Abstract
Common sense and science alike are grounded in human experience. Yet these complementary perspectives on the world and our place in it are often in conflict. The contentious issue of global warming shows that when this happens, the seductive simplicity of most down-to-earth commonsense explanations can make it difficult for experts to win people over to the complexity and uncertainties of most scientific arguments. But sometimes scientists, too, succumb to the appeal of commonsense simplicity when they should not. As Fredrik Barth remarked, practically all social science reasoning rests on the premise that there are discrete groups of people that can be variously labeled ethnic groups, populations, societies, or cultures – a commonsense idea that begs more questions than it resolves. Consider the case of the so-called Polynesians of the South Seas. Scholars have been accepting for centuries the claim that these islanders collectively comprise a biological and cultural people, or race, apart from other islanders in Oceania whose ancestors migrated long ago swiftly out into the Pacific more or less already recognizably ‘Polynesian’ in their appearance, ways of speaking, and cultural practices from a homeland somewhere in Southeast Asia or on Formosa (Taiwan). Mounting convincing evidence to the contrary that can be widely accepted as defying such commonsense thinking has been and remains one of the greatest challenges to Pacific Island studies in the 21st century.
Keywords
Introduction
Just as cultural geographers, anthropologists, and archaeologists may say they study not only ‘culture’ but also ‘cultures’, so too, population geographers and human population geneticists take as their particular subject matter not just population numbers and dynamics seen in an abstract or mathematical fashion but also in the seemingly more down-to-earth way as ‘populations.’ Yet what is problematic about these sometimes useful constructs is not just that how to define culture and population or draw boundaries around cultures and populations can be challenging, 1 but also that what Legg 2 aptly refers to as the ‘lived’ nature of human experience and social life can lead not only to the anchoring, fixity, or ‘rootedness’ of people in space and place, but also to their spatial mobility, their flux and flow. 3 By neglecting the dynamic and adaptive challenges and opportunities of the lived spatiality of the mobility of our species, 4 efforts to account for human cultural and biological diversity may be intellectually compelling but historically implausible. I offer an example from the South Pacific.
The spatiality of mobility
Questioning the ‘boundedness’ and substantiality of spatial units of analysis has long been a prominent feature of geography as a field of critical inquiry. 5 Importantly, however, as Cresswell 6 has observed, mobility as characteristic of modernity – and I will suggest of human history generally – is even harder to pin down (both figuratively and literally). 7 People are skilled at drawing lines between themselves and others, but then so too are many other animal species. What is more exceptional about our species is that we are also good at crossing the lines we draw – passing both across constructed lines and as someone ‘other.’ 8 Barriers of gender, class, religion, ethnicity, national origin, and the like that we erect are neither stable nor insurmountable. What seems difficult for many of us to accept, however, is that barriers like these are only as real as we want to make them.
Common sense tells us people come in different kinds called genders, ethnic groups, races, nationalities, and even personalities, and much of western social science is grounded on this conventional wisdom. Yet it does not help to label our willingness to believe people come in kinds as bigotry since saying this implies that at some level, conscious or unconscious, people are necessarily aware of the implications of how they are thinking about other people and places. Yes, common sense can lead to bigotry, but not necessarily. It is not easy, therefore, to challenge the wisdom that people come in kinds, and suggest instead that fluidity and spatial mobility are prominent, integrative, and often adaptive characteristics of human social life.
It may not always be obvious that much of science runs on common sense. Yet I would argue that more than many scientists may want to acknowledge, common sense is the basic ‘default setting’ most experts use at least at the start of their researches. Why? Because common sense, right or wrong, usually makes sense. Hence there is a comfortably seductive quality about down-to-earth commonsense explanations that makes it as difficult for scientists as it does for others to see past conventional wisdom.
For example, mathematical constructs in evolutionary biology such as the concept of inclusive fitness – i.e. the idea that helping relatives who share your genes is one way to pass on your genes to the next generation – may not only privilege the contestable assumption at the heart of contemporary Darwinism that people (and perhaps even genes) are inherently self-centered and selfish, but may also neglect the spatiality of the ‘struggle for existence’ when focusing on temporal change, i.e. adaptation and evolution. 9 By disregarding the spatiality of social life and mobility, applications of this concept may underestimate or simply overlook that under real-life conditions favoring kin over non-kin may simply be an unintended consequence of spatial autocorrelation. 10 Similarly in human population genetics, treating isolation-by-distance as a global parameter unstructured by the spatial realities of human mobility and social interaction beyond ‘my place’ may lead to underestimates of the degree to which social relations and the repositioning of people may be constrained more by social networks than by the geodesic distances among all the places and presumed ‘peoples’ taken within the sampling frame of the analyses performed (compare 11–12).
Why should this be so? King 13 has recently lamented that many geographers evidently have not ‘bought into’ the significance of mobility as a paradigm perhaps because they take the movement of people over space and between places as altogether too obvious to require dedicated attention. I believe this lament can be generalized beyond this particular instance. Both common sense and science are grounded in human experience. When these differing ways of seeing the world part company, philosophers of science usually say the reason is that scientists go out of their way to perfect the quality, precision, and intensity of their ways of experiencing the world. 14 Perhaps, but if it is true that everyday thought and great scientific insights are alike grounded in human experience, then the real question is what does it take to make these two ways of seeing the world part company?
I ask this question for a reason. According to Connell, ‘islands are places of discomforting dialogues: utopian and dystopian, but pervasively utopian – places in which to construct social and spatial ideologies, reconfiguring landscapes and peoples, as projections of outsiders,’ and more recently insiders,’ visions.’ 15 Maybe so, but I have never understood why anyone would believe that the islanders of the central Pacific who are today collectively called ‘Polynesians’ are the descendants of a singular and identifiable people, ethnic group, or – in older parlance – race that migrated long ago all the way to where they now live in the Pacific from an ancient, far off homeland located somewhere on the Asian mainland, or perhaps Taiwan.
Years ago, anthropologist Alan Howard summed up why foreigners for centuries have been so captivated by Polynesia and the Polynesians: The islands of Polynesia have held an enduring fascination for Western man since the time of their discovery. It was perhaps inevitable that the tall, brown-skinned inhabitants would become romantic figures – they were physically attractive, generous, receptive, and from a European point of view, carefree and sexually uninhibited . . . By no means the least romantic part of the Polynesian story is the question of their origins. Where was their homeland? When did they arrive on the scene, and by what routes?
16
No one would deny that imagining a migratory history for the forebears of the Polynesians seemed reasonable prior to the development of the technique of radiocarbon dating soon after the end of the Second World War. Before then, there seemed to be far too little time since people first began colonizing Oceania for the observed modern-day cultural, biological, and linguistic diversity of the Pacific Islanders to have developed or evolved in situ. But archaeologists and others have now known for several decades that people began landing on New Guinea and other islands in the southwest Pacific at least 30,000–40,000 years ago. Given this striking antiquity, why do so many today – including Pacific scholars – still think that ancient someday-to-be Polynesians migrated as an identifiable race or people all the way from Asia? Why has this racialized narrative 17 and depiction 18 of the Pacific landscape, or ‘islandscape,’ been so often reproduced and valorized? 19
Islands are conventionally portrayed in Western literature as isolated places inhabited by poor souls who suffer in diverse ways due to their lack of involvement with others beyond their shores.20–21 An element of fear is commonplace in this literature. It is not surprising, for example, that ‘the Pacific not only gave to Europe “tattoos” and “taboo,” but also a vision of islands spread as tiny dots across a vast ocean where, in their isolation, “primitive” people enacted strange rites which on occasion included cannibalism.’ 22
Our envisioning islands as strange and isolated places influences more than just how we see islands as unusual places to be. Islands and islandness are also broadly used in western thought, both lay and scientific, as metaphors for the assumed boundedness and isolation of human groups – such as ethnic groups, peoples, populations, races, and the like. 23 Said differently, it is conventional to say not only that human beings come in different kinds, but also that they do so because human groups are island-like in their segregation from one another.
To these observations, I would add that the metaphorical use of islands and islandness in western thought often intersects with other commonsense notions, and when this happens, it may be even harder to defeat the claims that people come in kinds, and human social groups are somehow isolated from one another the way islands are supposed to be. 24 One such reinforcing idea is the thought that each of us ‘belongs to’ an identifiable ethnic group, people, population, or race. Another intersecting element of western common sense – that ethnic groups, populations, and the like can be treated as corporate individuals having ancestors, descendants, relatives, and ‘patterns of hierarchical descent’ 25 – further serves to cement the conventional wisdom that human beings come in fundamentally different sorts, or types. As Featherstone 26 has observed, we tend to ‘treat ethnicities as given and sealed . . . as trapped in place.’
General proposition
Human beings are highly evolved social animals. With a few known exceptions, all human beings are born into an existing social realm. The commonsense understanding of this elemental truth would be that every person is also born into a society, not just into society. This is where the trouble begins. It is one thing to say we are all born into society, and therefore, what we are able to make of ourselves in life is inseparably social in its character and dimensions. It is another thing to say each of us is born into a society. From a commonsense perspective these two statements may sound so similar that it might seem like quibbling to suggest that they are not, and that in terms of the hidden complexities of the claims being made, they are actually worlds apart.
There are undoubtedly several ways to arrive at the commonsense conclusion that people come in kinds and live in separate island-like societies. After all, it is a safe bet that people living in other places will not be just like you or me. Hence, if there is some reason to draw a line between them and us, something can always be found or imagined to justify doing so. For example, the anthropologist James Watson reported that people living in the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea a half century ago were skilled at pointing out how they differed from people in neighboring communities, even though most of the communities experienced episodes of radical revision in their membership: Most groups are formed in a highly fluid sociopolitical field, intermittently marked by relocations, realignments, and the patriation of alien immigrants who have been expelled by hostile neighbors from their own lands elsewhere. Restless or disgruntled insiders split off to form new groups; refugee outsiders are recruited from time to time to reinforce the ranks of those remaining. To the literal-minded genealogist, the long-term kinship and continuity of each such group seem confused, even compromised.
27
Despite the social volatility of their communities, people had no difficulty drawing lines: I came to a paradoxical conclusion: no matter how numerous, small, near, and nearly identical the polities of the Eastern Highlands may be, no matter how permeable their boundaries or how checkered the history of their membership, they will consider themselves and will be thought to be distinct ethnic units.
28
What is doubly paradoxical about Watson’s ethnographic conclusion is that even scholars are similarly given to asserting points of difference – Watson and others would call them ‘diacritics’ – between people to substantiate the commonplace idea that people in different places comprise separate and distinguishable island-like ‘peoples’ or ‘societies.’ Fredrik Barth 29 observed that practically all anthropological reasoning rests on the suppositions that (a) cultural variation is discontinuous; (b) cultural discontinuities tell us that discrete groups of people exist; and (c) geographical and social isolation have been the critical factors generating and sustaining this cultural diversity. Consequently: ‘Few social science concepts would seem as basic, even indispensable, as that of group.’ 30
Such a view of human diversity leads us to see the world we live in as a place populated by ‘separate peoples, each with their culture and each organized in a society which can legitimately be isolated for description as an island to itself.’31,32 For example, while acknowledging that such a view of human social life is debatable, Ruth Mace maintains that ‘whatever the most important mechanisms are, it seems that our capacity for culture has contributed to our need to divide ourselves up into ethno-linguistic groups.’ 33 In some of the most extreme versions of her assessment, the need people supposedly have to isolate themselves from others and form island-like groups, populations, or cultures is said to be so compelling that the propensity to do so is analogous to biological speciation.34,35
I think what is happening when people make statements of this sort is that our human propensity to draw lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is being taken far too seriously. Worrisomely, history shows us that when this happens, the end result can be biological and cultural racism in its many virulent disguises. 36 In this regard, I suspect that the main title of Barth’s justly renowned book on ethnicity is misleading: Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. This suggests the book is about island-like groups when in fact his focus is on how and why people draw lines and cross them, too.
Materials
Until recently many people took it for granted that all Pacific Islanders are geographically isolated and culturally homogeneous, and have self-evident and clearly defined ethnic boundaries. 37 This has been certainly true of how many have traditionally viewed islanders in the great triangle of islands formed by the Hawaiian archipelago in the northern Pacific, New Zealand in the far southwestern Pacific, and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) south of the equator and about 4000 km off the coast of South America – the famed Polynesian Triangle. During much of the last century, it was conventional to say that these islanders are a biological and cultural people, or race, apart from others in Oceania. 38 It was assumed that the forebears of today’s Polynesians had migrated swiftly out into the Pacific already more or less recognizably ‘Polynesian’ in their physical appearance, ways of speaking, and cultural practices. 39 It was additionally taken for granted that once these migrants had begun their extraordinary journey eastward to Polynesia, they turned their back on their ancestral ‘proto-Polynesian’ homeland, a place somewhat like Shangri-La supposedly located somewhere in Southeast Asia or on Formosa (Taiwan). It seemed self-evident, too, that since their ancient forerunners had discovered and successfully colonized such remote and far-flung places as Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island, they must have been skillful navigators and brave, adventurous long-distance voyagers – veritable ‘Vikings of the Sunrise,’ as the Aotearoa New Zealand Maori scholar Peter Buck dramatically called them in his 1938 popular book. 40
Popular understandings of the Polynesians and their past have changed little over the last 75 years or so since Buck was putting the finishing touches on the manuscript for his famous book. What I see as almost incomprehensible is that the same may be said about how experts, too, have been writing about Polynesians and their prehistory. Since I cannot go into exhaustive detail, I will offer instead an illustrative sampling of some of the most recent statements that have been made first by journalists and then by well-recognized experts on ancient Pacific Islands history. The goal will be to pin down what it will take, as I said earlier, to make these two ways of seeing human diversity in this island realm part company.
My sample of popular statements about the Polynesian past comes from a single source, the well-regarded journal Science. My sample of expert statements will be similarly limited, and comes from research papers published during the first decade of the 21st century. Scholarly views on the Polynesians and their past varied a lot then, but what is noteworthy is how closely published research papers were also in keeping with the popular view that the Polynesians are an ethnic group whose ancestors migrated all the way from Asia to the central Pacific long ago.
Observations
Statements made in the last decade or so by journalists and scholars alike about the islanders of the Polynesian Triangle and their forebears have not just continued to make them out to be a discrete, bounded, and internally fairly homogeneous ethnic group in their own right, but have also depicted them as a collective, even corporate, set of actors, or agents, all sharing common interests, cultural practices, and a sense of purpose.
Journalists’ accounts
The journey of the ancestors of the Polynesians through news stories published in Science during the last decade or so has been a rather rocky road.
Genes point to a new identity for Pacific pioneers (1994)
In 1994 the Science staff writer Ann Gibbons reported that new genetic evidence was showing that Southeast Asians had mixed genetically with Melanesians – whom she identified as the ancestors of modern Australian aborigines and Papuan New Guinea highlanders – leading to ‘an early Melanesian presence’ in the Polynesian gene pool, a radical revision of the conventional story of Polynesian origins. She noted, however, that some archaeologists were skeptical about how early this presence had been felt since archaeological and linguistic evidence shows that Southeast Asians ‘in one of the largest known migrations in prehistory, crossed thousands of kilometers of open ocean in sailing canoes to Polynesia's Central Pacific islands, leaving behind a trail of distinctive decorated pottery and obsidian and shell ornaments known as the Lapita culture.’ 41
The leading theory about this migration – the so-called fast train model of Polynesian origins – holds that these legendary seafarers started from Southeast Asia 3600 years ago and by-passed Melanesians who had stopped at the edges of the ocean, in Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Ireland, almost 30,000 years earlier. The proto-Polynesians, however, went on to spread rapidly to the islands and atolls of the Central Pacific.
42
Proto-Polynesians quickly settled Pacific (1999)
Five years after Gibbons’ startling news story, another writer for Science, Bernice Wuethrich, reported that the ancestral Polynesians had had a reprieve from the supposed miscegenation with Melanesians: The ancestors of the Polynesian people settled the islands of the East Pacific only a few thousand years ago, but anthropologists have long debated where they came from . . . One camp, chiefly geneticists, argues that seafaring proto-Polynesians originated in Southeast Asia and quickly island-hopped eastward, sweeping through Melanesia in the West Pacific along the way. The other, chiefly archaeologists, argues that Polynesian ancestors originated in Melanesia itself, a hotbed of human diversity with a 45,000-year record of habitation. Now geneticists have combined DNA and linguistic data from Melanesia to make a new case that the archipelago [i.e. Melanesia] was only a way station.
43
The peopling of the Pacific (2001)
Ann Gibbons returned to the topic of Polynesian origins two years after Wuethrich to announce that Melanesians were back in the picture again: Many archaeologists agree that there was a rapid, recent migration of Austronesian speakers in to Remote Oceania. What is open to debate is precisely where the Lapita peoples came from and how much they intermingled along the way with the indigenous people whose ancestors had been living in Near Oceania for at least 33,000 years . . . Although they argue over the details, many archaeologists do agree that the Lapita culture arose from a fusion between indigenous Melanesian and Austronesian cultures – a fusion that was obviously a success . . .
44
Polynesians took the express train through Melanesia to the Pacific (2008)
In a brief news story seven years after Gibbons’ lengthy and generally informed treatment of the topic, the Science writer Constance Holden showed that old ideas never die, they just go underground for awhile: The Polynesians who settled the far-flung islands of Remote Oceania several thousand years ago accomplished one of humanity’s most rapid feats of colonization. But who were these early seafarers? Researchers have long debated various origins for them, from Taiwan to the islands of Melanesia . . . Now, modern genetics has offered the most definitive answer yet . . . The conclusion? ‘There was remarkably little genetic intermixture,’ says [Jonathan Friedlaender, the physical anthropologist who had led the study that Holden was writing about]. Melanesians speaking Papuan languages – their own ancestral tongues – showed no sign of genetic contributions from Polynesians.
45
Research papers
These several news stories published since 1994 in Science were obviously not intended by their authors to be fanciful accounts. The journalists involved were not making things up. They were trying to make sense of what they heard scientists telling them about human diversity and prehistory in the Pacific Islands. What is obvious, I think, is how little the story of the Polynesians changed over these years despite new scientific evidence being put out on the table for inspection. Here is a sampling of what this evidence was that reveals also how little intellectual distance there was during the last decade between what journalists were writing and scientists were saying.
Melanesian origin of Polynesian Y chromosomes (2000)
In 2000 the geneticist Manfred Kayser and his research team presented startling new results: All Polynesian Y chromosomes can be traced back to Melanesia, although some of these Y-chromosome types originated in Asia. Together with other genetic and cultural evidence, we propose a new model of Polynesian origins that we call the ‘slow-boat’ model: Polynesian ancestors did originate from Asia/Taiwan but did not move rapidly through Melanesia; rather, they interacted with and mixed extensively with Melanesians, leaving behind their genes and incorporating many Melanesian genes before colonising the Pacific.
46
Matrilineality and the Melanesian origin of Polynesian Y chromosomes (2003)
Many scholars found the results reported by Kayser and his team in 2000 to be a radical revision of the accepted story of Polynesian origins and migrations. In 2003 anthropologist Per Hage and linguist Jeff Marck offered an involved but seemingly acceptable scenario in Current Anthropology salvaging the conventional view that Polynesians are the descendants of an ethnic group that had migrated from Asia to the Pacific identifiable as such. As they summarized their thesis: Kayser et al. [45] have shown a Melanesian origin of Polynesian Y chromosomes favoring a Slow Boat to Polynesia model with substantial population interaction components in relation to indigenous non-Austronesian (Papuan) populations in Melanesia. Our hypothesis is that the predominance of maternally transmitted mtDNA of Asian origin and the significant presence of paternally transmitted Y chromosomes of Melanesian origin in Polynesian ancestry can be accounted for as an effect of matrilocal residence and matrilineal descent in Proto-Oceanic society.
47
Melanesian and Asian origins of Polynesians: mtDNA and Y chromosome gradients across the Pacific (2006)
In 2006 Kayser and his team appeared again in print on the issue of Polynesian origins. In their new report, they concluded: Our study provides evidence for a dual genetic origin of Pacific Islanders in Asia and Melanesia. This is in agreement with the Slow Boat hypothesis of Polynesian origins according to which Polynesian ancestors originated in Asia, moved eastward, and mixed extensively with local Melanesians before colonizing the Pacific Islands . . . The striking difference observed here between Asian and Melanesian contributions to the paternal and maternal gene pool of Polynesians suggests an admixture bias toward more Melanesian men, perhaps as result of uxorilocal (matrilocal) residence and matrilineal descent in ancestral Polynesian society.46,48
Language trees support the express-train sequence of Austronesian expansion (2000)
As in earlier years, non-biological evidence continued to be brought into the debate over Polynesian origins and migrations during the course of the last decade. Language data have often been used for this purpose, both by linguists and non-linguists, to bolster the persuasiveness of the conventional story. When language evidence is used, ‘Austronesian’ – the name of the language family to which all Polynesian languages are assigned by linguists – is favored by scholars over the term ‘Polynesian.’ In 2000, for instance, Russell Gray and Fiona Jordan reported: Prehistoric human colonization in the Pacific happened in two phases. Initially, Pleistocene hunter-gatherer expansions from Island Southeast Asia through New Guinea reached the Bismarck archipelago by 33,000 BP and the Papuan-speaking descendants of these people are dispersed throughout New Guinea and parts of Island Melanesia. The second colonization wave of Austronesian language speakers involved a diaspora of Neolithic farming peoples out of south China and Taiwan around 6,000 BP.
49
On the Road of the Winds (2000)
Like their linguist and geneticist colleagues, Pacific archaeologists have long been interested in tracing the origins and migrations of the Polynesians as an ancient and distinctive ethnic group in the Pacific. These goals have been on their research agenda since the end of World War II.50,51 While opinions have varied widely on what the evidence they have been gathering tells us about the past, few have doubted that ethnic migrations had been instrumental in contributing to the cultural diversity of the Pacific.
As they had in earlier years, however, most archaeologists during the last decade favored talking about the ancestors of the Polynesians indirectly as Lapita people or Lapita peoples. Furthermore, it was generally agreed that while on their way to Polynesia, ancient Lapita migrants learned a thing or two from people long resident in island Melanesia. As Patrick Kirch told the story in his book On the Road of the Winds, seafarers of Taiwanese origin ‘instantaneously’ arrived in Melanesia in the mid-second millennium they were not the first inhabitants of these islands, and on these beaches we must envisage a meeting of cultures, between the immigrant seafarers who spoke an Austronesian language that we call Proto-Oceanic and the diverse indigenous inhabitants of [Melanesia] who spoke not one, but a plethora of Papuan (or Non-Austronesian) languages, and who were culturally and biologically quite varied. Out of these encounters – no doubt tentative and cautious at first – would come a cultural synthesis that changed the face of ‘Old’ Melanesia.
52
This is certainly a dramatic portrayal of an imagined – and if true, an historic – event, but what if these encounters had already been happening for thousands of years? And they were between old friends, not strangers? 53
New observations
In 2009 I reanalysed a genetics dataset published in 2008 by Jonathan Friedlaender and his colleagues – the dataset that the journalist Constance Holden had reported on.44,54 I used the exploratory techniques of social network analysis (SNA), a body of theory and a set of relatively new computer-aided techniques developed to analyse and study relational data. 55 Contrary to what Holden had reported about the genetic distinctiveness of Polynesians and Melanesians, what this reanalysis showed was that genetic relatedness between the communities Friedlaender and his research team had studied was structured not by language, or by ethnicity inferred from language affiliation, but rather by isolation-by-distance constrained by social networks. This result was welcome because I had predicted such a finding back in the 1970s before a suitable genetics dataset had become available to test this idea.56,57
Early in 2011 Pedro Soares and a research team led by Martin Richards at Leeds University published new genetics information that confirms another hypothesis that I and others had advanced years ago: if you want to look for a homeland for present-day Polynesians, you need go no farther than Melanesia.58–61 As Soares and his colleagues concluded: This work suggests, therefore, a convergence of archaeological and genetic evidence, as well as concordance between different lines of genetic evidence. Our results imply an early to mid-Holocene Near Oceanic ancestry for the Polynesian peoples, likely fertilized by small numbers of socially dominant Austronesian-speaking voyagers from ISEA [island Southeast Asia] in the Lapita formative period, ~3.5 ka. Our work can therefore also pave the way for new accounts of the spread of Austronesian languages.
62
Furthermore, what Soares and his colleagues reported in 2011 also ran counter to Kayser’s Slow Boat to Polynesia hypothesis as well as the need for Hage’s and Marck’s thesis about the possible effects of matrilocal residence and matrilineal descent on the Polynesian gene pool: In ruling out both a simple Taiwanese and a Wallacean origin, these results also contradict an influential ‘slow boat’ model for Polynesian origins that suggests an ancestry in Taiwan at ~4 ka for the maternal line of descent while positing a large Near Oceanic origin for the male side, based on Y chromosome evidence.
63
They had reached these conclusions after finding that the maternally transmitted human mtDNA trait everyone hitherto had been assuming was Asian in origin had probably evolved instead somewhere within the Bismarck Archipelago over 6000 years ago – perhaps in the same area where the immediate genetic precursor of this particular biological trait (which is derived from an even more ancient genetic variant today still widely found throughout Taiwan, island Southeast Asia, and the more westerly islands of Near Oceania) may have also arisen more than 8000 years ago. 64
It is not known whether these findings took everybody by surprise. Genetic evidence suggesting that this biological trait had to be a great deal older in the Pacific than most experts thought likely had been on the table for inspection since the turn of the century. The mtDNA trait in question – revealingly called the ‘Polynesian motif’ by experts – was commonly seen then not only as a definitive Polynesian genetic trait, but also and more generally as a biological characteristic that could be used to trace the ancient journey of Austronesian (and Lapita) migrants from Taiwan to Polynesia. Few had anticipated, therefore, that researchers would find that this same trait occurs – often in high frequency – in Melanesian communities speaking non-Austronesian languages. As Andrew Merriwether and his colleagues reported in 1999: What is surprising, perhaps, is the high frequency [that the Polynesian genetic motif] has attained in so many non-Austronesian populations . . . since its recent introduction. This indicates extensive admixture between the Austronesian and non-Austronesian populations. The deletion almost reaches fixation in a few non-Austronesian populations (e.g. the Nagovisi of Bougainville, with a frequency of 0.98).
65
Note here that these investigators take it as established that this trait is a ‘recent introduction.’ They themselves began questioning whether this was so several years later, but eventually backed off from this likelihood without accounting for why a trait that was allegedly such a newcomer to the Pacific (and supposedly linked with Austronesian speakers) would be so commonplace on Bougainville Island – a place famous in the Pacific as the great stronghold of Non-Austronesian speakers outside the island of New Guinea.66,67
Neither my SNA research paper published in 2010 nor the paper by Pedro Soares and his colleagues in 2011 got retold as a story in Science. However, The New York Times on 11 February 2011 did publish a short account about Soares’ paper in its science section in which the newspaper’s readers were told: New genetic research reveals that the migratory story of the Polynesians may be more ancient and complicated than previously thought . . . [A] new study in The American Journal of Human Genetics reports that Polynesians began migrating thousands of years earlier, not from Taiwan, but from mainland Southeast Asia . . . Based on this, [these researchers] determined that Polynesians arrived in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea at least 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, via Indonesia, and presumably left the mainland about 10,000 years ago.
68
In other words, the journalist writing this story interpreted this surprising new genetics evidence in a manner that fits comfortably into the traditional story about an ancient Polynesian migration from Asia – taking the issue of Polynesian origins once again right back to where it had been before World War II. Caveat emptor.
Discussion
The sampling of popular and scientific writings selected for this study was neither exhaustive nor randomly picked. Yet I think it is clear that what might be called the ‘remarkable story of the Polynesians and their Great Migration’ has obvious and enduring appeal. 69 While the answer may seem self-evident, the question needs to be asked nevertheless: Why? Furthermore, given what Pedro Soares and his colleagues have now discovered, what must also be asked is why experts on human molecular genetics, linguistics, and archaeology have had so little to say about human diversity and prehistory in the Pacific Islanders that differs in any significant way from conventional wisdom on such matters.
There may be at least seven possible ways to account for why experts today may still be seeing Pacific Islanders in a fashion that is more commonsensical than scientific. These seven are not mutually exclusive.
The seductive appeal of common sense
There is a commonsense analog to the commonplace rejoinder ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Common sense is inherited conventional wisdom. On a day-to-day basis, common sense usually makes sense. If it works as an explanation, why look for a better one? Needless to say, the history of science is full of good reasons to do so, but the point to be made is simply that if you think the Polynesians had to begin life as an ethnic group somewhere else on earth other than where we now find them, then bringing them over from somewhere else already identifiable as a singular and remarkable ethnic group makes plain sense. Why make their story more complicated than it needs to be?
Storytelling
Like most people, experts not only can but sometimes do tell stories to get their ideas across. Storytelling can be an effective way for scientists to communicate not only with the public but also with their research colleagues. Students of literature are so aware of the uses of narrative in human communication that some suggest telling stories can be seen as characteristic both of human intelligence and of our species. 68 Good storytelling calls for more than simply listing details and events, one after another. Stories usually have narrative structure: e.g. a beginning, middle, and end. They have heroes and scoundrels, triumphs and defeats, trials and tribulations, conquests and achievements, winners and losers.
Some of these story elements are present in the news accounts and scientific reports sampled here. It can be argued, for instance, that in each there is an identifiable hero, or principal character, although the hero is not an individual but instead an ethnic group, people, race, or tribe identified (using one or more traits of biology, language, or culture) as Polynesian (a geographic label), Austronesian (a linguistic label), or Lapita (an archaeological label).
One of the dangers of presenting scientific findings and theories through the use of narrative is that elements of storytelling can get in the way of thought.68–70 For example, good stories often place human actors (or anthropomorphized animals) center stage even in instances when human actors may have had little to do with what happened in the past. More to the point, good stories generally must have good characters, and as we have just seen in the sample of writings, popular and professional, it is evidently all too easy in storytelling to turn things into ‘people’ (e.g. Lapita potsherds or gene lineages into ‘Lapita people’), and people into ‘peoples.’
Ambiguity
‘Say what you mean, and mean what you say’ is the way my mother used to put it. Experts sometimes do not see how easy it is for other people to read into what they say (or write) what they want to hear. Certainly one way for scholars to distance themselves from a commonsense notion like the Great Polynesian Migration is to watch the language they use. For example, in the abstract they wrote for their breakthrough paper, Soares and his colleagues 71 make this observation: ‘Small-scale mid-Holocene movements from Island Southeast Asia likely transmitted Austronesian languages to the long-established Southeast Asian colonies in the Bismarcks carrying the Polynesian motif, perhaps also providing the impetus for the expansion into Polynesia.’ In the body of their report, however, they argue that these ‘long-established Southeast Asian colonies’ date back ~8000 years – some 5000 years or so before the stated arrival of Austronesian speakers in the Bismarcks. Would these later arrivals be able to distinguish such ancient colonists from everybody else in Melanesia (notably on Bougainville Island) who by then shared this gene? On the face of it, this would seem to be a case of mistaking genes for people and gene lineages for ethnic lineages. However, this is not what these researchers meant to say (Martin Richards, pers. comm.). Considering how easy it is for people to misread what others say or write, it is vital that scientists choose their words with the utmost care lest they be misunderstood.
Historical naiveté
One of the most egregious errors in historiography is the intentional or unintentional misuse of the principle of uniformitarianism developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to write the history of the earth. Stated simply, this is the idea that ‘the present is the key to the past.’ Applied naively, however, this principle can negate history entirely when this thought is taken to mean ‘things have always been the way they are today.’ One reason many now still believe that the forebears of the Polynesians migrated from Asia out into the Pacific as an identifiable ethnic group may be a simple variation on this ordinary misapplication of the principle of uniformitarianism: ‘if there are Polynesians today, then there must have been Polynesians in the past.’ What is being naively ignored by such a commonsense thought is that we know archaeologically that people began to colonize the islands known today as Polynesia nearly 3000 years ago.72,73 While the present may be a key to the past, it would be historically naïve to think that nothing has changed in Polynesia since people first got there that long ago. 74
Intellectual isolation
Because of the salience of the issue to modern world affairs, questions such as ‘what is ethnicity?’ and ‘what is an ethnic group’ have been extensively explored and debated in the social sciences. Unfortunately, given the demands and pressures of their own research work, it is probably more the rule than the exception that researchers in one field rarely take time to read about what colleagues working in other fields are doing and thinking. Needless to say, this makes collaboration across research disciplines incredibly difficult. 75 Part of the reason scientists today may see the ethnicity of Polynesians in commonsensical ways may be nothing more surprising than that they have not had time – or possibly feel that it is unnecessary – to learn about how social scientists analyse and debate the use and misuse of the idea of ethnicity.
Mistaken identity
If you believe human groups are as real and classifiable as biological species, then what difference could it possibly make what you call them? Why not just accept the elemental truth that ‘once a Polynesian, always a Polynesian’ even if you elect to label them instead as ‘Austronesian speakers’ or ‘Lapita people’? This kind of commonsense reasoning may well be why some journalists are still writing that Polynesians came from Asia even if academics now opt for other labels. So the mistake lies in identifying human groups as being like species and then treating them as if they are. Of course, you can always say that with the right amount of ‘conceptual reframing,’ this is not a mistake, and then go on taking for granted that people come in kinds. 76
Marketing
Although it is not a pleasing thought, there is at least one other possible reason some experts may still be writing and talking about Polynesians – not to mention ‘Austronesian speakers’ or ‘Lapita people’ – as an ethnic group whose ancestors migrated from Asia long ago. Research work takes research funding. Additionally, academic success is grounded not only on scholarly achievement, but also on whether you are seen by your peers and others as successful. Therefore, however crass the thought may be, it may be that some scholars hitch the wagon of their own research to the bright star of popularly recognized and widely lauded ideas or beliefs. Unquestionably the story of the Polynesians and their supposed migration from Asia has been a very bright star for many years. Marketing research as somehow related to their purportedly miraculous story undoubtedly has its rewards.
More than common sense
If the scientific articles looked at here are a fair, although limited, sampling of scholarly findings and opinions expressed over the last ten years, it is appropriate to ask what can be done to change how human diversity and prehistory in the Pacific Islands are perceived and interpreted. This is a large topic, but one suggestion emerges from the above: experts need to devote more time to the practice of history. 77 Instead of taking for granted that their research findings are historical in character and significance, they must pay more attention to Carr’s famous question What is history? 78
Judging by some of the most recent publications included in the sample, there is growing conviction in the Pacific that history is not as simple as common sense would have us believe. David Addison and Lisa Matisoo-Smith, for example, observed in 2010 that ‘the human past on each island is likely to be complex (and necessarily difficult to interpret).’ 79 Similarly, Pedro Soares and his colleagues remarked early in 2011 that their research ‘highlights a deeper and more complex history of two-way maritime interaction between ISEA and Near Oceania than is evident from most previous accounts.’ 80
Given all that could be said about such a landmark paper, therefore, it is both fascinating and frustrating to see that when the editors of The American Journal of Human Genetics published the Soares article in 2011, this is what they wrote about it in the Editor’s Corner of that month’s issue: ‘regarding the origins of the people who colonized Polynesia . . . The authors report that Taiwan did not serve as the direct origin of the predominant maternal ancestry in Polynesia and that instead, the lineage is of ancient Asian ancestry with some stops made through Island Southeast Asia and Near Oceania before ending up in Polynesia.’ 81 Small wonder that the The New York Times journalist wrote what she did about this same scientific paper (above). Apparently it is as easy for scientists as it is for journalists to talk about the history of evolving gene lineages in ways making them sound not only like ethnic lineages, but also like laid-back immigrants or tourists on a low-budget trip to a dead-end but exotic place called Polynesia. While the genetic lineage in question could be said to be of Asian ancestry, what was finally carried to Polynesia was different from its Asian (and ultimately African) antecedents, and those were not ‘stops’ on the way to anywhere. While the human history of this geographically localized variant on the human genome is largely unknown, if what Soares and his colleagues report stands the test of time, then one dimension of the saga is now clear. The tale waiting to be told is not about an incredible human journey, or migration, from Asia to Polynesia.
Conclusion
In the sensibilities of some, the year 1492 was the great turning point in the history of our species, a date when – and even a place where – the restricted and often isolated horizons of the old global order were overthrown by the European discovery of the ‘Other’ in strange and truly foreign lands. 82 I have suggested that understanding how a stubbornly commonsensical view of Pacific prehistory has survived more or less intact into the second decade of the 21st century83–86 can help us understand why many today still see islands as isolated places, and believe that people come in island-like kinds. Challenging the conventional wisdom that Polynesians today are the descendants of a singular ancient ethnic migration long ago from an imagined place somewhere to the west seems one promising way of calling public and academic attention to the vexing issue of ethnicity and the insubstantiality of the seductively commonsense idea of the ethnic group. However, nobody is going to believe that common sense has led us astray on this issue if scientists and others continue to talk about human diversity as if ethnic groups really do exist in some exotic bounded island-like manner.
Geographers have a long tradition of attending not only to difference and diversity between people and places, but also to the nature and dynamics of space and place. 87 As Cresswell 88 argues, ‘people and things have always moved and mobility did not start in the twenty-first century or even with the industrial revolution.’ From the vantage point of post-structuralism, post-Modernism, and culture theory generally, there have been strong calls in recent years within geography for the (re)theorization of its subdisciplines such as population geography and migration studies. 89 In this regard, I have no doubt that replacing the old idea of a transformative ancient Polynesian migration is a desire on my part as an anthropologist that could be easily situated with the current mobilities paradigm of geography provided geographers take care not to make too much of Christopher Columbus or the Industrial Revolution. As Cresswell 90 reminds us, mobility – like place, landscape, and territoriality – lies ‘at the heart of the making up of social worlds.’
Current archaeological and human molecular genetic understandings of ancient social realities in the Pacific are still in their infancy. However, the time is long past when those of us interested in what ethnicity and mobility may have been like then in the Pacific should have started being more cautious about accepting that there had been a prehistoric Polynesian migration out of Asia or Taiwan. To borrow a phrase from Jackson, 91 the map of meaning in the Pacific has been warped by an enduring geographical view of Polynesia and Polynesians as naturally bounded entities 92 trapped in place despite the mobilities of human engagement with other people and places. 93 What is needed instead are more credible and historically plausible constructions of life and times in the ancient Pacific based less on contemporary common sense and more on archaeological (and molecular genetic) information informed and revitalized by insightful and well-articulated social and cultural theory.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank David Addison, Tom Clark, Mark Golitko, Terry Hunt, Chap Kusimba, Lisa Matisoo-Smith, Paul Rainbird, Nicola Sharratt, Jim Specht, Laura Steinfeldt, and Alaka Wali for their comments on the evolving draft of this essay. Eric Clark contributed much throughout the production of this essay. Others have also contributed to the argument, but have expressed a personal desire not to be publicly recognized, and so I honor their reticence.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.