Gardening of Polynesian culture
Although Polynesians were mariners above all, they were also devoted to horticulture and arboriculture, producing the staples of the Polynesian diet and most of their condiments in gardens and groves. The major native crops were yams (Dioscorea species), taro (Colocasia esculenta), breadfruit (Artocarpus communis), bananas (Musa species), sugarcane (Saccharum species), coconuts (Cocos nucifera), and Tahitian chestnuts (Inocarpus edulis). These crops achieved different levels of importance in various Polynesian societies, depending on cultural factors and environmental conditions. The Hawaiians, for example, relied heavily on taro, building extensive irrigation systems to grow the variety that requires muddy soil and planting the “dry” variety in the uplands. Breadfruit was not of great importance in Hawaii, but in the Marquesas and Tahiti it was the major staple, although taro was by no means neglected. In these islands breadfruit was allowed to become overripe and was then beaten into a pulp, wrapped in hibiscus-leaf bundles, and stored in large, well-drained pits in the ground. This stored breadfruit paste would ferment but remain edible and nutritious for years, its sour taste being highly prized for imparting flavour to the rather bland fresh breadfruit paste.
The most important Polynesian food plants were tropical cultigens that could not survive in the colder climates of Easter Island (subtropical) and New Zealand (temperate). On Easter Island, for example, legends maintain that the earliest settlers brought germinating coconuts but that the plants subsequently died. This deprived the Rapa Nui not only of a variety of condiments and a rich source of vitamins but also of the coconut leaves that were used elsewhere in Polynesia for thatch and baskets and of the husk fibres that were used to make fishing line and netting. In New Zealand not only the coconut but also the breadfruit, yam, and banana were unsuccessful. The radically different flora and fauna of New Zealand, however, offered foods that partially replaced those that the climate would not support.
As with the coconut, most food plants in Polynesia also provided materials for other purposes. The breadfruit tree furnished wood for the hulls of dugout canoes, and the milky sap of the fruit itself was used in caulking the gaps between the planks of larger canoes. The black mud of the taro patches was used to stain wood and stone carvings. The pandanus fruit was highly prized as a kind of chewing gum, as well as a major component of floral necklaces and headpieces, to which it contributed its strong and pleasant colour. Pandanus leaves, when bleached, became the raw material for weaving fine mats. The candlenut was used for torches. Its oil was a cathartic, and its wood furnished certain canoe parts.
Material culture
Traditional Polynesian technology relied for the most part upon five substances: wood, stone, vegetable fibre, shell, and bone. Canoes, houses, domestic utensils, weapons, religious sculpture, and a host of other incidental tools were fashioned from wood with stone or shell adzes; stone-flake knives; files made of coral, sea urchin, or rough stone; and drills of bone, stone, or shell. Fine carving was done with stone, shell, or animal teeth, particularly those of rats or sharks. Fine-grained basalt stone was the hardest material available to Polynesians and was used to produce a variety of adzes.
The components of complex items were skillfully fitted together and lashed with cordage made from various types of vegetable fibre, such as hibiscus bark, pandanus-leaf fibre, coconut fibre, or banyan bark. Huge double-hulled canoes, 100 to 150 feet (30 to 45 metres) in length, were built of numerous small wooden components held together only by fitting and lashing, yet they were able to withstand the pounding of wind and waves for thousands of miles.
Vegetable material also furnished a major source of clothing in the form of the beaten bark (tapa) of the paper mulberry tree or the banyan. This material was pounded out into small sheets that could then be assembled to produce loincloths, capes, skirts, and headdresses. Items made from bark cloth were decorated by painting and watermarking and by attaching feathers, shells, animal teeth, and other ornaments. Finely woven mats were also used as apparel in western Polynesia.
Home furnishings consisted mainly of vegetable material in the form of mats for sleeping and sitting, as well as for protection from the weather, and of baskets for holding personal belongings and food. Coconut shells and bottle gourds provided handy, durable containers.
Property and exchange
The concept of personal property was well developed in traditional Polynesia. Each individual, regardless of rank, had a variety of possessions such as tools, clothing, ornaments, and other items. Other types of property, however, were owned by extended families or descent groups in common and were used for the common good. These included items too large to be produced or managed by a single person alone, such as a large double-hulled canoe or a fishing net several hundred feet in length, as well as facilities and land intended directly for community use, such as a ceremonial ground, a fortification, or a large breadfruit-paste storage pit.
The rules pertaining to land ownership and the means of production were complicated; they generally depended on the form of social organization used in a given community. In some Polynesian societies, land was vested in a corporate descent group. In other societies, however, changes in social organization exerted pressure on such groups, which were ultimately forced to surrender their land to increasingly powerful and autocratic chiefs. Thus, in Hawaii, perhaps the most sociopolitically complex of all the Polynesian societies, a large mass of completely landless commoners existed.
The Polynesian system of exchange of goods and services may be summarized by two terms: redistribution and reciprocity. The redistributive system was essentially a vertical system with goods moving up from the lower strata of the society to the chiefs and other high-ranking persons and then being apportioned and redistributed, so that all would share in more equal fashion in the productivity of every kinship group or region. Redistribution crosscut a complex, shifting web of reciprocal obligations (often “horizontal,” or between those of similar status), which is still very much at the heart of Polynesian culture. Goods and services rendered, even if not requested, create an obligation for a return in kind.
There were no markets in Polynesian cultures, nor was there any standard medium of exchange. All exchange was in the form of barter, often under the general supervision of some senior family or kin-group member. Thus, for example, a portion of the fish catches made on a minor fishing expedition by coastal residents would be passed inland to residents at central villages, who might return dry taro for the fish. The services of any of the numerous specialists in Polynesian cultures (tattooists, fishermen, and wood carvers, for example) were also paid for in goods, usually over and above the cost of the specialist’s keep during his period of service. Early European visitors to Polynesia who were able to analyze the importance of reciprocal exchange and put it to their own use generally fared quite well, although they sometimes found themselves overwhelmed by the increasing size of the obligations they had undertaken. In 1813 Captain David Porter of the U.S. Navy, for example, won the friendship of the chief of Taiohae, Nuku Hiva, with a gift of sperm whales’ teeth but within a few months found himself fighting a tribal war essentially on behalf of the same chief in order to live up to his obligations.