Customarily, men’s meals were taken in communion with ancestral gods, and these very foods were the sacrifice, hence at all times prohibited to women. The participation of the women would defile the sacrifier, the offering, and, for that matter, the god. But then, the food tabus never sat on the women with the same force they had for men, being rather the negative imprint of the men’s consecration. On the other hand, the Hawaiian logic of tabu remained in force on board the ships, with this effect: it consumed the divinity of the foreigner. As men who ate with women, the British soon found themselves desecrated, polluted. They were secularized, and an ethnic cleavage set in between Hawaiians and Europeans that was not envisioned, for example, by that Hawaiian who first carried off the Resolution’s sounding line. In the ensuing decades, Captain Cook alone was able to preserve his divinity—since the Hawaiians had already sacrificed him. But when Vancouver arrived at Kealakekua fourteen years after Cook, King Kamehameha solemnly requested that none of the English be allowed to enter any Hawaiian temple, lest it be defiled. By contrast, Cook’s own people had freely used the principal temple as a place to repair their sails, recruit their sick, and bury their dead. When Vancouver left, King Kamehameha went into seclusion to purify himself because, he explained, “of his having lived in such social intercourse with us, who had eaten and drunk in the company of women” (Vancouver 1801, 3:222). So was the course of history orchestrated by the logic of culture.

There is in all this another essay on the dialectics of structure and practice in the history of the Sandwich Islands. But I have already written about that (Sahlins 1981). I invoke this history here mainly to suggest the role that love has had in making it. The questions it then leads to are again historical and structural. How are we to understand this remarkable expression of eroticism in Hawaii? As a “pattern of culture” it seems worthy of comparison with the militarism of Sioux Indians or the quietism of the Hopi—dare one place an “Aphrodisian” alongside the famous “Dionysian” and “Apollonian”? Beyond that, the Hawaiian order is appropriately placed in that whole family of cultures, including our own, which prefer to sediment structural relations out of pragmatic actions, rather than determining the actions a priori from the relations. Here is a serious matter for social thought. For, unable so far to develop any theory of these systems beyond the statistical and the practical, anthropology has risked excluding them from the meaningful and the cultural.

II. Venus Again Observed: The Ethnography of Love

One should respect the observation made by the British that the women who flew precipitously into the arms of the English seamen were not of the highest rank (Cook and King 1784, 3:30–31). On the other hand, within the context of traditional Hawaiian society, the erotic interest knew no such limitations of class or sex. It engaged men as well as women, chiefs as well as commoners. There was wife-capture as well as husband-capture, hypogamy as well as hypergamy, homosexuality as well as heterosexuality. Famous ruling chiefs were bisexual, but the preoccupation with sex was expressed as much in the virginity enjoined on certain young persons as in the liberties granted to others. Sociologically, love was a decisive principle of the form (or formlessness) of the family, as of its division of labor. It was a favored means of access to power and property. Rank and tabu might be gained or lost by it. Indeed, popular heterosexual games of chance were played for it. Children, at least of the elite, were socialized in the arts of love. Girls were taught the ‘amo’amo the ‘wink-wink’ of the vulva, and the other techniques that “make the thighs rejoice.” Young chiefs were sexually initiated by older women, preparing them thus for the sexual conquests that singularly mark a political career:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: Supplement to the Voyage of Cook; or, le calcul sauvage
• 2: Other Times, Other Customs: The Anthropology of History
• 3: The Stranger-King; or, Dumézil among the Fijians
• 4: Captain James Cook; or, The Dying God
• 5: Structure and History
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index