Table of Contents
The traditional political communities of the central Caroline Islands, from Ulithi to Namonuito Atoll, are characteristically small. A politically autonomous community may consist of a single village, a district or a small island, each composed of matrilineal descent groups. The total population of an island or an atoll is, on average, less than 800 persons and its land area is at most five square kilometres in extent. Some scholars have suggested that institutionalized chieftainship in Micronesia, as a form of suprafamilial authority, is directly related to surplus food production (e.g. Mason 1968). Therefore, due to their meagre resource base, the societies of the central Carolines should necessarily be unstratified and egalitarian.
This, however, is not the case. Instead, these polities are characterized by hereditary chieftainship and ranked kin groups. Shimizu (1987) classifies the polities of the Carolines and the Marshalls into two main types:
- chieftainships of a primus inter pares type, as in Palau (Belau) and Yap,
- centralized chieftainships, as in the central Carolines, Truk, Pohnpei, Kosrae, and in the Marshalls.
He concludes that political organization in Micronesia shows little correlation with environmental conditions (Shimizu 1987:249).
The matri-clans or matri-lineages of the central Carolines are divided between those of chiefly and non-chiefly rank. Rank is related to the sequence of a clan’s or lineage’s arrival on an island or in a particular locality (Alkire 1978:117, 1984:6-7). Claims to priority of settlement are generally asserted in terms of oral histories of migration routes and land ownership. In this regard, there exist two “contradictory” narrative traditions concerning the homeland of ancestral migrants to the central Caroline Islands. One is a narrative tradition that links migration to an “eastern route”, from “Kachaw”. The other link is to a “western route”, from the “Yap Empire”.
The aim of this paper is to examine the oral historical traditions that relate to rank among kin groups and islands and to clarify, more specifically, the nature of chieftainship on Satawal Island. I describe mainly the way in which oral traditions of migration help create social rank and legitimize chieftainship according to notions of political precedence among islands and kin groups.