as the domestic model of production and typically organized around many equivalent-status household units producing only enough for their subsistence) is that chiefdoms are ordered by rank and impose “social production” on the households that make it up. That is to say, a small, nonproducing class of chiefs extracts a surplus of food and goods from the majority of producers and then deploys it in the service of continuing and expanding the hierarchical relationship. In a sense, the surplus is a kind a capital accumulated and spent to sustain or increase itself, the extraction of surplus. Kirch, echoing his colleague and frequent collaborator University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, characterized the political economy of chiefdoms as “the ceaseless extraction of surplus from individual households that otherwise might be thought of as intrinsically antisurplus.”95
In Hawai‘i, status was conferred not solely by genealogy but by wealth, which took the form of food and labor extracted from the people and of ritual, status, and durable goods, such as feather cloaks, produced by commoners and specialists for the ali‘i—goods that could in turn be deployed to obtain more status and power—a system of political economy referred to as staple finance.96 Kurashima and Kirch wrote: “The political economy of precontact Hawai‘i was based fundamentally on food surpluses.”97
There have been two classic analyses of Polynesian chiefdoms, both from the mid-twentieth century (predating the postwar expansion of field archaeology in the Pacific), attempting to explain both the broad similarities and diversity of types by dividing them into three classes. The first is Sahlins’s 1954 study, “Social Stratification in Polynesia.” In it, Sahlins identifies Type III societies as simple; small (not more than two thousand people); generally based on atolls like Tokelau; and ruled by hereditary chiefs, little removed in lifestyle from commoners, who are responsible for both religious and secular guidance. Type II societies are midsized both in terms of population and island size (like Mangaia), with at least two strata of chiefs. Type I societies are large (ten thousand or more people), with distinct and often complex social hierarchies (Tonga or Hawai‘i) counting as many as seven to eight distinct strata, with separate priestly and warrior classes. In this framework, environmental limits had a direct social manifestation: greater aggregate productivity of an island or system equaled greater social differentiation between producers and distributors—which is to say that social stratification is ecologically adaptive. Accordingly, the physical size of the island or island system, insofar as it equates with productive potential, correlates in Sahlins’s conception directly with social typology.98 Big islands have big societies; small islands have small ones.
The second classic analysis is Irving Goldman’s 1970 Ancient Polynesian Society, in which his three categories are sorted by degrees of “status rivalry” between chiefs and are called traditional, open, and stratified. A traditional society is governed by the same hereditary chief as Sahlins’s Type III; it is “conservative” and close in structure to the ancestral Polynesian model described by Kirch of the ‘qariki (hereditary leader of a common descent group).99 Open societies are typified by competition between politicomilitary claimants and are less rigid, and less religiously ordered, than the traditional type. They tend to be located on midsized islands, such as Mangaia, the Marquesas, and Easter. Stratified chiefdoms, including Hawai‘i, Tahiti, and Tonga, are rigidly divided by caste and rank and supported by elaborate religious structures yet retain some of the competitive, warlike qualities of open societies as a sort of alternate method of social advancement.
Clearly, there is overlap between the two analytical frameworks; both describe the dynamic social and productive evolution of Polynesian societies, though from different optics: one resources, the other status. These optics derive from and illustrate two fundamental outlooks in anthropology: Malthus’s focus on environment and Marx’s on political economy. Both share a basic correlation with size, though only Sahlins’s ecological approach interprets it explicitly. In Sahlins’s model, greater size equals greater productive potential and therefore greater potential or tendency toward sociopolitical stratification and, when conditions are right, toward greater intensification. Simple atoll environments sustain only simple, relatively stable social types, as the opportunities for agricultural intensification are radically limited. In midsized environments—which correspond with the list of environmentally marginal islands—progress toward stratification is derailed by the shortage of good land. When the “full land” state is reached in the valley cores, intensification extends onto more marginal lands, pushing them into the cycle of degradation—deforestation, erosion, and so on—at first increasing and then markedly decreasing the carrying capacity of the land and creating conditions of competition and strife too unstable and dynamic for the rigid, stratified structure to take hold. Instead of an intermediate stage on the evolutionary road from traditional to stratified, the open society is more like another pathway, “different, more fluid,” sometimes leading to a more dire, or dead, end. Large islands, with greater productive potential and therefore more capacity to absorb population shifts and environmental stress, could take the path of intensification and still successfully accommodate more layers of human structure.
WAI AND MALO‘O
In the dichotomy between the western and eastern Hawaiian islands can be seen the outline of one of the most fundamental oppositions not only in Hawai‘i but most everywhere in Polynesia; one that extends the full range from the environmental to the social and their conjuncture: the wet and the dry (wai and malo‘o)—at once the differing productive regimes and crops of well-watered, kalo-growing windward landscapes and dry, yam- and sweet potato–growing leeward ones and the correspondingly different social systems each produced.100 As each island encompassed a wet/dry distinction based on trade winds and topography, so too did the archipelago: the western islands of Kaua‘i and O‘ahu predominantly wet and kalo growing and boasting the largest irrigation complexes in the Pacific; the eastern islands of Maui and Hawai‘i predominantly dry and yam- and ‘uala growing. Molokai sits in the middle, half wet and half dry and too small and segmented to rival its larger neighbors in either character. The Hawaiians acknowledged this fundamental distinction, as their creation stories of Pele and Hi‘iaka at opposite ends of the archipelago attest.101 They also understood, as well as do Kirch and other modern scientists, how “this environmental gradient played an important role in the political dynamics of the late prehistoric Hawaiian chiefdoms.”102
The force of the dichotomy derives from the single fact that irrigated kalo is the most efficient form of Polynesian agriculture, yet land suitable for it is strictly limited and varies in direct relation to position within the archipelago. Wet kalo culture and dry ‘uala culture stand at opposite ends of a spectrum of efficiency. Pondfield kalo culture produces the highest yield from the smallest land area, with the lowest long-term labor input, requiring only a one-time investment in the capital improvements of pondfields and ditch systems, accomplished through a community labor pooling organized by konohiki appointed by the ruling chief.103 On drylands, on the contrary, the path to intensification came through quickening the cropping cycle, decreasing fallow, and squeezing more yield from fertilization and mulching. All of this was labor intensive, rather than capital intensive. Dry land then, equaled constant risk and periodic stress: first agricultural and in direct consequence, social and political, shaping a sociopolitical structure different from that of the more stable windward valleys. Sahlins writes that “the great challenge [of the dryland economy] . . . lies in the intensification of labor: getting people to work more, or more people to work.”104
The religious structure of the archipelago also attests to this geographic one. The authors of Native Planters in Old Hawaii assert evidence for different times of arrival of certain agricultural and cultural forms from elsewhere in Polynesia in Hawaiian tales of gods and their identification with different foods: “It seems likely that the four chief gods of Hawaii . . . represent distinct eras of colonization.” The first is Kāne, associated with kalo, sugarcane, bamboo, and windward valleys, who is central to the creation myths of Hawai‘i and therefore assumed to have arrived with the first settlers. The second is Kaneloa, associated with bananas, the ocean, and springs. The third is Kū, god of war, coconut, breadfruit, and fishing—and therefore assumed to be a latecomer because breadfruit orchards are poorly developed in Hawai‘i but fundamental to the Tahitian economy