The legal life of anthropological theory: Limits to the ideal of being useful

Abstract

This article critically examines the impact of anthropological theory on land relations and chieftainship in the Marshall Islands. Anthropologists steeped in lineage theory developed models of a feudal system centred on land as private property that informed the colonial establishment of a court system that institutionalised chiefs as landowners. This shift transformed traditional reciprocal land relations into stratified, commodified ones, enhancing the power of chiefs and marginalising commoners. Rereading key anthropological texts, analysing legal documents, and discussing contemporary critique against landowners, this article explores some unintended consequences of these anthropological models. It argues that anthropological theorisation is an ethical exercise that we should meet with good anthropology rather than explicit aims of being useful or meeting community needs.

Anthropologists working in Micronesia after the Second World War hoped to be useful. Working within the militarised imperial context of the US administered United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI), they wrote to and for (and only subtly against) the colonial administration (Kiste and Falgout, 1999; Mason, 1969; Useem, 1947). American engagement in Micronesia exploded after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as George Peter Murdock turned his Cross-Cultural Survey group’s attention to the region (Kiste and Falgout, 1999: 11). After the war, Murdock went on to lead the partly military-funded Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology (CIMA), sending 41 researchers to Micronesia between 1947 and 1949 (Kiste and Falgout, 1999: 26). In a war-devastated region, the colonial administration sought anthropological research to guide its plans for what it called economic rehabilitation and political restoration (Poyer et al., 2001).

This motivated researchers to be administratively useful. But their primary aim was to assist the local communities in which they worked. Anthropologists working in the Marshall Islands hoped the application of their ethnographic material would help meet those needs by ensuring an ‘enlightened’ or ‘just’ administration (Mason, 1947: vi–vii; Spoehr, 1949: 7; Tobin, 1952: iii). They saw the study of kinship and property organisation as essential to understanding local communities on their own terms. This required detailed descriptions of land tenure and property law, formulated in a language that would enable colonial administrators to settle disputes justly (Goodenough, 1951; Tobin, 1952). The resulting anthropological reports and monographs therefore established a direct link to the colonial construction of land law institutionalised in a court system.

The desire for practical application required models based on clear-cut definitions of terms like lineage, clan, and rights, even if these ‘frequently fail[ed] to coincide with those given by informants, which were usually in the nature of rules of thumb’ (Goodenough, 1951: 10–11). Such discrepancies are central to the extensive critique of lineage/descent theory voiced in the 1980s (Kuper, 1982: 84; Schneider, 1984). The gist of this critique was that the analytical concept of the lineage based on unilateral descent collided with local conceptions of affiliation, belonging, and relatedness. These and later critics were concerned with the methodological and theoretical factors of the anthropological study of kinship, questioning the epistemological premise of the discipline. That is not my aim here. I am instead concerned with the ethical implications of anthropological theorisation (McGranahan, 2022).

I explore some social consequences that arise when colonial or state actors apply anthropological models of society as models for society. I develop a case study of how the colonial court in the Marshall Islands directly affected structures of inequality tied to landownership by institutionalising anthropological theories of kinship and property. The consequence has been subjugation of commoners, many of whom suffer under exploitative landowners. Analysing how the construction and application of anthropological theory affected this outcome, I contribute to a broader discussion of what it means for anthropologists to be useful, opening further concerns over the ethical dimensions of anthropological theorisation.

I must stress that anthropologists were not the sole actors influencing, nor the sole source of knowledge shaping the court system that developed in the postwar years. Both anthropologists and legal architects relied on community consultation as primary sources to build their models, most likely drawn from the same pool of elite islanders with a clear stake in questions of property law (Mason, 1947: vi; Spoehr, 1949: 5; Tobin, 1952: iii). The court also built on intellectual traditions existing independently of anthropological theory, including both Roman and common law, which undoubtedly shaped its conception of property as a thing (Hann, 1998). Anthropological models contributed to the court’s understanding of Marshallese property relations, but they were not a blueprint for the resulting land law.

I must also note that the social consequences of the land law were unintentional and only visible decades after institutionalisation. Yet, they were, and are, also shaped by the political agency of local elites with varying intentions. Some have hired anthropologists to provide reports on land rights (Mason, 1986); others have devised their own or researched reports for the state judiciary as resources on customary law (Kabua, 1993; Stege, 2008). These reports follow the convention of outlining kinship and property structures that dominated postwar anthropology. Anthropological models were therefore theoretical foundation blocs in a legal system that has evolved beyond anthropologists’ control, opening questions about the temporality of anthropological usefulness.

Although ethnographically informed, my intervention is not ethnographic. Instead, I analyse published and unpublished monographs, reports, court cases, legislation, and newspaper articles. Following a brief section outlining the basic principles of historical land relations, I critically reread some key texts from the postwar period that have become standard reference work for anthropologists and shaped contemporary land law (Mason, 1947, 1986; Spoehr, 1949; Tobin, 1952). This leads to a discussion of some lingering consequences of this land law and local critique of contemporary landowners.

The ethical life of anthropological theory

Beginning from the premise that anthropological theory is not only about the world but also has effect in the world, it is crucial for anthropologists to reflect on the ethical implications of our work beyond our ethnographic engagement. Anthropologists must balance the increasing but often conflicting demands – coming from research participants, colleagues, state officials, and funders – for their research to ‘have value’ and ‘be useful’ or ‘relevant’ (Kirsch, 2018; Low and Merry, 2010; Sillitoe, 2006). To some, this calls for proactive steps to broadening our audience, using ethnographic insights to make political, intellectual, or humanitarian interventions in public debate (Bunzl, 2008; Eriksen, 2006; Hedican, 2016). Others see a need for anthropological advocacy, activism, or ally-making (Hale, 2006; Kirsch, 2002; Loperena, 2016). Yet others invoke Sherry Ortner’s (1995) concept of ethnographic refusal, arguing that theory’s embeddedness in ethnographic encounters raises questions of how and what (not) to write (Chao, 2024; Kirsch, 2018: 29; McGranahan, 2022: 297; Shah, 2022).

Responding to the ethical challenges of anthropological theorisation, Carole McGranahan (2022: 695; 2025: 70)) has recently argued that theory already exists in lived experiences. Therefore, the theories we construct, based on real people’s lives, will act upon the world as ideas that move and lead to action, and must therefore be told ethically. To achieve this, anthropologists must commit to a deep, interpersonal engagement with ‘the community’ – being useful and responding to community requests – to ensure that their work is true and meets local needs (McGranahan, 2022: 290, 294). This proposition, though seemingly morally right, warrants critical comment. Besides the points that interpersonal relationships have always been central to ethnographic engagement, and that such relationships pose their own ethical challenges (Bell, 2019), I have three major objections to emphasising community engagement as the solution to ethical theorisation.

First, the concept of needs is ambiguous. Postwar anthropologists working in the Marshall Islands indeed operated with an idea that they were addressing local needs. The desire for clear-cut land law was not only a colonial interest but also resonated deeply with local needs during conflictual times. Still, unintended consequences arose from the idea that one could mediate in such conflicts by reducing custom to clear-cut models to be applied and discussed through the language of law. Anthropological models may have helped to meet local needs (for some) in a short-term perspective, but meeting those needs had long-term negative consequences. Moreover, the anthropologists took for granted that the relatively few people they engaged with to construct these models represented the views of a unified community.

Second, the idea of ‘a community’ is analytically flawed. Whose needs, exactly, are we supposed to meet? Like the culture concept, the notion of a community has a ‘cosy invocation of consensus [that] may serve to distract attention from social and cultural contradictions, from the fractures and oppositions within the whole’ (Thompson, 1993: 6). The problem with framing community engagement as a solution to the ethics of theorisation is that it assumes the idea of community without accounting for internal disagreements and power struggles. Postwar anthropologists in the Marshall Islands largely let males with landowning aspirations serve as community representatives, meeting their own needs at the expense of others.

Finally, community engagement can only be a starting point if seen as anything like a moral imperative. We cannot assume that attending to community needs during our ethnographic engagement automatically leads to desired results for the local community. When people express concerns to a researcher, they usually have a desired outcome in mind, too (Ferguson, 1999: 139), but there is no guarantee that the results of ethnographic research will corroborate this. McGranahan (2022: 290) mentions that her own project on asylum and citizenship was shaped by local concerns, but it is doubtful whether her resulting theorisation of refusal, published in top-tier anthropological journals, though based on local ideas (McGranahan, 2022: 296), did anything to meet those concerns (to be clear, I am not suggesting that it should have). A conscious engagement prior to and during fieldwork to fulfil the ethical imperative of meeting local needs does not guarantee that our resulting theories will be useful or valuable for ‘the community’.

Even genuine quests to be useful can have unforeseen negative consequences (Li, 2007; Low and Merry, 2010). Postwar anthropologists working in the Marshall Islands had no preconceived intention of contributing to the alienation of commoners. Yet, they did. As James Ferguson (1999: 28) has argued from the Copperbelt, white anthropologists in the colonial era were fiercely anti-racist and anti-colonial, but their analyses still ‘reproduced colonial ideology by taking both the colonial system and the superior position of white colonists for granted’. Attempts to criticise colonial structures ended up reinforcing them. Alan Smart (2010) has voiced similar concerns about his own work in Hong Kong, worrying about the limits and constraints of external criticism of ‘flawed social arrangements’ in postcolonial situations. These worries are relevant for anthropologists working with ‘communities’ in which internal actors maintain structures of inequality with colonial origins.

My critique of the land law and chieftainship in the Marshall Islands is in one sense an internal critique of anthropology’s role in its colonial development. But it is also an external critique, as it would not have been worthwhile if not for the contemporary consequences of the law, which has been dire for those now defined as landless tenants. In that sense, this is an intervention in engaged anthropology that speaks to local concerns. Indeed, I respond to what I perceive as local needs by publicising widespread grassroots critiques of landowners to a broader audience, critiques that few individuals dare voice publicly. I have discussed this intervention in detail with some of my research participants, who view this critique as desirable, arguing that powerholders tend to discredit public criticism as uncustomary, showing the necessity of external critique. But like Smart (2010), they see a need for it to be tactful. Right or wrong, my approach is to analyse the historical processes leading to the contemporary social structure. Doing so, I legitimise the grassroots critique and refute the customary justification for the current social arrangement, but I avoid making explicit advice or recommendations.

Social differentiation and land

The primary form of social differentiation in the Marshall Islands is the distinction between titled chiefs (irooj, male, and lerooj, female) and untitled commoners (kajoor). ¹ Local storytelling traditions attribute separate origins to the two classes: whereas chiefs have divine origin, kajoor are said to have risen from the earth itself (Aea, 1948; Carucci, 2015; Tobin, 2002: 14). This implies that chiefs were landless, originally arriving from elsewhere (Sahlins, 1985), while kajoor were the land (Carucci, 2015: 78–9). A chief’s divine status manifested itself in their ao, a concept related to the Polynesian mana. Although hereditary, chiefly titles were unfixed: chiefs could lose their ao, and consequently their status, if they lost in battle or abused their role (Rynkiewich, 1974; Tobin, 2002: 331). Indeed, their status as chiefs and their strength as political leaders depended on their relationship with kajoor, who had strength in numbers (Tobin, 1952: 13–14).

We should understand the historical relationship between the titled and untitled through the prism of interdependence and reciprocity rather than property (Thompson, 1993: 127). In essence, kajoor granted chiefs the right to live on, and reap the fruits of, the land while chiefs enjoyed a position as ceremonial leaders, a capacity that obliged them to ensure bountiful harvests, security from violence, medicinal assurance, and other forms of assistance in times of need (Carucci, 1997; Kiste, 1974: 21; Milne and Stewart, 1967; Spoehr, 1949: 77; Yanaihara, 1940). Kajoor supported chiefs through food tributes and political allegiance. Chiefs, in turn, redistributed their tributes among their followers and supported families in need. Chiefs had certain rights to material goods derived from the land (Carucci, 1995: 35–6), but they presided over, rather than ruled, the land and its people (Poyer et al., 2016: 108).

Indeed, kajoor did ‘not regard themselves as tenants upon the farms because they never feel that the chieftain has loaned his land to them in the capacity of a landlord’ (Yanaihara, 1940: 141). Instead, family groups claimed, maintained, and managed land through a consensus-based principle were respected elders (al̗ap) held esteem and served as knowledge keepers and management guides. The proverb mājed kapilōk kōj (eyes that guide us) reflects the role inhabited by the al̗ap as a guiding voice and knowledge holder in questions of land management. Al̗ap could instruct tenure practices because they had valuable experience and intimate knowledge about the land they inhabited. They were respected elders and resource managers, but did not possess absolute authority over land. Personal capability determined the recognition of an al̗ap, ensuring a proper management of their joint resources.

Use rights and personal attachment to land were extended bilaterally and through a spouse (Carucci, 1995; Kiste, 1974; Pollock, 1974; Spoehr, 1949). Individuals had a wide range of overlapping rights and obligations that provide a relatively relaxed choice of wāto to live on and harvest from. Residency and affiliation with one piece of land and its inhabitants did not exclude similar relations to resources and inhabitants on a second or third piece of land (Pollock, 1974: 103). Land relations were highly flexible and not easily reduced to a coherent structure. But as land came under capitalist control, people’s relation to land were gradually formalised.

From the early 1860s, traders aligned themselves with chiefs to gain access to land and resources (LaBriola, 2019). Chiefs, in turn, enhanced their political influence through traders by gaining access to new kinds of resources and material wealth. This caused a gradual shift in political structure towards feudalism, as relations between chiefs and commoners were seen as analogous to those of landlords and tenants (Carucci, 1995). The relationship between chiefs and commoners became increasingly mediated by money and labour, attested to in the conceptual shift turning kajoor into ri-jerbal (workers). Tributes also changed from being ceremonial and redistributive to becoming taxation as chiefs gained a colonially sanctioned right to a standardised share in the copra income generated by the untitled, much to the dismay of kajoor (Yanaihara, 1940: 75–6).

Lineage theory in the Marshall Islands

Semi-professionalised ethnographic writing from the Marshall Islands began after German annexation in 1885 (Erdland, 1914; Finsch, 1893; Krämer and Nevermann, 1938). By then, major changes in land relations had already occurred, reinforcing their preconceived notions of a feudal landholding system casting chiefs as owners and kajoor as tenants (Carucci, 1995: 37). These models depicted chiefs as landowning autocrats who could evict subjects at will (Erdland, 1914: 108; Krämer and Nevermann, 1938: 314). They influenced external perceptions of chieftainship and landholding into the postwar era but lacked ethnographic depth and systematic theory. Neither were they developed during the Japanese imperial era (1914–44), when ethnographic interests lay elsewhere in Micronesia (Ishikawa and Ushijima, 1987). Systematised efforts to model land tenure began with the CIMA project during the US administered TTPI.

The Murdock-directed postwar anthropology in the Marshall Islands was steeped in lineage/descent theory, which had developed a focus on typologies tied to segmentary lineages, unilinear descent groups, and kinship structures (Kuper, 1982). CIMA anthropologists built on traditions exploring the (functional) relationship between kinship and territory, viewing kin- or clanship as a framework for thinking about and acting towards rights to and use of land. This paradigm construed lineages as corporate groups linked through unilateral descent, exogamy, and solidarity, the latter being a function of common investment in and jural and political connection to productive property (Schneider, 2011 [1965]: 648).

In the Marshall Islands, lineage theory focused on ideal representations of named and exogamous matrilineal clans (jowi) consisting of unnamed lineages (bwij) linked to a mythologic foremother (Kiste and Rynkiewich, 1976; Mason, 1947; Tobin, 1952). This perceived matrilineal lineage system supposedly structured patterns of land and title inheritance. The ideal, for both chiefly and commoner lineages, was matrilineal inheritance, where the oldest son of the oldest sister preceded his younger brothers to the title inherited from his mother’s brother. His younger brothers, in turn, preceded their mother’s younger sister’s sons (Mason, 1986: 2; Spoehr, 1949: 157–8; Tobin, 1952: 4–6). This reflects a male bias among the early anthropologists. Resting on an image of overt male power, they distinguished between ‘de facto’ and ‘de jure’ titleship, construing females as incapable of serving as true al̗ap (Tobin, 1952: 6).

Postwar anthropologists also assumed the notion of land as reified, divisible property subject to ownership. They ascribed autocratic authority to traditional chiefs, who could claim produce and other movable property, demand productive activities, and evict people from the land (Mason, 1986: 3; Milne and Stewart, 1967: 3; Spoehr, 1949: 162; Tobin, 1952: 13–14). Among commoners, al̗ap served as deputies overseeing land tenure in keeping with the chief’s wishes, sometimes allocating land rights to affines and children of lineage members (Spoehr, 1949: 166–7; Tobin, 1952: 20). Anthropologists viewed al̗ap as a formal, hereditary position linked to landownership rather than a respect title honouring the person’s knowledge and capabilities.

The ideal system of matrilineally inherited titles and land claims was coherent and agreed-upon between (the largely male) informants as well as anthropologists. The latter were content that this was a fair model of society. However, they also noted that the empirical reality was more complex. A pressing problem was the existence of paternal land rights and the frequent occurrence of patrilineally inherited status as al̗ap. Anthropologists noted the existence of paternally acquired use rights but dismissed it as unimportant because they could not lead to a formal leadership position or recognition as true landowner. The two common explanations for the patrilineally inherited status as al̗ap was the extinction of the matriline and the authoritative capacity of the individual al̗ap (Kabua, 1993: 12–13; Mason, 1947: 87; Tobin, 1952: 6).

Claims that contested the ideal pattern were problematic for anthropologists searching for systems and structure within a coherent cultural logic. Tobin (1952: 6) cast such occurrences as ‘deviation from the accepted custom’. Recognising that they operated in a historical moment of radical change in the near past, anthropologists were concerned with sorting the introduced from the indigenous. They therefore analysed all such ‘exceptions to the rule’, no matter how numerous, as products of recent changes imposed from the outside, allowing them to construe patrilineal inheritance, for instance, as subordinate to its matrilineal opposite (Kabua, 1993; Spoehr, 1949: 166–9; Stege, 2008: 13–14; Tobin, 1952: 15–23).

Anthropologists saw the decreasing authority of the chief and al̗ap as a significant factor to change, arguing that the resulting inability of these figures to make clear-cut decisions led to uncertainty about land and title inheritance, potentially leading to unrest or outright conflict (Mason, 1947: 90; Spoehr, 1949: 165; Tobin, 1952: 14). Building on ideas of autocratic chiefs fuelled by Christian conversion narratives and German portrayals of feudalism (Aea, 1948; Damon, 1861; Erdland, 1914: 107; Finsch, 1893: 128–9; Krämer and Nevermann, 1938: 196–7), American anthropologists interpreted limits to a chief’s autocracy as a recent change brought on by the ‘pacification’ of chiefs under imperial rule, rather than a reflection of the historical interdependence between titled and untitled. This construction affected the way the courts came to understand chiefly power in the postwar era.

From custom to law

The German Imperial District Office avoided local politics and never formalised anything like a court system for customary land rights, but was sometimes forced to mediate in some land and title disputes, since they held an acute potential for warfare (Mason, 1986; Rynkiewich, 1974). The largest case in the German era came in the early 1900s, in which the missionary-ethnographer August Erdland was a key witness (Erdland, 1914: 105–6). It concerned the interpretation of ‘native law’ for determining proper succession, as chiefs Kabua and Litōkwa disputed land and title inheritance after irooj Loeak died in 1904 (Firth and Mochida, 1986). Wrought with accusations of false statements, threatening of witnesses, conflicting views of custom, and the looming prospect of war, the case haunted the administration for years.

The dispute concerned whether a former splitting of a chiefly realm should remain permanent – creating two descent groups with patrilineal succession in one – or whether the two groups could reunite. If permanent, Litōkwa would have a legitimate claim to Loeak’s realm through his father. If reunified, Kabua was Loeak’s proper successor based on his matrilineal affiliations. The case lasted three years, with the Imperial District Office initially ruling for Kabua, then Litōkwa, before finally finding a compromise to avoid war. It agreed that the groups could reunite but granted Litōkwa the lands he had worked himself, creating a permanent split between the chiefly realms (Firth and Mochida, 1986).

The Japanese colonial administration also made some radical interventions that affected landholding and chieftainship, despite actively seeking not to interfere in land and title disputes. The key case concerned succession of a chiefly realm on Mājro (Majuro) after irooj Jeberik Lukotworok died without obvious heirs in 1919 (Spoehr, 1949: 85). Refusing to rule in anyone’s favour, the Japanese administration left the realm without a chief, and therefore without formal property owners, for more than twenty years. The TTPI court later interpreted that this would allow the transfer of formal property rights to the colonial government, specifying that it would not waive those rights if it failed to meet traditional chiefly obligations (TTR, 1953: 41).

The TTPI court was the first formal court system in the Marshall Islands. Anthropological analyses were key in its quest to establish land law and determine title succession, chiefly obligations and power domain, and formal roles ascribed to each tier in the social hierarchy. Across Micronesia, at least thirteen court cases from 1951 to 1958 cited anthropological studies (King, 1999: 368). In the Marshall Islands, the court referenced both Tobin (1952) and Spoehr (1949) in a key case to establish the general principles of Marshallese land law (TTR, 1954). ² But despite the close relationship between postwar anthropologists and the colonial administration of the TTPI (Kiste and Falgout, 1999), and despite anthropological theory being key resources for the court, anthropologists did not actively participate in or advise on the court’s form and function.

Former judge Edward King (1999: 365) has observed that discussions between anthropologists and judges focused on ethnographic details tied to specific points of law, and not on fundamental questions like the court’s role and dispute resolution in Micronesian cultures. Neglecting such questions put the court in an awkward position, proceeding as if it was an American court, despite not having sufficient knowledge about local customs to handle land disputes properly (Dunlap, 1977). The court compensated for its lack of a defined formulation of purpose by devising creative ways to reach ‘fair decisions consistent with local values’ so as not to undermine its own integrity (King, 1999: 368).

The first volume of the Trust Territory Reporter (TTR, 1958), shows that the court concerned itself with categorising key elements related to land tenure, sorting out rights and obligations tied to land titles, and establishing some ground rules. The court acknowledged that ‘there is no helpful general analogy between the Marshallese system of land ownership and anything common in English-American history since the days of feudalism’ (TTR, 1954: 587). This feudalism had three hierarchical levels of ownership, irooj (chief), al̗ap, and ri-jerbal, ³ none of which could be designated sole owner. The court, like the anthropologists it built on, questioned the content inherent in the concept of ownership, but not the concept itself. Instead, it took the category ‘property’ for granted, seeing property and land ownership as the central to Marshallese feudalism. This also granted chiefs ultimate authority over land.

Early court cases ruled that chiefs could evict subordinates, revoke land rights, gift al̗ap title without bwij consent, redistribute land, change land categories, and resolve conflicts. These were ‘time-honoured’ customs that the court expected chiefs to execute in ‘reasonably’, using ‘his [chiefs were generally gendered male] honest best judgment as responsible official’ (TTR, 1958: 678–80). This reinforced the old German understanding of chiefs as autocrats, missing the point that reciprocal obligations and interdependency and not property relations and landownership, were at the heart of the relationship between titled and untitled. ‘We are yours, but the land is ours’, as the feudal tenet goes (Thompson, 1993: 127).

The untitled accepted chiefs and showed their loyalty by giving ceremonial tributes at first fruit of the harvest season, when a chief came to the atoll, at communal celebrations, and similar occasions. But they managed their own land in accordance with the mājed kapilōk kōj (eyes that guide us) principle. This guiding role was difficult to grasp for a court that could not rid itself of its preconceived model of ownership. Therefore, the term al̗ap was ‘somewhat confusing because it is also used at times to describe the senior member of a bwij regardless of questions of land ownership and sometimes means simply “uncle”’ (TTR, 1954: 580). Similarly, since the bwij was understood as a landholding unit, the court (like the anthropologists) could not make sense of Marshall Islanders’ use of the term for extended matrilineal and patrilineal lineages (TTR, 1954: 580, 1958: 677, Limine v. Lainej).

The court further cemented the conception of land as property, and institutionalised separate forms of interest and individualised ownership, based on the idea of a hierarchical division between chief(s), al̗ap, and ri-jerbal. It treated chiefs and al̗ap as landowners and ri-jerbal as an interest-holding group with inalienable use rights. The court struggled to grasp the complexity of such use rights, specifically their bilateral extension, and gradually separated matrilineally and patrilineally acquired rights by adopting the term senior ri-jerbal to designate the oldest person with patrilineal affiliation to the al̗ap (Mason, 1986: 4). Today, the senior ri-jerbal has individualised landownership title as a third tier in the hierarchical differentiation of landowners. This title is specified in the charter of ‘Customary Law of Land Titles and Land Rights Act of 2017’ (RMI Nitijel̗ā, 2017: 33), ⁴ describing it as a predominantly male category, noting that men have preference over women, and that it follows patrilineal inheritance.

Landowners and the state

Legal scholars echoed the anthropological claim that chiefs and al̗ap were less powerful in the postwar era than the pre-contact past (Dunlap, 1977; TTR, 1958, 1969). The idea was that their subordination to an imperial order had restricted their abilities to resolve contestations violently and to withdraw or allocate land rights at will (TTR, 1958: 681, Abija v. Larbit; Limine v. Lainej). This is partly true, though chiefs likely never decided land rights without kajoor support. The idea assumes that chiefs held exclusive land ownership, but that the colonial era altered land relations to joint ownership by chiefs and al̗ap, who represented all ri-jerbal with land rights (Mason, 1947: 90; Tobin, 1952: 14; TTR, 1958: 682, Jatios v. Levi).

Though this seems like a democratisation of land relations that weakened the ‘feudalistic system’, it reinforced stratification by construing chiefs and al̗ap as landowners and ri-jerbal as rights holders. Chiefly power over kajoor therefore increased by limiting their capacity to restrict impositions and installing institutions for monetary compensation that enriched landowners (Poyer et al., 2016: 112–13). This may indeed be a consequence of being subordinated to an imperial order.

In the 1960s, the court established the fact that the government had taken over the chiefly obligation to ensure protection and welfare for their followers (TTR, 1969: 620, Labina v. Lainej). This allowed chiefs to legitimise their break with their traditional ties of interdependence that obliged them to redistribute what they received from kajoor. To some extent, they can receive without an obligation to return. This is particularly true in urban atolls like Mājro and Kuwajleen (Kwajalein), where much of the population live without holding traditional use rights and therefore come under the domination of landowners.

The dissolving of traditional interdependence following privatised landownership is subject to much critique among kajoor in contemporary Mājro, many of whom have effectively become tenants. The gist of this critique is that landowners (irooj, al̗ap, and senior ri-jerbal) abuse ordinary, struggling people with unreasonable demands for labour power and material goods. They enrich themselves at the cost of others and refuse people the right to a life of freedom (mour in anemkwōj). The most extreme, yet common, critique links this abuse to the high migration rates, claiming that people would rather leave the country than live under greedy and exploitative landowners.

My interlocutors commonly used landowner-organised Christmas or birthday parties as examples to illustrate these unreasonable demands in practice. They claimed that al̗ap organise elaborate parties for members of their extended family, sparking demands from their tenants for rice bags, frozen chicken cases, ramen cartons, Kool-Aid packages, and other store-bought food. Along with expected monetary gifts, these demands strain household economies already burdened by the cost of electricity, sewage, and telecommunication – services many landowners access for free to compensate for the use of ‘their’ land. Yet, it is not inequality itself that makes these demands unreasonable, but the idea that landowners no longer redistribute what they receive (see also Carucci, 1997).

One of my research participants elaborated this point by explaining that, when he was a child (about thirty years ago), his parents occasionally gave tributes to their chief, as custom (ṃanit) prescribed. The chief would thank them and put the gift aside, keeping only a little for personal consumption. Chiefs knew their followers well enough to redistribute effectively, for example, to alleviate families enduring sickness or unemployment. ‘Now irooj still says thanks but then turns around to keep everything for himself’, my interlocutor explained. The core of this critique is that contemporary landownership represents a clear break from valued forms of customary interdependence between chiefs and commoners by imposing structures of exploitation rather than reciprocity in the form of relational obligation.

Businessowners are among the sharpest critics of contemporary landowners in Mājro. Many of my interlocutors complained that landowners made it difficult to run a successful business because they often imposed new claims for monetary compensation, outside of the leasing agreement. They reported being bullied to pay more than the original contract due to additional individuals demanding compensation or landowners imposing amended contracts with unreasonable clauses. Some also complained that chiefs tried to force businesses to install their own family members in companies, for example as board members or in higher-level employment.

Several interlocutors noted that enclosing land as private property, yet withdrawing it from market mechanisms, made it difficult to operate businesses, even for Marshall Islanders who know how to navigate the social and political fields. They stressed it was even worse for foreign entrepreneurs, making it nearly impossible to attract foreign capital and investments. They asserted that landowners held ‘the Marshallese people’ back from development and from a chance to reach their full potential, using a corrupted construction of custom (m̗anit) to do so. The idea is that landowners have maintained their rights but not their obligations, relying on a particular form of male authority to replace the more subtle forms of female power.

The stratification and power inequality emerging from the breakdown of traditional relations of interdependence have disenfranchised kajoor, and particularly women. Recently, male landowners have attempted to strip women of their possibility of becoming al̗ap by tapping into the male-centric models of postwar anthropology. In her report on women and land in the Marshall Islands, Kristina Stege (2008: 19) outlined the proposed Bill 84, which sought to exclude women from holding the al̗ap title and therefore from formal landownership:

Two senators moved to introduce the bill after two women won landowner status on Kuwajleen in a 2005 court battle. The senators were appealing to the tradition of women delegating al̗ap responsibility to their brothers, what anthropologists described as a distinction between de facto and de jure titleship, to argue for a male exclusive definition of land title and decision-making authority. Female activists, many seeing themselves as defenders of custom, grouped together in a successful mobilisation against the bill. However, the male-centric interpretation of the al̗ap title has won some ground recently, as the charter of customary law and land titles states that the al̗ap will ‘generally be the oldest male offspring of the oldest member of the kajoor bwij lineage’ (RMI Nitijel̗ā, 2017: 27). To some extent, landowners have encroached upon state institutions to make it work to their advantage.

While contemporary chiefs are legally subordinated to the state (RMI Nitijel̗ā, 2017: 22) and not above the law (though the threshold to prosecute them is generally higher than for kajoor), they can sometimes dominate the state. Indeed, there are numerous examples of landowners shutting down state institutions or threatening to block public access to fresh water over land-leasing disputes. The following examples appeared in the weekly newspaper, the Marshall Islands Journal, the only printed newspaper in Mājro.

In November 2017, a landowner nailed shut the entrance to a preschool in Majuro in response to escalating landowner conflict. Unhappy about the internal distribution of land-lease money, the stunt kept about 125 pupils out of school for most of the week (Hosia, 2017). Five years later, landowners locked up an elementary school across the street, as they had done several times before, after discovering that a building on campus was excluded from the leasing agreement. Acting with support from the lerooj, the al̗ap meant to keep the school closed until the public school system paid eight years worth of back payment for the building. The closure affected hundreds of pupils. After the Attorney General intervened, the al̗ap indicated that he would possibly open the school towards the end of the week, but warned that ‘if I sign the lease and still receive no payment, I will still shut the school’ (Hosia, 2022).

Such incidents feed the idea that landowners care more about enriching themselves than the welfare of their followers. Only a fraction of them reaches the newspaper, but comparable stories circulate widely through the ‘coconut wireless’ to shame greedy landowners, exemplifying the power position that landownership affords those with legal claim to title. The ultimate example came in January 2018, when landowners had bolted the doors to the capital building, preventing Nitijel̗ā (the legislative body) from following its constitutional mandate to open parliament for the new year. Using bolt cutters, Nitijel̗ā members forced their way through the locked doors to convene for two days. President Hilda Heine called for recess on day two so cabinet could resolve issues with the landowners, who were upset because the land-lease agreement had expired two years earlier (Johnson, 2018). Landowners may not be above the law, but they can, in certain respects, stand above the state.

Conclusion

The primary form of social differentiation in relation to status and land was between titled chiefs and untitled commoners. This remains true, but in new ways. Today, ‘titled’ includes al̗ap and senior ri-jerbal, making some kajoor legally recognised as landowners. The titled–untitled distinction has shifted from hereditary rank to legal title in land. In urban contexts, this has negatively affected the material conditions under which untitled kajoor live, and the possibilities they have for political participation. Consequently, landownership has become a defining element of political stratification and socioeconomic inequality in urban areas.

This raises questions about the ethical implications of anthropological theorisation. As shown, anthropological models of society have become models for society, significantly impacting recent changes in land relations and political leadership in the Marshall Islands. Through the legal system, anthropological texts have legitimised unequal access to, and utilisation of, material resources and political decision-making. There is, then, a direct relationship between anthropological theories in the postwar era and contemporary structures of social and political inequality.

These social consequences have been largely unintentional. Despite entanglements with colonial administrators in Micronesia, anthropologists could not have foreseen the social effects of their models. Therefore, this case encourages ethical reflections beyond the direct human relationships we absorb during and after our ethnographic work, raising questions about the application of our theories and how to ensure an ethical engagement beyond fieldwork. Some contemporary responses to such questions, like promising deeper community engagement (McGranahan, 2022), yield only partial or unsatisfactory solutions.

Indeed, this case encourages a broader reflection of what it means for anthropologists to be useful, and whether our models and theories can, or should, attend to community needs, however defined. This was, after all, exactly what motivated anthropologists in the postwar Marshall Islands to construct clear-cut models for administrative application. Our theories, of refusal for example, might be based local perspectives and reflect community needs in ways that contribute to the political empowerment of indigenous or marginalised groups (McGranahan, 2022: 295–6), but it is also easy to imagine state actors or political opponents seizing upon such theories to legitimise structures of rejection. Great or small, our theories will have an effect in the world, which means that theory construction is an ethical exercise. But the effects they have can be unpredictable or unexpected, and therefore difficult or impossible to guard against.

Perhaps we should abandon the aim of being useful (beyond the personal engagements we enact during and after fieldwork, of course), setting our sights on doing good anthropology instead. Some of the greatest strengths of anthropology – nuance, indeterminacy, complexity, ambiguity – are, ironically, also some of the least useful tools to meet predetermined social needs, which often demand clear-cut answers. Maintaining attention to ethnographic nuances, even if our findings contradict popular views and needs in the communities we study, may make our theories less applicable to policy concerns, but could bring us closer to the social realities we attempt to understand and open possibilities of relevance beyond our immediate imagination.