ABSTRACT
Subsistence production in Polynesian and Micronesian societies was predominantly two things: farming and fishing. On many of the smaller islands, fish and other marine animals may have constituted the bulk of the diet, or at least a large proportion; even on large islands, where not all families had direct access to fishing grounds, fish still served as the primary source of protein, and were part of the daily diet for most people. And every family, everywhere, with the exception of a few high-ranking chiefs in the most stratified societies, engaged in agriculture, primarily producing food for its own consumption. Understanding family organization for subsistence production, then, means analyzing separately organization for farming and for fishing. The other kind of rights and duties that were managed and transmitted, and had an important place in O-cluster social systems, were the many offices and titles that characterized both the kinship and the political system.
