Islands of Ideology: Exploring Group Formation in Hawaiʻi and Sāmoa

Summary

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Social consent was essential to promote cooperation and group identity. Because of disciplinary attention to top-down processes of power accumulation and political classification, how social notions of social consent in middle-range societies were modified and diversified is poorly understood. The societies of Polynesia provide an opportunity to better understand the circumstances under which different power strategies were employed to build larger-scale communities within divergent ideological frameworks. Highly variable systems of leadership developed in the region at the intersection of two notions, one associated with the sacred and exclusive nature of leaders and the other associated with populism and consensus building. This paper will examine the archaeological signatures of these processes using Hawaiʻi and Sāmoa. These societies contrast markedly, occupying different subregions of Polynesia and possessing fundamentally different political structures by the eighteenth century. At the same time, leaders in Hawaiʻi and Sāmoa employed similar notions of mana to legitimize their actions and position. The archaeological record of both areas allows exploration of inequality, concessions, and public works to better understand how such variability in political structure operated and how the ideological framework of these places was modified to meet the needs of both leaders and communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives.   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38070.0