Polynesians and the seductive power of common sense

Abstract

Common sense and science alike are grounded in human experience. Yet these complementary perspectives on the world and our place in it are often in conflict. The contentious issue of global warming shows that when this happens, the seductive simplicity of most down-to-earth commonsense explanations can make it difficult for experts to win people over to the complexity and uncertainties of most scientific arguments. But sometimes scientists, too, succumb to the appeal of commonsense simplicity when they should not. As Fredrik Barth remarked, practically all social science reasoning rests on the premise that there are discrete groups of people that can be variously labeled ethnic groups, populations, societies, or cultures – a commonsense idea that begs more questions than it resolves. Consider the case of the so-called Polynesians of the South Seas. Scholars have been accepting for centuries the claim that these islanders collectively comprise a biological and cultural people, or race, apart from other islanders in Oceania whose ancestors migrated long ago swiftly out into the Pacific more or less already recognizably ‘Polynesian’ in their appearance, ways of speaking, and cultural practices from a homeland somewhere in Southeast Asia or on Formosa (Taiwan). Mounting convincing evidence to the contrary that can be widely accepted as defying such commonsense thinking has been and remains one of the greatest challenges to Pacific Island studies in the 21st century.