Braided Waters. Wade Graham

labor inputs (including the addition of female labor in field cultivation) had probably been reached by the end of the seventeenth century. And the increasingly frequent objects of their aggression became the western islands of Moloka‘i, O‘ahu, and Kaua‘i, rich in irrigated pondfields and fishponds.”¹¹⁹

      EXCEPTIONAL MOLOKAI

      Molokai, in certain locales, was a rich food producer and an irreplaceable stopover for moving armies, but these spots were too few and far between for the island as a whole to sustain population centers comparable to the larger islands. The Hālawa, Wailau, Pelekunu, and Waikolu Valleys thrived, as did the larger southern valleys, especially those joined with major fishpond complexes. These places, big enough to produce a surplus that could be siphoned off but too small to defend themselves, were vulnerable to invasion and control from outside and to the intensification imposed by conquering, parasitic chiefs. But other places were either too small or too inaccessible to be powerfully attractive to outside forces. Western and upland areas were too poor, too sparsely populated, and too far from canoe landings where armies could disembark to be effectively subdued or occupied, as the people simply melted into the woods and shadows. The Kala‘e area is celebrated in Hawaiian tradition for its stubborn independence. Its ali‘i were said to be so proud that they kept only their own kapus, even in the presence of higher-ranked chiefs.¹²⁰ Kala‘e was also known as a place of kauwa (slaves or low-status individuals), who frequently lived on the margins of the cultivated areas of settlement, such as in the kula uplands and forests: “Kala’e pe’e kakonakona” (Kala‘e hides and avoids contact.¹²¹ Another word for kauwa, reported by Malo, was nahelehele, people of the wild woods.)¹²²

      Molokai acquired a mythology of resistance and its people a reputation for sorcery. Many legends in the ethnographic corpus describe powerful invaders repelled by the spiritual force of the weaker, less numerous Molokai people: O Molokai i ka Pule o’o (Molokai of the Powerful Prayer). The island was known for its traditional prophets (kaula), typically common men and women “of spontaneous inspiration,” in Sahlins’s words, who constituted “an alternative to the ‘organized religion’” that buttressed ali‘i rule. In a later context, Sahlins considered that the association of kaula with a popular religious revival “reinforces the sense of an anti-chief movement.”¹²³ The greatest school of kaula kahuna in Hawai‘i was that of Lanikaula, on the East End, and its mythology centers around the hostile visits of outside chiefs and rival priests.

      The history of Molokai is notably replete with incidences of poisoning—typically by kama‘āina (children of the land) using poison against stronger malihini (outsiders). A legendary grove of trees on Mauna Loa, the kalaipahoa, was said to have intensely poisonous wood that could be made into weapons or powder. Kamehameha’s invaders were said to have been killed en masse by pule o‘o—though at least one local informant insisted that the Hawai‘i people were not prayed to death but were fed sweet potatoes mixed with ‘auhuhu, a common fish poison.¹²⁴

      LESSONS: A SOCIOENVIRONMENTAL CALCULUS

      Because of the central role of irrigation in Hawaiian history, Hawai‘i enters into the long-running historical debate over the supposed correlation between large-scale irrigation worldwide and Marx’s “oriental despotism,” as advanced by Karl Wittfogel (who singled out late prehistoric Hawai‘i as “a crude, agro-bureaucratic hydraulic despotism”) and elaborated and extended to the American West by Donald Worster.¹²⁵ This “hydraulic hypothesis” holds that the requirements of labor control and the management of large irrigation works assure the development of a bureaucratic elite that dominates the mass of producers. Handy, Handy, and Pukui, while agreeing with Wittfogel’s emphasis on irrigation in Hawai‘i, argued that the ali‘i overlay and dominance of the windward valleys was not inherently despotic.¹²⁶ Kirch went further, arguing that it is intensification itself, not irrigation per se, that attends social complexity: “The neglect of intensive dryland cultivation by anthropologists and archaeologists . . . has masked the fact that it was not irrigation but short-fallow dryland systems that were the most demanding of labor inputs . . . the most hierarchically structured and hegemonic Polynesian polities are usually associated, not with the irrigation-dominated production zones as the hydraulic theorists would predict, but with the intensive dryland sectors. Thus, a more inclusive analysis of Polynesian agricultural variability results in the virtual turning of the hydraulic hypothesis on its head.”¹²⁷

      I would qualify this by noting that, while there may be forms of irrigation without stratification in Polynesia, irrigation as intensification—that is to say, irrigation as a phenomenon of scale—is certainly implicated in stratification—though it may not be a sufficient cause. It is intensification’s quasi-industrialization of the landscape, of production, of the division of labor, not the method used, that creates stratification. It is the hierarchy, not the technology. In Polynesia, dryland cultivation at large scale is more regimented, temporally, spatially, and socially, than wet cultivation at large scale. But it is no more than a more extreme form of the same process.

      In Hawai‘i, both irrigation and dryland farming reached their greatest elaboration and complexity in the Pacific. And, on the eve of contact, the Hawaiian archipelago was the single most complex, hierarchical society in the Pacific. To most scholars, it had already passed out of the status of chiefdom and into that of an “archaic state,” having moved beyond a power/class structure based on kinship and toward one of divine kingship.¹²⁸

      To recapitulate, recent Pacific archaeology has shown that human colonization of island environments is inflected toward certain patterns according to the size, resource base, climate, geology, and other physical characters of the colonized place, in dynamic interaction with the characters of the colonizing society: its economy, religion, technology, fertility, and so on. Certain combinations of these characters will push the process in certain directions—trajectories, like those seen in the chiefdom typologies of Sahlins and Goldman—that do not “determine” outcomes but help to explain, and perhaps to predict, historical outcomes—and certainly cannot be ignored in the ideological service of some notion of absolute historical contingency.¹²⁹

      Water, the fundamental organizing principle of both the human and the natural in Hawai‘i, operates on a range of registers: metaphysical, social, and physical, but its effects are modulated according to the different scales and characters of the places and people involved. Just as wet and dry, wai and malo’o, are fundamental physical characters, so too do big and small structure the history of Hawai‘i at all levels. Bigness can be physical, as in types of resource “thickness”—such as high streamflow, fertile soils, broad valleys, or productive aquaculture—and it can be social, as in the high populations, surpluses, and stratified societies that resource thickness can sustain. It is a circular relation: social bigness thrives on physical bigness and makes more of it through intensified land use to obtain more surplus, thereby making more social bigness through stratification, and so on. The mechanism is at base environmental: given enough resources, bigness benefits from the environmental degradation inherent in human economic activity in fragile island environments in that it weakens the earlier, dispersed, diversified, presumably more egalitarian settlement pattern and strengthens centralized, simplified, intensified agriculture and the competitive involution that feeds on it. This in turn has its feedback mechanism in more cascading environmental degradation: deforestation, denudation, erosion, dessication, and extinction.

      This sequence proceeds at varying rates and intensities, depending on the characters involved. In small environments characterized by resource “thinness”—aridity; poor soils; physical remoteness or isolation, such as in small, steep valleys; inaccessible uplands or stormy coastlines; or in the atolls that stall out in the first, simple form of chiefdom structure—it may not get started at all or, once started, may fizzle out. Physical smallness fights social bigness, as the history of Kala‘e on Molokai suggests. Small places, like Kala‘e, can become places of refuge for politically and economically weak segments of the population; these refugia, as biologists call such pockets, ironically preserve both cultural and natural diversity because of their marginality and vulnerability, not in spite of them. But, under the right conditions, social stratification and environmental degradation will tend to produce