Property, Propriety, and Ecology in Contemporary Tonga

By Evans, Mike

The agro-forestry system of Tonga includes crops used for food, medicine, and other purposes. Among these is the ‘ahi or sandalwood tree. This paper describes events that occurred in the Ha’apai region, in the early 1980s, when a trader offered to buy ‘ahi at unheard of prices. Although farmers have detailed and sophisticated knowledge of the island’s ecology; in spite of the fact that Tongan lands are privately held and farmers control garden plots as individuals under the law; and that ‘ahi is prized within traditional gift exchange, the farmers of Ha’ano harvested all their ‘ahi in the space of two years. Much of the overharvest was the result of the defensive actions of farmers. Superordinate kin (fahu) were harvesting the trees without permission, encouraging many farmers to harvest their trees defensively. Though land in Tonga is privately controlled, land, crops, or people are encumbered by the interests of, and obligations to, others. This means, as in the case of the ‘ahi tree, that the conservation potential of private property may not be realized. Nonetheless, the ongoing kinship system that supports fahu also continues to ensure biodiversity and sustainability in contemporary Tonga by regionalizing the ecology.

Key words: Tonga, argoforestry, common property, human ecology

Introduction: Tragedy and the Commons

The debate about property embedded in Hardin’s (1968) “Tragedy of the Commons” is an old one. Indeed, in moral terms at least, Hardin’s position is entirely consistent with John Locke’s thought about land and land ownership. For Locke the question of land wasn’t about common property, but about how and why land should become private (Moulds 1964). For Hardin, the question isn’t really about common property either, but fundamentally about why land should become private property. Both the positions are moral ones, based on a consideration of what ought to be (the good). What Hardin adds to Locke’s concern about the value of labor acting on the world is the value of the conservation that comes (Hardin argues) from individual material interest in land. Both Hardin and Locke take moral positions that recommend individuation/privatization of interests and resources, assuming that the result of individual economizing is a good. Locke sees a sociological/economic good, Hardin an ecological one, but both seek a common good.

In this paper I enter the common property debate from an oblique angle, criticizing Hardin’s assumptions about private property rather than his thoughts on common property. Hardin’s assumption that the economic asociality’ embedded in private property is either ecologically desirable or for the common good is problematic.2 His basic thesis has been recounted elsewhere; for this paper two additional points need consideration. First, as the references to Locke above indicate, I understand Hardin’s thesis to be part of a centuries old political discussion about property. Hardin’s thesis is also consistent with Adam Smith’s (1991 [1776]) marketbased “invisible hand.” For Smith only individual interest can motivate efficient resource allocation (for the common good), and for Hardin, private property, unfettered by social conventions or institutions (except, presumably, those of family, household, and inheritance)3 can ensure that individual interest and ecological interests (i.e., the common good) are congruent. Social institutions (or their absence) that impede the efficient functioning of either the economy or the ecology are “bads,” while the free flow of resources through the actions of the self-interested promote the maximization of goods, and thus the common good (for a cogent discussion of goods and bads, see Gregory 1997).4

Given both Smith’s and Hardin’s theses, private property systems are to be encouraged. But as Wagner and Talakai (this volume) note, it has become abundantly clear that various social institutions have had, and continue to have, ecological benefits that come of processes that are not easily reproduced by economic systems based on individual self-interest and private property regimes.5 While one might argue that this is the result of the imperfect adoption of private property institutions, we could/should nonetheless examine carefully the ecological impacts of such imperfect systems. Nonetheless, Hardin’s silence regarding other social institutions that have effectively ensured the conservation of ecological values is not simply inaccurate, in the context of the history of the development of capitalism and the accompanying moral philosophy (e.g., Thompson 1966), it is politically significant. In the case study that follows I examine the impact of mixed property systems on the contemporary Tongan ecology.6

Sociality and Sandalwood

From May 1991 to March 1993 I conducted research in the Kingdom of Tonga. Bender (this volume) has already described the basic geography and political economy of the country. The research involved basic participant observation in addition to a number of demographic and microeconomic surveys undertaken on Ha’ano Island. Like Bender’s study area, the island of Ha’ano is part of the Ha’apai group, and shares many (though not all) of the same characteristics she details for ‘Uiha. The island is small, about one by four kilometers, with very little elevation. There are four villages, Muitoa, Ha’ano, Pukotala, and Fakakakai running from north to south on the leeward shore. The population of the island has been drastically affected by emigration, and now hovers at around 600 residents-roughly half of the population in 1961. The economy is predominantly subsistence oriented, with some limited cash cropping, some handicraft production, and a very few wage labor opportunities. Gardening and fishing occupy most adult men. This gardening occurs on lands which are held as inheritable leasehold property, and legally at least lands are effectively private.7

In early 1992, while undertaking a detailed survey of garden lands with two young men, we happened on small tree, about 10 feet or so high, with lacey light green leaves. When I asked what sort of tree it was, an embarrassed silence ensued. I persevered, and eventually one of the young men (a grandson of the man who owned the garden) told me it was an ‘ahi-a sandalwood tree. I was intrigued because after two complete surveys of the gardens of the island, and over a year of trooping through the bush on an island only four kilometers square, this was the first time I had ever seen an ‘ahi. My unusual interest in the tree made my companions nervous. They warned me not to reveal the existence of the tree to anyone else lest its location become commonly known. Their fear was that someone would come and steal the tree.

That certainly peaked my interest, so over the course of the next few weeks I asked several older men about ‘ahi. I had heard repeatedly that the island of Nukunamo, a small island between Ha’ano and neighboring Foa Island was the “King’s Island,” and thus protected (this is a straightforward analog of the traditional right of Polynesian Chiefs to declare an area or resource tapu, i.e., declaring a prohibition, under threat of both physical and supernatural sanctions, on harvesting the resources). In local discourse Nukunamo was remarkable for the fact that flying foxes nested there and the large numbers of ‘ahi on the island. I had known this for a while, but what I had failed to understand was that both the flying foxes and the ‘ahi that could be found on the island needed protection. With certain provisos (no one can hunt an albino flying fox because it is associated with the King), the flying fox is an open access resource, protected more because of people’s inability or disinclination to hunt them. The ‘ahi, on the other hand, should, a Ia Hardin, be protected by the interaction of individual self-interest and the institution of private property, yet it was not.

The Tongan Agroforestry System

The traditional Tongan agricultural system is a remarkable adaptation of horticultural techniques to the ecology of coral atolls in the central Pacific. By early accounts Tongan gardens were intensive and well ordered, incorporating a great range of cultivars (Ferdon 1987). Contemporary gardens and cropping practices vary somewhat, but in the Ha’apai region, intercropped, vertically layered, multicrop gardens are still common. In addition to the food crops annually planted and harvested, farmers also plant and/or protect a variety of longer-term tree crops used for food, medicine, and other things (Stevens 1995; Thaman 1976). Among the most important of these tree crops is the ‘ahi.

Sandalwood played a significant role in the political economy of the Pacific. In the precontact period the use of its aromatic woods as a perfume was a marker of status, rank, and beauty (all of which are aspects of one another). In the colonial period sandalwood was one of the few commodities that Western traders could convince Chinese consumers to buy, and thus it became a vital part of Pacific trade. The market put great pressure on sandalwood stands throughout the Pacific as indigenous elites liquidated the trees in pursuit of status and power (Sahlins 1988). The contemporary market for sandalwood is much smaller and less significant (botheconomically and politically) than in the historical period, but nonetheless markets still exist. When, in the early 1980s, a Chinese trader appeared off the coast and offered to buy ‘ahi at very high prices, the farmers of Ha’ano harvested almost all their ‘ahi in the space of two years (two visits of the trader). The reasons for this overharvest are interrelated and complex.

Agricultural Production and Markets

The contemporary political economy of Tonga is shaped by global markets, trails-Pacific transportation and marketing infrastructures, and traditional Tongan social practices and values (Bollard 1974; Evans 2001; Gailey 1987; van der Grijp 2004). The long-term (+150 years) integration of Tonga into world markets, the introduction of cash into the Tongan economy, and the use of primary commodity production to meet demands for cash by Tongan households have resulted in a pseudo cyclical series of cash cropping events. Beginning with copra and coconut oil production in the mid- and late- 180Os, and continuing through to the present day, Tongan producers have had various opportunities to engage in primary production for the global market. Most Tongan farmers have been responsive to opportunities to meet cash requirements using any one of a number of crops if and when there are lucrative markets and marketing opportunities (Bollard 1974; Needs 1988; Sturton 1992; van der Grijp 2004).

At times opportunities have been grasped at the expense of ecological values (e.g., Needs 1988; Stevens 1999), though generally the pursuit of money through agricultural markets has been constrained by a number of conditions. The land tenure system, while arguably a private property regime, does not allow the direct (or easy) commoditization of land itself. The sale of land is, in fact, illegal, and most land transfer is through leasehold inheritance,8 even while some quasi-legal land sales do occur (cf. James 1993; van der Grijp 2004). The result has been continued access to the primary element of the means of production (i.e. land) for most Tongans9 and a robust subsistence agricultural system most of the time. Until quite recently most of the Tongan population could be fairly categorized as “uncaptured peasants” (Hyden 1980), and thus while able to take advantage of market opportunities were not dependent on them. In addition the fragility and length of infrastructural linkages have put Tongan commodity producers at a permanent disadvantage. The latter condition intensifies the price-taking character of Tongan producers, while the former has allowed people to withdraw from market-oriented production when prices drop to unacceptably low levels, or when social and/or ecological values are threatened. For some farmers, especially those in the outer-island regions where infrastructural linkages are particularly tenuous, the inclination is to produce only those crops that are desired for direct consumption or marketable in Tonga itself, and to eschew those destined for overseas market. Many farmers will plant enough material that under normal to good growing conditions, they will overproduce (i.e., above that required for subsistence and gift exchange) traditional subsistence and exchange crops like ‘ufi (Dioscorea alatd) and either increase their contributions to traditional exchanges or sell the surplus.

Bender (this volume) makes the point that social sharing institutions can have a salutary effect on ecological processes when sharing practices curtail the need for intensified harvesting in the context of a marine commons. This is true for terrestrial resource use as well. Interhousehold exchange of both marine (Bender, this volume; Evans 2001; cf. Halapua 1982) and terrestrial products (Evans 2001) is common. Indeed, variation in the levels of production of food crops between households is marked (Evans 2001:98).

Resources flow between people in the context of traditional gift exchange all the time; the relationships formed are in fact transnational, and thus transcend ecological limits of the region as well (Evans 1999). Not withstanding this, people do have material need for both cash and the stuff of gift exchange (fine mats, bark cloth, pig, fish, etc.) and they must, in the absence of social relations through which these things can be obtained, intensify agricultural production and resource extraction to meet these needs. At times people must make difficult decisions balancing social obligations and economic demands; sometimes this requires selling material that might otherwise find its way into gift exchange. This balancing can also be complicated by marked changes in the prices of crops, which inevitably create pressures to intensify production.

The destruction of ‘ahi on Ha’ano Island was caused by just such a radical shift in price, but the sociological context of the event requires examination. In fact, much of the over harvest was the result of the defensive actions of farmers. Superordinate kin (fahu) were harvesting the trees without permission, and so many farmers harvested their trees before others could take them. The institution of fahu is an ancient one, and paradoxically, it is at the heart of both the short-term loss of the ‘ahi on Ha’ano Island, and the stability of the ecology of the island over the longer term.

Fahu

The institution of fahu, the key to the loss of the sandalwood stocks, is central in the integration of Tongan social groups and social practice (see Gailey 1987; Mahina 1992; Rogers 1977). Very briefly, fahu refers to the relationships between a person and their father’s sister (FZ) and patrilateral cross cousins that arise from the principle that sisters are the superordinate and sacred counterparts to their brothers. Combined with the additional principle that the father’s side is superordinate to the mother’s side, this means that from ego’s perspective, one’s FZ is the highest ranking person amongst their kin (mother’s brother, MB, is the lowest). In precontact Tonga the interrelationships between chiefly kinship groups were governed (at least partially) by this relationship. The complexities of the system are discussed at length elsewhere (Bott 1981,1982; Gailey 1987; Mahina 1992); here it must suffice to note that the predominantly patrilocal residence pattern (especially but not exclusively among the chiefly strata), results in interisland and interregional ties that have both economic and ecological consequences. The material aid of the MB was a crucial element in contention for chiefly titles (which passed patrilineally and/or patrilaterally), just as the social rank of a contender’s mother had consequence in ideological terms (Biersack 1990; Bott 1981,1982). At its widest extension, the marriage patterns of the chiefly strata knit Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga into a regional political economy/ecology.10

Similar social practices have long been recognized as ecologically significant in hurricane prone regions (Alkire 1978), and certainly Tonga was and is hurricane prone. The technological capacity to relocate in times of hurricane and drought is a key element of human adaptation in the far Pacific generally (Irwin 1992). Whatever else fahu did (and does) in ecological terms, it facilitated interisland linkages that could be employed to move people and resources when appropriate, required, or desired (Damas 1994; Pomponio 1992; Flinn 1992).

Fahu and Contemporary Practice

It has been argued that fahu is a historical social fact transformed by patriarchal political institutions and commoditization (Gailey 1987). Fahu no longer has the political implications it once did. Nonetheless it is also widely recognized that the rights of the FZ and the father’s sister’s children (FZC) continue to have cogency, especially at the level of social practice (Evans 2001; Gailey 1992). On numerous occasions I have heard people speak of their authority over their MB and his resources. The rights of superordinate patrilateral kinspeople can supersede those of wives and children. On one occasion when I asked a friend what would happen if nuclear family members were to try to deny fahu rights (specifically in reference to a garden that he had planted on his MB’s land), I was told that they could do so, but that the result would be a demand that the MB be returned to the FZC so that he could be used for fuel for making an earth oven! Such jests, which are not infrequent, point to the continuing cogency of the institution of fahu.

Theoretically these fahu rights are unlimited; practice is, of course, much more complex. Nonetheless, the exercise of fahu rights was one of the main reasons the ‘ahi on Ha’ano Island disappeared. Young men were harvesting their MB’s ‘ahi. For the MB there is no appropriate response to this except a smile and a nod. The only defense was to harvest the ‘ahi before the FZS could, and thus in spite of the fact that land in Tonga is legally a private resource, and a resource that can usually only be inherited (!), social practice is much less simple, and in this case ecologically destructive. A very simple remedy, and one coded into the law, is to insist that land is private, and not subject to the claims of others (i.e., fahu). This was, in fact, attempted unsuccessfully in early constitutional documents (see Latukefu 1974).

But before embracing this as ecologically sound and further proof that Hardin’s take on Lloyd’s (1833) “tragedy of the commons” is correct, it is important to imagine the consequences of a successful erosion of fahu claims. The commoners of Ha’ano have networks of kin connections, some characterized by the fahu relationship, which they use, quite consciously, to access resources beyond their own locales. The webs of kinship obligation that disperse control over land and its products do just that, disperse control over land and its products; that is, the interregional movement of plants is assured by the dispersion of people wit\h overlapping customary rights to one another.

While this means, as in the case of the ‘ahi tree, that the conservation potential of private property is mitigated, the ongoing significance of kinship obligation actually ensured (and arguably continues to ensure) biodiversity and ecological sustainability in contemporary Tonga. The capacity to use superordinate kinship relations to demand resources or subordinate kinship relations to beg resources from kinspeople in other areas of the country lies at the heart of the Tongan political ecology. Private property may well have positive implications for conservation, but in the Pacific, where social connections are key to regional ecological adaptation, the individual nature of truly private property is problematic.

From 1991 to 1992 Ha’ano Island experienced protracted drought conditions. The result of the drought was significant crop loss and a shortage of food. In contemporary Tonga food shortages result in either the movement of people (i.e., to other areas of the country or overseas), the movement of cash (sent by relatives living elsewhere), or emergency food aid. In 1991-92 all these things happened. One anecdote will help establish the importance of sisters to ecological sustainability. A number of people left Ha’ano in 1992 for a variety of reasons, went to a variety of places, and stayed away differing lengths of time, but the drought figured largely for everyone. There was not only little food, there was little to do (the gardens were dead and even the supply of panadanus required for women’s production of fine mat was stressed). In late 1992 when the drought broke, people’s problems were far from over. Not only food, but also planting material was in desperately short supply. When people returned to the village, they often brought with them planting materials from wherever they had been staying. For example, one of my neighbors actually went to Vava’u group to the north, and returned with sweet potato slips to plant. He got these from his brother-in-law (i.e., via his sister). He was by no means alone in this. In Tonga, especially in the outer islands, planting material can be extremely hard to come by, and quite often it requires favorable social conditions to acquire what is needed. The fahu relation that caused such havoc on the ‘ahi population was the same relationship that allowed people to come out of the drought well. It was not the fahu relationship alone that facilitated the flow of resources, but fahu was nonetheless one key element of a kinship system that can result in both positive and negative ecological consequences.

Conclusion

Given Hardin’s argument, it would follow that in order to realize the benefits of a private property regime in terms of ecological conservation, relationships like fahu need to be curtailed because they introduce imperfections into the system. What the “tragedy of the commons” debate has allowed is the addition of ecological sins to the economic woes laid at the door of tradition and traditional social relations in the Pacific. Whatever the short-term ecological benefits of enforcing privatized land tenure, because private property not only fragments social ties by allowing an individual to deny others, it has the potential to fragment the regional ecology as well. In the absence of the fahu relationship (or some analogue) the drought I described above could have had more serious and lasting consequences. Access to cultivars to replace those killed in the drought was dependent on kinship relations.

In any society, the demands of sociality can be at least as onerous as the demands of the market. The difference is that sociality allows people to appeal to what is considered right or proper (i.e., a moral economy-Scott 1985). When juxtaposed to the operation of a private property system in the industrialized West, the Tongan system seems rather less than individualized, and not truly private at all. But even the cursory examination of property in the West would generate examples of property relations that were considerably less asocial than might be admitted. For example, the intergenerational transfer of property is a crucial element of property even in a fully capitalist system.

While private property and market institutions can and do function to disperse resources in various settings, the drought conditions described above for Tonga are not one of those settings. The social relations typical of private property systems in capitalist economies, by contrast with the Tongan situation, are characterized by a kind of social impoverishment. Traditional Tongan sociality mitigates the effects of an individualized private property system because people can and do appeal to a system of propriety that negates the retraction of social relations and therefore enhances the impact of Tongan economic practice on the resilience of the ecology. There is nothing invisible about the hands (and feet) that organize the Tongan economy or ecology. I have demonstrated elsewhere (Evans 1999) the ways in which Tongan exchange systems facilitate access to resources across the Pacific in the context of the world system via migration and remittances. The point underlined there is that these systems have profound economic and ecological consequences and operate outside of, or at least alongside of, market logic and capitalist economics. In Tongan law property is private; what is common in the Tongan system is people-access is shared and dispersed-and it is this dispersion that is the root of both the contemporary and long-term ecological adaptations of Tongans to the central Pacific.

Notes

1 By “asociality” I do not mean to suggest that property is not a social institution in a private property system, but rather that the assumption embedded in ideas about private property in the capitalist system is that property is held by individuals, and that only self (rather than social) interest should govern considerations around property. That this is an incorrect assumption need not affect the ideology, nor the practices thus engendered.

2 It is well worth noting here that the original use of the phrase “tragedy of the commons” comes from Lloyd (1833 cited in Hardin 1968). Lloyd’s purpose in posing the problem was to suggest problems with Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” arguments. This debt is further elaborated in a brief commentary provided by Hardin in 1998. Also embedded within Hardin’s later commentary is this weighty (almost Leviathan-like) statement-”the way to avoid disaster in our global world is through a frank policy of ‘mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon’ through which private property is protected” (1998:683).

3 It is worth noting that an individual’s interest in conserving resources ceases at death-a truly self-interested individual might therefore seek to achieve maximum gain from their natural resources at, or shortly before their demise. That this does not happen is, according to Locke (and presumably Hardin), a function of the natural affinities of families – affinities that should cease at the boundaries of some natural unit. The myriad difficulties of the public/private dichotomy in Locke, or for that matter most of Western European political economy, has been the subject of a poignant critique by feminist scholars in recent decades (e.g., Kelly 2002).

4 The political context of labor in Smith’s work includes those political discussions connected to the enclosure movement, during which common property was privatized and European rural producers freed to migrate, embrace waged labor, or starve (see Thompson 1966 in reference to England; see Worsley 1984 for an anthropologically informed synopsis of enclosure in a variety of times and places in Europe).

5 I will leave aside the corollary that individualized interests in property, especially in the context of the portability of capital, can and have had disastrous ecological effects-though an important corollary it is.

6 Throughout this paper when I use the term ecology or any of its derivatives I mean to include humans within the concept. So thoroughly transformed is the original Tongan ecology to (and through) human activity that it simply makes no sense to conceptualize humans and human action as anything but integrated and integral to the contemporary ecology; the key question is whether or not humans are sufficiently sensitive to ecological stressors.

7 The Tongan leasehold system was formally instituted in the middle of the 19th century, and gradually implemented in practice. Every male person over the age of 16 is entitled to a small (usually 8.25 acres) parcel of agricultural land, which is registered to that individual and inherited by his male heirs via a system of patrilineal primogeniture. Individual allotments are located on larger tracts of land (estates) controlled by either the Royal Family, a noble (these are chiefly lines that were recreated as nobles in the 19th century), or the government. While the granting of an allotment requires the consent of the estate holder, once granted, land legally belongs to the grantee and his heir, and cannot be sold or repossessed (see Evans 2001:78-91).

8 Land can also be rented in the short term and/or leased for the medium to long term.

9 This is an oversimplification, and the subject of considerable debate, even when considering only Tongans residing in Tonga itself (Evans 2001:78-81; cf. James 1993).

10 Having raised the ecological impact of fahu it is important not to conflate result with function. It is entirely too easy to reduce culture to adaptation and adaptation to function. The archaeological evidence suggests profound and recurring interconnections between Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga-connections that were motivated by politics and prestige, not ecological balance (Kaeppler 1978). Nonetheless the result was balance, or at least the capacity to maintain cultivar diversity by access to \region-wide plant pools.

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Mike Evans (mike.evans@ubc.ca) is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair, Community, Cultural, and Global Studies, University of British Columbia-Okanagan, Kelowna. This research has been supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research grant. The paper has been honed via the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania process over several years and with the helpful criticisms of numerous session participants. In particular Andrea Bender, John Wagner, Michael lieber, Michael Rynkiewich, and David Griffith have made a number of helpful suggestions. I am deeply indebted to the help and generosity of the people of Ha ‘ano, Ha apai, without which this paper, and many others I have written over the years, could not have been completed. Malo ‘aupito kau Ha ‘ano.

Copyright Society of Applied Anthropology Spring 2007

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