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The Expensive Taste for Modernity
 
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Francis X. Hezel, S.J.
Note: Francis X. Hezel, SJ is THE foremost authority on the history and culture of Micronesia. He wrote this article in 1992. This and his other articles, historical photo albums, etc. can be found at The Micronesian Seminar.
The Caroline and Marshall Islands extend some 2500 miles across the western Pacific and encompass about a hundred inhabited islands. The inhabitants of these two archipelagoes, the geographical center of the area known since the mid-19th century as "Micronesia," are broken up into perhaps ten cultural-linguistic groups. (Anthropologists and linguists have never agreed completely on the number, since one group often shades into another and boundaries are blurred.) While the Carolines and Marshalls are neither by traditional nor modern geopolitical standards a homogeneous unit, it would be a mistake to regard them as simply a Western artifact. The three modern political entities that make up the area -- the Republic of Palau, the Republic of the Marshalls, and the Federated States of Micronesia -- have all recently adopted, or are in the process of adopting a status of Free Association with the US. Moreover, they have shared a hundred years of colonial rule under four different powers. Finally, even before the first Western incursions into the area, they exhibited enough common features to be classified in that cultural family that came to be called Micronesia.
The coral atolls of the Marshalls and the high volcanic islands of Kosrae and Pohnpei -- all of which have distinct but closely related languages -- had relatively stratified societies with paramount chieftainships over extensive sections of these groups (Alkire 1977). Truk and the coral atolls of the central Carolines, whose dialects were part of a single language continuum, had petty chiefs but lacked the strong centralized authority of the east. The high islands of Yap and Palau in the west, which differed considerably from the rest of the area and between themselves in language and culture, showed strong village authority and a ranked network of villages. Despite their relatively rich resource base, these two island groups never developed the degree of stratification that the islands to the east displayed. They may serve as a warning against any overly rigid theory of economic determinism.
All these island societies, like those in other parts of the Pacific, produced all they needed to feed, clothe and shelter themselves; otherwise they would not have survived. They did this by a mode of production and distribution that has come to be termed the "subsistence economy." This is often taken to mean reliance on local resources with a "make-do" technology, but it means a great deal more than that. One feature of the island subsistence economy in the Pacific is its relatively high productivity; families can produce all they need in "3-4 male labor hours a day" (Fisk 1982). This allows plenty of time for people to maintain social relationships within the family and community, and even to develop the elaborate social rituals that some societies practiced. Available land and sea resources were under-utilized -- at least by today's standards -- to allow them to replenish. There were no incentives to produce a surplus except for the occasional food distributed to the community, under a chief, as an expression of solidarity. The reward for such surplus production as was required was enhanced prestige in the community. On the whole, the "subsistence economy" could be considered as much a mindset as a mode of production. It represents a cluster of attitudes that are inimical to many of those values associated with modern development in a monetized economy.
Micronesians engaged in some inter-island trade, but this was of marginal importance since most places had the same limited resources anyway. Only for atoll-dwellers, exposed to the fury of the typhoons that periodically denuded their islands, were the traditional trading networks essential. Their ties through trade contacts with other islands in the area were an insurance of aid in time of natural disaster (Alkire 1965).
The island societies of Micronesia are usually regarded as having been static prior to Western contact. Indeed, there is good reason for this. They had limited environmental resources with which to work -- copper and iron ages demand metals and the means of extracting them. The islands were relatively isolated from one another -- sea voyages of even several days brought them to other islands with similar resources and technologies.
Furthermore, the societies looked on maintenance of the system as a virtue and disruption as perilous, given the need to maintain harmony in their small communities. This is not to deny the fact of occasional change, even major change at times, usually as an imposition from without. The oral history of Pohnpei, less shadowy than most, records the conquest of the island by a force from across the sea that built the mammoth stone settlement at Nan Madol. The conquerors were presumably also the architects of a similar settlement on Kosrae. Kava and other non-indigenous cultural elements may have been introduced in the same period, which is dated by archaeologists at the 13th century.
Europeans first visited the islands in the early 16th century in the wake of Magellan's voyage. The Spanish stopovers were infrequent, short, and of little lasting impact aside from the introduction of the marvel of iron tools. Even if the Spanish had not bedazzled islanders with nails and iron hoop, however, the latter would have discovered this technological wonder on their own -- as they did in fact on drift voyages to the Philippines and the Marianas in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Those islanders fortunate enough to obtain pieces of iron sequestered their treasure under their mats as they slept and sought more "with the same longing that you have for heaven," as a priest was told by one Carolinian castaway (Hezel 1983: 39). The atoll-dwellers of the central Carolines began making yearly voyages to Guam to obtain more of the metal for a time, but these voyages were discontinued when a party failed to return in 1788 and were presumed to have been imprisoned or murdered by the Spanish on Guam (Kotzebue 1821 v 2: 240). The desultory European visits during the late 18th century, after two centuries of Micronesian isolation, produced little more than had early Spanish contacts. Finding a dependable supply of iron was a problem that persisted until the early 19th century when regular European trade contacts were established in the area.
When Ltke and the other naval commanders surveyed the area between 1815 and 1849, they found the atoll-dwellers of the central Carolines and Mortlocks far more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than the inhabitants of the larger volcanic islands of Yap, Truk, Pohnpei and Kosrae (Nozikov 1946; Ltke 1835 v 2). When offered metal fishhooks, Kosraeans inserted them in their earlobes as ornaments; and others were baffled about how to use steel axes. The Mortlockese, on the other hand, scoffed at the iron bars and hoop they were offered and insisted on knives, tinder boxes and bone-handled knives instead. The central Carolinians had tasted strawberry preserves, pat de foie grs, and madeira; and many of them could count to ten in Spanish -- a consequence of their visits by earlier sea voyages to Guam and encounters with early whaleships on their islands. The outer-islander remains comparatively cosmopolitan -- in English ability and awareness of the rest of the world -- even today. Lacking the rich resource base of their neighbors on the high islands, the atoll-dwellers have always been forced to travel and adapt in order to provide for their needs, in times of over-population as well as after typhoons or in famines.
Itinerant trading captains engaged in the three-cornered China trade paid regular visits to several of the islands in Micronesia from the 1830s on. The islanders received much more than the iron-ware they so coveted in exchange for the beche-de-mer, turtle shell and mother-of-pearl that they sold to the traders as a cargo to Canton. They also were treated to calico, denim and serge -- the favorite color almost everywhere being turkey red -- and most important of all, tobacco, Yet not even tobacco's addictive property was able to revolutionize island production; people worked as they had before, simply allocating some of the surplus for tobacco and such luxury items. The China trade introduced another commodity to a few islands such as Pohnpei, Kosrae and Palau -- the white (or sometimes black) beachcomber. The beachcomber was almost always attached to a chief and was as much his "possession" as the axes, dry goods and ironware that made their way into the chief's hands. In Pohnpei and Kosrae the foreign resident was regularly called on to act as the chief's intermediary in trade with ships; in Palau he acted as diplomat to plead his chief's case against rival sections and enlist military support from British naval ships and other foreign vessels (Hezel 1978).
The China trade may have provided a regular supply of such novelties as cloth and tobacco, but otherwise its disruption of island life was minimal. Beachcombers may have done some wild carousing, even killing one another on occasion, but none of that was unknown among islanders at that time. Trading was carried on almost universally through traditional mechanisms and the goods distributed through customary channels. In effect, it reinforced rather than changed the old political system. Even the economic consequences on the islands were not especially significant -- at least not yet. Dry goods and ironware were welcome luxuries, but one could not eat them or, for that matter, even wear European clothes on a daily basis. As prestige items they were in constant demand, but the exigencies of daily life were provided, as they always had been, from the land and the sea.
The American whaleship trade that flourished on Pohnpei, Kosrae and a few smaller adjacent islands from 1840 to 1865 brought a substantial increase in both the volume of trade and the number of beachcombers. Between 1840 and 1855 yearly trade on Pohnpei may have doubled to $8000, and the number of Westerners living on the island grew from 30 to 150 (Hezel 1984: 13-14). Islanders were introduced to other, more dubious wonders like firearms and firewater. Pohnpeians and Kosraeans avidly sought both, while Palauans generally shunned liquor. The commoners of Pohnpei and Kosrae, who were without the normal trade commodities, displayed some ingenuity by selling the favors of their wives and daughters to seamen, thus breaking the chiefly monopoly on foreign trade. The reward for this was what was then called "the pox" -- venereal disease -- which was added to the host of other diseases and maladies afflicting islanders since sustained foreign contact began. All islands suffered a serious population loss, but Kosrae was by far the worst; in 40 years its population declined to one-tenth of what it had been (Ritter 1978). The sudden loss of population cracked the foundation of its elaborate political system, which vanished quickly in subsequent years and was replaced by a quasi-democratic system that retained some of the external forms of older chieftainship (Lewis 1967).
The copra trade, which began in the 1860s, was the final and most perduring step in island commerce. Until a few years ago, copra remained the main export of the Caroline and Marshall Islands; only recently has it been challenged by tourism as the main industry in the area. The large German firms in the Pacific -- Godeffroy, Robertson-Hernsheim, DHPG, and the Jaluit Company -- were instrumental in establishing trade stations virtually everywhere in the area. Copra production was ideally suited for island life. It utilized a resource found in abundance everywhere, it required no new skills, and it could be done without any change in local work habits. The copra trade brought Micronesians few Western goods that they had not previously seen, but it offered them in greater quantity and in regular supply since foreign traders maintained stations on nearly every island. By the early 1880s, the peak of the early copra trade, foreign firms were exporting a total of one-quarter million dollars worth of copra a year (Hager 1886: 121-3).
The cumulative effects of this and the previous stages of trade in the area produced striking changes in the externals of life in the islands. The people of the eastern half of Micronesia, who had been missionized by the Protestant American Board, now habitually wore Western dress in place of their traditional garb -- although some used both, depending on the occasion. Notwithstanding missionary objections, clay pipes and whiskey were common articles of trade. Iron pots had become a standard item in nearly every household, and ordinary tools and fishing gear were now imported. Rifles and muskets had also become commonplace items; by mid-century there were an estimated 1500 guns on Pohnpei, or one for every third person (Shineberg 1971: 190).
The greatest beneficiaries of this new wealth were the chiefs, of course, especially in areas like the Marshalls where the chiefs retained traditional ownership rights to the land. Marshallese chiefs, who retained for themselves a third of all income from copra made on their land, became rich almost overnight and flouted their wealth openly. Several bought small schooners and hired foreigners to captain them as they made the rounds of their island possessions to oversee their estates and collect their tribute. Some chiefs dressed in suits and top hats and bought wardrobes of silk dresses for their wives. One had an income of $8000 a year, more than the German governor of the Marshalls was earning (Firth 1977).
A look beneath these externals -- something that foreign residents rarely bothered to do -- would reveal that in most important respects life was lived very much as it had been in past centuries. That congeries of traditional values and customs that were intertwined with the "subsistence economy" were very much in force everywhere except in Kosrae. And yet the seeds of a social revolution had been planted. The chiefs had always supervised the land resources and were charged with the responsibility of redistributing surplus products. With the advent of trade goods, however, the old system was being challenged. The producer had, for the first time, an attractive alternative to putting his surplus at the disposal of the community through the chief; he could try to secrete it and trade it for consumer goods. Similarly, the chief was tempted to keep surplus goods for himself -- something that would have been senseless if he were not able to parlay perishable produce into storable Western items. There was a point to hoarding, Micronesians learned for perhaps the first time. Not that they actually did -- for the ethos and the structures of their old way of life were still too firmly in place to allow this. Nonetheless, this realization loosened, ever so slightly at first, the land tenure system in which the chiefs retained control of the basis of production. It was too early for a revolution just yet; this would come under the buffer of colonial rule in years to come.
Spanish annexation of the Carolines in 1886, although it marked the beginning of a hundred years of colonial rule, was no major watershed in the lives of the islanders. Spanish rule was largely ineffectual in Pohnpei and Yap, the two Spanish administrative centers, and the new government had almost no impact elsewhere in the archipelago. Yapese land tenure, rooted as it was in family estates, had proven resistant to mercantile innovations; and its network of village chiefs was never challenged by the Spanish, whose major concerns were the introduction of the Catholic Faith and the carrying out of public work projects. On Pohnpei Spanish attempts to impose military rule provoked two early armed insurrections, and the Spanish, who suffered heavy losses without redress, thereafter found themselves confined to their small colony in the northern part of the island (Hanlon 1988). The Spanish threat did not even have the effect of uniting the five autonomous kingdoms on the island; they remained as suspicious of one another as ever. Meanwhile, the Trukese who were relatively untouched by 19th century foreign trade, continued to fight their inter-sectional wars with no interference from the Spanish.
Continued Taste2
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