ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with certain historical and ritual incidents which, amount to a Polynesian philosophy of social life. The great classicist Georges Dumezil suggests that the ideas of political sovereignty in this philosophy are similar to structures he has found in ancient Indo-European civilizations. The stranger-king thus consumes the land and appropriates its reproductive powers, but only to suffer thereby his own appropriation. Fijians make an extensive classification of material things parallel to the basic dualism of native land people and immigrant sea people. Pierre Clastres also happened to develop his argument in the context of a different native philosophy of power: the quaint Western concept that domination is a spontaneous expression of the nature of society, and beyond that, of the nature of man. The whole thus makes up an elaborate cycle of the exchange of raw women for cooked men, marked at certain points however by transformations which preserve the distinctions between categories and their hierarchical relationship.
