With Davis and Young in charge of his firearms, Kamehameha invaded Maui, and then successfully defended Hawaii against several attacks, in the process scoring a famous victory called “the red-mouthed gun,” a name used by the locals to express their awe at the fire and smoke that issued from the new gunpowder weapons. Kamehameha quickly established uncontested control over Hawaii. He then spent the next several years consolidating his rule and developing the institutions of his new state. In 1795 he sailed with Davis and Young and a giant war fleet, overwhelming Maui and finally capturing O‘ahu. The westernmost island of Kaua‘i, which had escaped capture thanks to rough seas and diseases stopping Kamehameha’s army, was at last subdued in 1810, completing the unification of all of Hawaii for the first time. Kamehameha proceeded to create a new set of political institutions to govern this massive state of far-flung islands. He appointed governors to each island, and Young was made governor of the big island itself.
Breaking Taboos
Muhammad and Shaka had to break parts of the cage of norms in their societies since many of these norms limited the emergence and exercise of political authority. Muhammad, for example, fought against kin-based relations while Shaka transformed both kin relations and supernatural beliefs in order to weaken sources of competing power. Kamehameha and his followers would similarly have to break down the norms that stood in their way.
Central to Polynesian society’s norms were regulations of tapu, or taboos, as they came to be known in English after their first documentation by Captain Cook. Tapu was a common institution throughout Polynesia, and in Hawaii it had evolved into kapu. In English, “taboo” means something forbidden, off limits. In Polynesia, in the words of Edward Handy, the first great modern ethnographer of Hawaii,
in its fundamental meaning tapu [kapu] as a word was used primarily as an adjective and as such signified that which was physically dangerous, hence restricted, forbidden, set apart, to be avoided, because: (a) divine, therefore requiring isolation for its own sake from both the common and the corrupt; (b) corrupt, hence dangerous to the common and the divine, therefore requiring isolation from both for their sakes.
In essence, tapu meant a prohibition or restriction. These were everywhere in Polynesian society. Tapu was so important because it was supposed to protect mana. Mana was the manifestation of supernatural power in the human world. Handy says:
Mana was exhibited in persons, in power, strength, prestige, reputation, skill, dynamic personality, intelligence; in things, in efficacy, in “luck”; that is, in accomplishment.
But how did you protect mana, exactly? Notable among the many restrictions was the “eating taboo,” which dictated that men and women could not eat together; their foods had to be cooked in separate ovens and some foods were prohibited to women (such as pork and certain kinds of fish, and bananas). It wasn’t just eating that was controlled. So were clothing and many other aspects of life. Most famous was the “prostrating taboo,” which required that ordinary people immediately strip off their upper body garments and lie prostrate on the ground in the presence of a chief. The nineteenth-century Hawaiian historian Kepelino recorded:
As to the prostrating tapu of the chief, when the chief wished to go forth the announcer went ahead proclaiming the tapu of the chief, thus: “Tapu! Lie down!” Then everyone prostrated himself on the way by which the chief was passing and the tapu chiefs who followed him, all dressed with great splendor in feather cloaks and helmets.
Just as our earlier discussion of the cage of norms suggested, the prevailing norms did not necessarily treat everyone equally because they were shaped in part by existing power relations in Polynesian society. Chiefs had a lot more mana than ordinary people—hence all the prostration. In Hawaii it was this power of chiefs that also transformed tapu into kapu. Chiefs were not just protecting the gods and their mana; they came to be regarded as direct descendants of the gods, and kapu was about enshrining this dominance. At its root, mana is not so different from the tsav of the Tiv. Remember that tsav, like mana, helped explain different outcomes in life—why it was that some people were more successful than others or behaved in a different way. But with tsav, someone who was very successful could be so because they were intrinsically talented or simply because they were a witch. With mana, instead, success came from being chosen by the gods. Despite this enormous difference, the whole kapu system was still hedged about by myriad regulations and restrictions limiting what the elites could do. Although political hierarchy had already started to form in Hawaii, it was still far from what it would become under Kamehameha.
The erosion of norms limiting political hierarchy started under Kamehameha. He had named his son Liholiho as his successor, and upon taking over the newly created kingship of Hawaii following his father’s death in 1819, Liholiho, crowned as King Kamehameha II, decided to abolish the kapu system. He felt confident of his power to do something no previous chief had done. So he dissolved the prohibition against eating altogether. Soon after being crowned king, he organized a feast. As a contemporary recalled it:
After the guests were seated, and had begun to eat, the king took two or three turns round each table, as if to see what passed at each; and then suddenly, and without any previous warning to any but those in the secret, seated himself in a vacant chair at the women’s table, and began to eat voraciously, but was evidently much perturbed. The guests, astonished at this act, clapped their hands, and cried out “Ai Noa,—the eating tabu is broken.”
A Time of Troubles
We have so far focused on the emergence of political hierarchy where none, or very little of it, existed before. How the will to power breaks down the resistance against it and may move a society along the slippery slope is not confined to the distant past. The will to power and its consequences can also be seen in contemporary cases where state institutions are present but unable to exercise control over society, such as in Georgia in the early 1990s.
In the late 1980s the Soviet Union was collapsing. Moves were afoot to establish independence in many Soviet republics, including Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as well as Georgia. Georgia’s first genuine free multiparty elections took place in 1990. A coalition called “Round Table—Free Georgia” got two-thirds of the vote against the Georgian Communists. In May 1991 the country declared itself independent of the Soviet Union, and Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the leader of the Round Table, was elected president with 85 percent of the vote. He took over a country riven by fractures and contesting visions, and without any real consensus about how it should be run. Many minority groups were concerned about being dominated by ethnic Georgians and started to talk about secession. By January 1992, Gamsakhurdia had fled the country, and the capital, Tbilisi, was mostly in the hands of two warlords, Dzhaba Ioseliani, head of a paramilitary group called the Mkhedrioni, and Tengiz Kitovani, head of the National Guard. At one point in just Tbilisi there were as many as twelve other militias and armed groups (with colorful names like the White Eagles and Forest Brotherhood). Georgia had a state at this point (well, sort of), but things weren’t so far from the condition of Warre.
Tengiz Segura, a former prime minister dismissed by Gamsakhurdia, managed to have himself reinstated in the job. Gamsakhurdia formed another armed group, the Zviadists. Without an effective state, the capital experienced a wave of violence, looting, crime, and rape. The state lost control of the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which declared themselves independent, and other places, like Adjara and Samtskhe-Javaketi, remained completely autonomous. A civil war began. Georgians call it the Time of Troubles.