Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Austronesia

ABSTRACT

The current collection of articles includes a discussion of Austronesian peoples living in modern nations situated in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa and Melanesia. It thus crosses many long-established boundaries in area studies which tend to develop their own theoretical dialects. While there are many valid reasons for these theoretical discussions, a shift in focus from geographically defined areas to what might be called ‘Greater Austronesia’ brings to light new sets of theoretical problems. Our central concern is the extent to which Austronesian societies value social hierarchy over egalitarianism, and the extent to which political leadership is determined through a rule of succession or other form of status ascription, through the competitive achievements of individuals, or actively resisted in the first place through various mechanisms such as the mandatory sharing of wealth, the denigration of ambition, or the dispersal of populations.

KEYWORDS:

• Austronesia
• hierarchy
• egalitarianism
• colonialism
• comparison

Acknowledgements

We thank the Center for World Austronesia and Indigenous Peoples (CWAIP) for hosting the international conference on “Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Austronesia/ Oceania” held at NTHU on December 2–3, 2016. In addition to the eight authors represented in this volume, another 19 people have participated in this project over the last 10 years. We would like thank Cato Berg, David Blundell, Robert Blust, Chiang Bien, Scarlett Chiu, Frederick H. Damon, Serge Dunis, Fang Chun-wei, Feng Chien-chang, Gregory Forth, James J. Fox, Kao Hsin-chieh, Lin Ching-hsiu, Lamont Lindstrom, Maria Mangahas, Glenn Petersen, Nancy Pollock, Robert Tonkinson, and Yeh Shu-Ling for their contribution to our on-going discussion of the Austronesian speakers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Kun-Hui Ku http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5729-7453

Thomas Gibson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7147-8672

Notes

1 Similarly, the archeologist White (1995) has suggested the term ‘heterarchy’ for societies in which multiple status systems coexist.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the funding support of the Harvard Yenching Institute (https://harvard-yenching.org/) for the 2016 international conference held in Hsin-chu and the supplementary grant from the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences (//rchss.nthu.edu.tw/rchss/index.php) at the NTHU.