State, labour, and kin: tensions of value in an egalitarian community

Abstract

This essay discusses the effects of a state apparatus and new forms of labour in a kin‐based egalitarian distributive economy. The atoll society of Tokelau is currently establishing a modern state, largely financed by aid, but also through revenue from Tokelau's fisheries zone. The new labour regime associated with the introduction of a state administration is in practice entangled with an egalitarian distributive system of production and reproduction. The local kin‐based leadership is able to incorporate and use the system of capital in an egalitarian fashion. Whether it will be able over time to accommodate social inequality – that is, the division of villagers into skilled and unskilled workers with potentially qualitatively different access to livelihoods – is, however, an open question. Where comparative studies from Aboriginal Australia describe unequal access to work and standards of livelihoods by reference to ontology, and hence by implication to ethnicity, the tensions experienced in Tokelau take place within one social network in which new forms of labour contribute to a devaluation of skills associated with gendered patterns of livelihoods. From this devaluation follows a potential loss of sustainability for the atoll society should the capital flow move elsewhere.

Introduction: Dependence in Oceania

“…Hayano (1979:45–7) discusses the ways in which cash‐cropping led to greater ‘independence’ for some women in Tauna Village in the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea; a process ‘spurred on by independent wealth’ (1979:50). This kind of reconfiguration of gendered aspects of social relations also applies to other activities such as wage‐labour and involvement with state bureaucracies (see for example Hoëm 2018:178). Koczberski and Curry (2016:272) describe how the emergence of oil palm smallholdings in West New Britain, has enabled younger men to ‘ … destabilise existing power hierarchies and enable the younger generation of males to assert greater financial independence as they demand more control over the income’.…”

“…According to Slaughter (2007:207), pointing out that the ' … neocolonial character of … national independence and self-determination becomes evident when national development reveals itself to be a program of international dependency', is also a central trope of Hau'ofa's 1983 collection of satirical short stories Tales of the Tikongs. Although Hau'ofa (1987:348) begins his discussion by limiting his focus to 'the South Pacific region' rather than 'the world economy', his analysis is positioned within a tradition of earlier 'world-system' theorists, such as Wallerstein (1974), for whom the analysis of such structural 'dependencies' in global and regional economic systems was a major focus of analysis (see also Otto 1993:1, 6;Good and Fitzpatrick 1979:126;Bratrud;Hoëm;Smith this volume). In anthropology, and social science more generally, one feature of such accounts was often a scepticism towards an overly strong focus on local specific ethnographic findings at the expense of drawing out regional or global systemic trends (e.g.…”

‘Cutting the Colonial Cord’? Tensions of Value and the Relationship between Tokelau and New Zealand

“…The value placed on formal education as the main instrument to achieve a better future also served to erode local survival skills and subsistence activities, of which the perhaps most skill‐demanding is open‐ocean fishing, a male activity ( cf . Hoëm 2018; Huntsman and Kalolo 2007).…”

“…However, a striking feature throughout has been a marked absence in Tokelau of the ‘yearning for independence’ that according to the thinking of the decolonizing lobby was a driving force for decolonization in some African countries (see Ferguson 2013). This is related to the fact that the dependency that Hooper (or Wallerstein) warned against is obviously a very different kind of dependence than that valued by Tokelauans, as it is associated with relationships that are individualized, producing segmentation, or class‐like societal structures, and is premised on the possibility of material accumulation (Hoëm 2018).…”

European social anthropology in 2018: an increasingly recursive public

“…In that spirit, contributors to the special issue try to offer the most expansive possible sampling of relationships between labour and capital, seeking to avoid limiting the concept to wage labour (Cant ; Martin ; Narotzky ; Yanagisako ). Here, they make a deliberate decision to focus both on the now much‐discussed precariat (Grill ; Harvey ; Eriksen and Schober 2018), but also the persistence of the state and far more stable labour relations among certain privileged groups (Campbell ; Hoëm ; Krohn‐Hansen ). These authors all seem to be promoting the idea that, as Harvey and Krohn‐Hansen frame it, even anthropologists who ‘might not necessarily see themselves as working primarily on economic relations’ can still use labour as ‘a means of extending thought as we attempt to find ways to respond to the challenges of our contemporary world’ (2018: 28).…”