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Article Excerpt
Abstract
Micronesia was initially settled from at least three quite separate points of origin and comprises multiple cultural and linguistic stocks. It nevertheless manifests a striking uniformity in its sociopolitical organization. I argue that these shared aspects of Micronesian societies diffused out of the Eastern Caroline Islands as a consequence of a prehistoric sociocultural efflorescence driven at least in part by the hybridization of two entirely different breadfruit species. The characteristic form of Micronesia's dispersed conical clans was spread throughout the entire region, carried along with the economic successes conferred by productive new breadfruit varieties. Botanical, linguistic, archaeological and ethnological data are marshaled to substantiate this argument.
Keywords: Micronesia, social organization, subsistence, breadfruit, culture area
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Although Micronesia constitutes a coherent geographic region, it is sometimes dismissed as having little or no validity as an ethnological concept. Archaeological and linguistic evidence make it clear that the eastern and western reaches of the area were initially settled by different peoples moving out of distinctly different homelands, probably at different times. It is primarily because of these disparate origins, as compared, say, to the relative homogeneity of the Polynesians, that the existence of a valid Micronesian culture area is denied, although other sociocultural differences have also been cited (Hanlon 1989; Kirch 2000: 5; Kirch and Green 2001: 63; Rainbird 2003, 2004; Clark 2003). But it can be argued that Micronesia is, at least for comparative purposes, substantially more significant than Polynesia as a culture area. This is so precisely because of its multiple origins; the differences between Micronesia's many societies pale before their similarities. These commonalities exist precisely because of Micronesia's characteristic social form, the dispersed matrilineal clan. Micronesia is defined not by matriliny, however, but by the fact that its societies are linked together by a common, shared network of matrilineal clans and the longstanding patterns of social interaction they facilitate, and it is for this reason that it is much more informative about, or at least more representative of, the sorts of processes that have historically gone into shaping cultural regions or areas.
This article argues that this shared Micronesian sociocultural core is primarily the consequence of an historical process of diffusion that was driven, some 6001200 years ago, by what might be called a 'breadfruit revolution'. This process had its genesis in the latter part of the first millennium AD in the high islands of the Eastern Carolines and then spread east and west, bearing with it a complex of cultural and social practices, including cultivation of hybrid breadfruit varieties, classic matriclan organization, and a range of political and religious cult practices. When Dumont d'Urville first described the region he called Micronesia, he was pointing to what were in fact the results of a long process of culture history, and not merely conjuring up a convenient but ultimately erroneous rubric.
Mieronesia's settlement and early prehistory
Despite the archaeological work conducted throughout Micronesia (Fig. 1) in the past few decades, the origins of the Micronesian peoples remain uncertain. As Irwin notes, "The source of eastern Micronesian settlement, somewhere between eastern Melanesia and West Polynesia, is as vague as that for western Micronesian settlement, somewhere in the Philippines or eastern Indonesia" (1992: 6-7). What follows does not review Micronesian prehistory, which has been ably covered by Rainbird (2004) but simply notes important points regarding the area's initial settlement that are critical to the main thrust of this article.
In the late first millennium BC, when eastern Micronesia was first occupied, the atolls--what are now Kiribati, the Marshalls, and some of the eastern Carolines--were probably still partially awash (Dickenson 2003; Nunn 1994). The earliest archaeologically-known settlements in the high islands, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Chuuk, appear to represent the original occupation. It is likely that these were the consequence of multiple voyages from sites in the southeast Solomons, the Santa Cruz islands, and perhaps elsewhere in this general vicinity (Irwin 1992: 130), and that the earliest settlers were a heterogeneous lot. The peoples of all these high islands speak languages grouped into the Nuclear Micronesian branch of Eastern Oceanic.
Modern Melanesian societies in the general region out of which the Micronesians' ancestors migrated manifest a great many different kinship and descent systems. Some are characterized by matrilineal beliefs and practices, some by patriliny, some are bilateral, and others combine multiple aspects of these classic types. There is no compelling reason to presume that because modern Micronesia is overwhelmingly matrilineal, only matriliny was initially introduced into the region. (1)
The matrilineal forms that were carried into eastern Micronesia from Melanesia proved considerably more useful to these pioneers than the other sorts of social institutions that arrived with them. Modern Micronesia's matriclans are distinctly different from those of eastern Melanesia, but are quite similar to one another. Each comprises numerous lineages which are in turn dispersed among multiple adjacent communities and islands. Most clans have localized branches--subclans--encountered throughout entire archipelagoes (e.g. the Marshalls or the Eastern Carolines). Several are even more widely distributed, extending in some cases from Kiribati to Pohnpei and from Kosrae to the Marianas and Belau's Southwest Islands. Any given local lineage is linked to lineages on other islands not simply through ties of friendship or patterns of exchange but through deep and permanent bonds of kinship. It is the broad and supple webs of ties linking each of the constituent households or descent groups of any particular community to a substantial number of groups in other communities and on other islands that enable all the communities of an island or island group to survive. While Micronesian matriliny may well trace its roots to eastern Melanesia, what is diagnostic about it is quite distinct from the forms found in Melanesia and it quite misunderstands the actual situation to speak of a 'matrilineal belt' as if there were a single basic social form or type common to both areas.
The origins and prehistory of western Micronesia differ in significant ways from those of the eastern islands, with all indications being that Belau was settled from Indonesia and the Marianas from the Philippines, approximately 3000 years BP (Shutler 1999). Yap's history is highly complex, with apparent influences from the east and west and quite possibly from the Admiralty Islands (Ross 1996). Historically known societies throughout eastern Indonesia and the Philippines are overwhelmingly bilateral or cognatic in organization. The few that do practice unilineal descent are generally patrilineal (though most of these have been influenced by Islam). The only societies in this entire region reported to have matrilineal organization lie scattered among a few islands off the northeast coast of Timor (LeBar 1972, 1975). (2) Given the general absence of matrilineal clanship in this area, there is no compelling reason to think that the peoples who settled western Micronesia from island Southeast Asia were practicing matriliny when they came, or that if by some remote chance they did, it survived in Micronesia any longer than it did in the Philippines or in the general vicinity of Sulawesi.
On the other hand, western Micronesia's matrilineal clans are for the most part identical to the forms that evolved in eastern Micronesia, and which proved so adaptive that they diffused westward with the Nuclear Micronesian-speaking peoples who inhabit all the Carolines atolls. That is, western Micronesian patterns of matrilineal organization are eastern Micronesian in origin. Western Micronesia was settled before the east, and yet a set of traits largely evolved in situ in eastern Micronesia came to typify western Micronesian culture and society. How did this happen? It appears to have been a consequence of a significant transformation in Micronesian economies, which in turn had tremendous effects on Micronesian social systems. This shift came as a consequence of what can be termed Micronesia's 'breadfruit revolution'.
The breadfruit revolution
Evidence suggests that much of Micronesia underwent substantial sociocultural transformations in the years between 1000-1500 AD. These entailed ecological, economic, demographic, social, and political changes in many, perhaps most of the region's societies. Aspects of this--important aspects--can best be attributed to Micronesia's breadfruit revolution, a development in the region's agricultural economies that would lead to far-reaching changes in other aspects of life there.
Eastern Micronesia's subsistence economies are tied overwhelmingly to breadfruit. Early settlers on Kosrae and Pohnpei depended upon a mix of tree and root crops with particular emphasis on breadfruit, but pollen records also show that they shifted toward a greater reliance on breadfruit (Athens 1995; Ayres et al. 1979). It may be that in the early settlement period only a portion of the Lapita peoples' broader crop inventory was carried northward, but it is at least as likely that in the course of the first millennium of settlement in eastern Micronesia breadfruit's unprecedented success in the Eastern Carolines resulted in the neglect or abandonment of some crops. It is worth noting that...
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