
































Kinship as Continuity and Transformative Process in Pacific Island Societies 

Review by Kathleen Barlow 

Living Kinship in the Pacific

by Christina Toren & Simonne Pauwels (eds)

Berghahn Books, 2015

Toren  and  Pauwels  frame  the  essays  in  Living  Kinship in  the  Pacific  as  demonstrations  of  how

thoroughly kinship continues to produce social relations and community for Pacific Islanders, and does

so as an historical process that draws on meanings enacted through daily life and ritual. Drawing on

Sahlins (2011) and Kuper (2013), they affirm that each acting subject lives in a culturally constituted

reality in which kinship is articulated with and through other domains, including exchange, gender,

cosmology, and political economy. For the societies included here emphasis is on political economy as

community,  leadership,  land  and  place,  as  mediated  through  marriage  and  siblingship.  While  the

authors argue that kinship is historically constituted through biology and culture, the definitions of

history,  biology (as genetics?)  and intersubjectivity  that  are  asserted as  the process through which

kinship is ‘lived,’ are not made clear, nor are they articulated comparatively in the essays that follow.

Nevertheless, there are excellent accounts of culturally specific renderings of biological relatedness

across the cultures described here.

The volume begins with three chapters that provide striking examples of contemporary kinship

sustained in and adapted to contexts heavily influenced by nation-state politics and global economy.

Nabobo-Baba (Ch. 1) shows how in Fiji kinship is expressed as chiefly compassion through gifts of

land  (i  solisoli)  and  material  goods,  a  practice  that  runs  directly  counter  to  the  competitive  and

accumulative strategies of capitalism. She gives three examples in which land was gifted from one

chief to another to provide a social safety net for a community in need or to benefit the larger good.

These contemporary examples reveal lines of fracture between contractual relationships modeled on



Western institutions and the spirit of kinship obligation and exchange based on traditional practices.

Jara Hulkenberg’s essay (Ch. 3) demonstrates the strength of Fijian ideas of community, place and kin

ties  in  contexts  of  urban-rural  migration,  inter-island  inequalities  in  access  to  resources,  and  out-

migration to transnational contexts. Fijians away from home go to great lengths to provide remittances

to home villages and to provide barkcloth mats and valuables, and appropriate kin to perform life-cycle

rituals for those living in town, city or another country. Identity and membership continue to be based

in  vanua,  one’s  home  place  (including  land,  people,  ancestors).  Ching-Hsiu  Lin’s  essay  (Ch.  2)

examines the impact of monetized economic relations on exchange practices related to marriage among

the  Truku  of  Taiwan.  In  order  to  purchase  pigs  for  bridewealth  and  for  sacrifices  to  redress

wrongdoings or alleviate misfortune, families and households enter into debt relationships in contrast to

the formerly egalitarian nature of inter-household exchange.

Chapters  4  through  10  concern  complementary  and  hierarchical  relationships  established

through the maternal line and based in cross-sex siblingship. In each society activities and meanings

involving gender, procreation, membership, life-cycle transitions and material exchange stem from the

crucial brother-sister relationship. The authors highlight the power of maternal relatedness (often the

superiority of a man’s elder sister), as a complement to formal emphasis on relations through the father

in lineage, residence patterns and authority. In Tokelau (Hoëm Ch. 4), ritualized behavior takes two

forms—ritual based in kinship emphasizes offspring through brothers and sisters as complementary

groups, and festive community rituals that comment on the leadership, legitimacy, moral quality, etc. of

cognatic ties organized through cross-sex siblings.  Völkel (Ch. 5) analyzes terminology expressing

stratification  and  possession  in  Tongan.  The  ‘eiki/tu’a distinction  (superior/inferior)  maps  onto

sister/brother,  cousin,  patrilateral/matrilateral  kin  terms.  Linguistic  features  discriminate  with

possessives who controls the relationship and who is subordinate, privileging ties through the eldest

sister.

The Ankave-Anga of Papua New Guinea (Bonnemère Ch. 6) emphasize the sister’s  role  in

establishing  her  brother’s  full  adult  status  as  a  maternal  uncle.  Because  Ankave-Anga limit  blood

relatedness to the mother only, a man and his sister share blood, but he does not pass it on to his

children. His sister must ritually enable each phase of his life-cycle transitions and his own child’s

birth.  His  sister’s  children  are  his  only  “blood  relatives”  and  as  a  maternal  uncle  he  maintains

connection to the next generation.

The importance of cross-sex siblingship informs an extensive set of classificatory relationships

in Lau, Fiji (and other Polynesian societies). Pauwels (Ch. 7) describes the vasu status or relationship in

terms of the superiority of the elder sister to her brother, and hence her children’s ability to ask for (or



take)  from him and her  obligation to  care for and protect  her brother’s  children.  This prerogative

applies to whole kin groups and chiefdoms in relation to the sibling set through which they are linked,

and organizes  relationships  with  respect  to  relative  status,  respect  and avoidance,  gifting,  land/sea

prerogatives, and alliance in case of conflict.

Tcherkézoff (Ch. 8) traces a widespread consensus in Samoan communities that it is unseemly

for villagers to marry each other to a conceptual basis in cross-sex siblingship that requires avoidance,

especially with respect to sexuality. In terms of the component groups and symbolic construction of the

village as a “family,” chiefs are fathers, suggesting that all other males and females are brothers and

sisters. In practical terms, if one villager marries another, the man retains his status, but the woman

becomes an in-marrying wife, thus losing her valuable status as a “daughter” of the village.

Douaire-Marsaudon’s essay (Ch. 9) takes up the Tongan parallel to the Fijian vasu relationship,

showing  how  the  brother-sister  pair  and  their  offspring  are  the  crux  of  intergenerational  kinship,

mediating  between  domestic  and  political  spheres.  Because  of  the  sister’s  superiority,  being  most

closely related to their founding ancestor/god, her son is fahu to his mother’s brother. In this patrilineal

society, the father has secular title, land and authority, but the father’s sister wields sacred power over

the reproductive success of her brother’s wife. Extended fahu relationships designate hierarchy among

groups whose chiefs are related through the maternal line, informing inter-island military and political

alliances. (Nabobo-Baba shows how these positions remain functional in contemporary life.)

Cayrol (Ch. 10) analyzes relationships through women in Nasau, Fiji. Whereas men are more

rooted  in  land,  locality  and house/household,  women are  mobile.  They move at  marriage  to  their

husband’s house where they must be welcomed by their husband’s father’s sister or her representative.

Paths  of  exchange  among  lineages  are  established  by  women  through  marriage.  Crucial  in  these

configurations is the paternal grandmother, who is empowered to give names drawn from her own

lineage. This naming prerogative is emblematic of women’s contributions as they establish paths of

wealth and exchange by marrying in.

The volume concludes  with an  essay by Toren (Ch.  11)  inviting  us  to  consider  kinship  as

intersubjectively developed through life experience in culturally constructed contexts. The relationship

among ritualized behavior,  ritual meaning, developmental trajectories and structural features of kin

terms and relations is addressed in a necessarily abbreviated way. That these are dynamic and changing

dimensions  of  cultural  life  that  nevertheless  often  hew  closely  to  core  cultural  values  over  long

stretches  of  time is  well-demonstrated  in  the  articles  that  precede this  discussion.  Overall,  we are

offered ethnographically rich insights into contemporary kinship as grounded in longstanding traditions

and persisting in the face of tremendous forces of change.



References Cited

Kuper, Adam

2013 ‘Review of Marshall Sahlins What Kinship Is—And Is Not,’ Times Literary Supplement, 12 July,

pp. 12-13.

Sahlins, Marshall

2011. ‘What Kinship is, Parts I and II,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17:2-19, 227-

42.

Kathleen Barlow has conducted local village-based and comparative regional research in the Lower

Sepik  River  and North  Coastal  region of  Papua  New Guinea beginning  in  the  1980’s.  Her  main

research interests are gender women, cultural learning, material culture and ritual among Murik and

their trading partners.

© 2015 Kathleen Barlow


