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People, animals, and island encounters: A pig’s history of the Pacific

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2021

Jordan Sand Open the ORCID record for Jordan Sand [Opens in a new window]
Jordan Sand*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 20057-1035, USA
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*Corresponding author. E-mail: sandj@georgetown.edu
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Abstract

This essay traces the diffusion of pigs and the introduction of new practices of pig husbandry in East Asia and the Pacific, with particular attention to the cases of Hawaii, Okinawa, and Japan. Countering the trend in animal history to emphasize environmental and genetic factors, it demonstrates that discourses of property, sovereignty, freedom, and slavery, brought to the region with modern imperialism, played a decisive role in shaping relationships between people and domesticated animals. The essay concludes that global diffusion of capitalist forms of animal husbandry depended on a process of disembedding animals from earlier social roles. This process took different forms in different places. It was in part ecological and in part economic, but must be understood first in the context of the movement of political ideas.

Keywords

Human-animal relationsethnohistoryhistory of capitalismAsia-PacificEast Asia
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , November 2022 , pp. 355 - 373
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Yoshida Shigeru, ‘Sengo shoki no Okinawa chikusan no kaifuku katei to Hawaii rengō Okinawa kyūsaikai’, Ryūkyū daigaku nōgakubu gakujutsu hōkoku no. 51 (2004): 96.

2 Shimojima Tetsurō, Buta to Okinawa dokuritsu (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1997), 196.

3 NHK, ‘Taiheiyō 5000-kiro buta yūsō sakusen’, 1999; Okinawa Prefecture ‘Pigs from the Sea Commemorative Monument,” “Umi kara buta ga yatte kita “kinenhi”’ https://www.pref.okinawa.jp/site/bunka-sports/koryu/umibuta.html; Hawai‘i State Senate, ‘Pigs from the Sea Day’, September 18, 2018. https://www.hawaiisenatemajority.com/post/2018/09/18/pigs-from-the-sea-day.

4 Hawai‘i State Senate, ‘Pigs from the Sea Day’.

5 Okinawa Prefecture, ‘Pigs from the Sea Commemorative Monument’.

6 Sam White, ‘From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Animal Cultures and Evolutionary History’, Environmental History, 16, no. 1 (January 2011): 94–120. There has been a modest boom in pig histories since publication of White’s article, including Tiago Saraiva, Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); J. L. Anderson, Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America (Morgantown, West Virginia: University Press, 2019); Alex Blanchette, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); and Thomas Fleischman, Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020).

7 Quoted in Shimojima, 175.

8 American pig breeds were introduced elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific in the twentieth century, so the genetic reunion in Okinawa was not unique. It was surely one of the best documented and most celebrated, however.

9 Louise Robbins observes of eighteenth-century Europe that ‘concerns about human affairs suffused writing that was ostensibly about animals’. Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 187.

10 Other studies that bridge environmental and social-cultural history include Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford University Press, 2004); John Ryan Fischer, Cattle Colonialism An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i, Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

11 Greger Larson et al., ‘Current Views on Sus Phylogeography and Pig Domestication as Seen through Modern mtDNA Studies’, in Pigs and Humans: Ten Thousand Years of Interaction, edited by Umberto Albarella and Keith Dobney (Oxford University Press, 2007), 32–5.

12 Marvin Harris, Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1985), 74.

13 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; Ark Paperbacks, 1984), 41–57.

14 Harris, 67–87. Harris contrasts the ancient Hebrew abomination of pigs with what he calls ‘pig love’, seen in many Pacific island societies. See Marvin Harris, ‘Pig Lovers and Pig Haters’, in Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture (NY: Random House, 1974), 35–60. For another ecological study, with a focus on Melanesia, see Roy A. Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (Waveland Press, 2000); For a theoretical review, Margaret Jolly, ‘The Anatomy of Pig Love: Substance, Spirit and Gender in South Pentecost, Vanuatu’, Canberra Anthropology 7, nos. 1–2 (1984): 74–108.

15 White, 82. Fleischman’s Communist Pigs emphasizes that modern communist regimes promoted the same factory farming methods.

16 Janet M. Wilmshurst et al., ‘High-Precision Radiocarbon Dating Shows Recent and Rapid Initial Human Colonization of East Polynesia’, PNAS, 108, no. 5 (2011).

17 James Cook, R. A. Skelton, and J. C. Beaglehole, The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, Extra Series, No. 34–37 (Cambridge: Published for the Hakluyt Society at the University Press, 1955), vol. 1, 139–40, 151.

18 Biogeographer Cheong H. Diong claims that all Polynesian pigs were ‘pariah’ animals, taking food from people but not bred or sheltered by them. Diong, ‘Population Biology and Management of the Feral Pig (Sus Scrofa L.) in Kipahulu Valley, Maui’ (PhD dissertation, University of Hawaii, 1982), 69. Diong summarizes early European descriptions of Polynesian pigs on pp. 53–4.

19 For the comparable case of ‘village dogs’, see Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 69–70. For historical study of a range of dog-human relationships, see Lance Van Sittert and Sandra Scott Swart, Canis Africanis: A Dog History of Southern Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

20 William Ellis, Polynesian Researches (London: Fisher, Son, and Jackson, 1829), vol. 4, 428.

21 Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World, in His Britannie Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution (London: B. White, 1777), 273. Forster also records that the islanders hid their animals from the European visitors and told them they could not trade them because they belonged to the king. It bears remembering that all early European observations of pigs in the Pacific were made by voyagers seeking to acquire them. The same phrase about droopy ears as the ‘badge of slavery’ was used by Bennett, 1840; see Diong, 58.

22 Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Penn State University Press, 2015), 63; Robbins, Elephant Slaves, 186–91.

23 Patrick V. Kirch and Marshall Sahlins, Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii (University of Chicago Press, 1992), vol. 1, 28. For summaries of several dozen studies revealing the variations in pig-human relations in the Pacific, see Secretariat of the Pacific Community, eds., ‘The Importance of the Pig in Pacific Island Culture: An Annotated Bibliography’, Secretariat of the Pacific Community, 2006.

24 Urey Lisiansky (Yuri Lysianskyi), A Voyage Round the World: In the Years 1803, 4, 5, & 6 (London: J. Booth, 1814), 107.

25 There is some dispute today over whether pigs in Hawaii before the European arrival roamed free or were kept penned. The historical record offers evidence of both. Hawaiian scholars tend to emphasize a high level of management of land and livestock before European contact, implicitly deploying European concepts of property to support the case for indigenous sovereignty. See, for example, Kepā Maly, Benton Kealiʻi Pang, Charles Peʻapeʻa Makawalu Burrows, ‘Pigs in Hawai‘i, from Traditional to Modern’, East Maui Watershed Partnership, 2013. http://www.eastmauiwatershed.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Puaa-cultural-fact-sheet-04.03.pdf.

26 Robert Wood Williamson, The Social and Political Systems of Central Polynesia (Cambridge University Press, 1924), vol. 3, 356.

27 Michael J. Kolb, ‘Staple Finance, Ritual Pig Sacrifice, and Ideological Power in Ancient Hawai‘i’, Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, 9, no. 1 (January 1999): 89–107.

28 Quoted in Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu vol. 1, 42.

29 Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago University Press, 1985), 19, 23.

30 C.S. Stewart, Private Journal of a Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and Residence at the Sandwich Islands (3rd ed.; London: H. Fisher, Son, and P. Jackson, 1830), 152. See the discussion of this story in Stewart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 146–8. A variation, recorded as the speech of a native Christian convert in Rurutu (French Polynesia) may be found in John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands (London: J. Snow, 1838), 230.

31 Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu vol. 1, 27.

32 Robbins, Elephant Slaves, 201.

33 Banner, Possessing the Pacific, 138–46. For a detailed account, see Robert H. Stauffer, Kahana: How the Land Was Lost (University of Hawaii Press, 2004).

34 Jocelyn Linnekin, Sacred Queens and Women of Consequence: Rank, Gender, and Colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands (University of Michigan Press, 1990), 201; See also Fischer, Cattle Colonialism, 56, 176–88. Fischer shows that the issue of fencing property was closely tied to the introduction of cattle ranching.

35 Diong records a case elsewhere in Polynesia in which people abandoned pig-keeping when compelled to pen them. Diong, 104.

36 Lawrence H. Kessler, ‘A Plantation upon a Hill; Or, Sugar without Rum: Hawai‘i’s Missionaries and the Founding of the Sugarcane Plantation System’, Pacific Historical Review 84, no. 2 (2015): 129–62; Carol A. MacLennan, Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawaiʻi (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2014), 52–80.

37 Fischer, 183.

38 Diong, 63–5. The cull did not eradicate Hawaii’s feral pigs, which continued to be regarded as a problem.

39 Takuma Watanobe et al., ‘Prehistoric Introduction of Domestic Pigs onto the Okinawa Islands: Ancient Mitochondrial DNA Evidence’, Journal of Molecular Evolution 55, no. 2 (August 2002): 222, 230–31; Larson et al., ‘Current Views on Sus Phylogeography’, 36.

40 Kinjō Sumiko, ‘Shiryō ni miru sanbutsu to shoku seikatsu’, Shin Okinawa bungaku 54 (1982): 63.

41 Higa Rima, Okinawa no hito to buta: sangyō shakai ni okeru hito to dōbutsu no minzokushi (Kyoto: Kyōtō daigaku gakujutsu shuppankai, 2015), 25.

42 Ijichi Sadaka, Okinawa shi (Tokyo: Ishikawa Jihei, 1877) vol. 2, 45.

43 Harada Nobuo trans., Sakuhō Ryūkyū shiroku sanpen (Okinawa-ken Ginowan-shi: Yōju shorin, 1997), 39.

44 Examples from classical texts in Guoxue.net Chinese Economic History Forum. https://web.archive.org/web/20070813121422/http://economy.guoxue.com/article.php/9477.

45 Akira Shimizu, ‘Meat-eating in the Kōjimachi District of Edo’, in Japanese Food and Foodways, edited by Stephanie Assmann and Eric Rath (University of Illinois Press, 2010), 95.

46 Hirakawa Munetaka, Suteeki ni koi shite: Okinawa no ushi to gyūniku no bunkashi (Okinawa-ken Naha-shi: Bōdaa inku, 2015), 20–21, 24.

47 Edward Belcher, Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. Samarang, During the Years 1843–46 (London: Reeve, Benham, and Reeve, 1848), vol. 2, 13.

48 Belcher, 13.

49 Li Chen, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 206–7.

50 Belcher v.2, 8. On the Phaeton Incident, see Noell Wilson, ‘Tokugawa Defense Redux: Organizational Failure in the Phaeton Incident of 1808’, Journal of Japanese Studies 36, no.1 (Winter 2010): 1–32. A similar incident in 1824 had resulted in armed conflict. See David Howell, ‘Foreign Encounters and Informal Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan’, Journal of Japanese Studies 40, no. 2 (Summer 2014), 309.

51 Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (University of Chicago Press, 2015). 168–82.

52 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), edited by J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (London: Athlone Press, University of London, 1970), 282–3. Bentham’s ideas came in the wake of a centuries-old tradition of moral arguments against gratuitous cruelty to animals, but differed in its reliance not on biblical interpretation but on a non-religious utilitarian logic. On the religious tradition, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (Penguin UK, 1991), Chapter 4.

53 Bentham, 283.

54 White, 105.

55 Rob Boddice, A History of Attitudes and Behaviours toward Animals in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain: Anthropocentrism and the Emergence of Animals (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). See also Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 125–66.

56 Daniel Botsman, ‘From Sacred Cow to Kobe Beef: Japan’s Bovine Revolution’, forthcoming.

57 Michael Abele, ‘Peasants, Skinners, and Dead Cattle: The Transformation of Rural Society in Western Japan, 1600–1890’ (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois, 2018), 3–6; Pieter S. De Ganon, ‘The Animal Economy’ (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2011), 126–33.

58 Calling Tokugawa pigs ‘status-less’ calls to mind Mary Douglas’ explanation of the interdiction of pigs in Hebraic law as resulting from their anomalous position in the Israelites’ animal taxonomy. The Tokugawa case, however, had nothing to do with cosmology; it had a concrete social and political foundation. Moreover, in contrast to Douglas’ reading of the anomalous pig in ancient Israel, outsider status in Japan had the opposite effect of making pigs more acceptable for consumption.

59 ‘Buta’, Kokushi daijiten (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1979–97). This historical encyclopedia article also refers to the custom in islands of southwestern Japan of releasing pigs in the forest to feed, suggesting that ancient Japanese domesticated pigs may have been mast-feeders like the pigs of Europe.

60 Tsukamoto Manabu, Edo jidai hito to dōbutsu (Tokyo: Nihon editaa sukūru shuppanbu, 1995), 131–53.

61 For discussion of pig breeding in Japan with specific reference to these prohibitions, see Tanaka Saneo, ‘Wagakuni yōton no tenkai’, Kagoshima daigaku nōgakubu gakujutsu hōkoku, no. 23 (nd.). http://hdl.handle.net/10232/2342.

62 Indeed, intensive rice farming became so central under Tokugawa rule that from the late seventeenth century, the draft animal population fell too, as farmers found human labour better suited to maximizing yields from small paddies.

63 ‘Fuchi ruisan’, Tōkyōto kōbunsho dayori dai 3 gō (September, 2003), 1–2; Murakami Yōshin, Yōton shinsho (Tokyo: Hirano Shiō, 1888), 8–9.

64 Nōrinshō chikusan kyoku, Honpō no yōton (1931), 1–31, 33.

65 Fukuzawa Yukichi, ‘On Meat-Eating’ (1870), translated by Michael Bourdaghs. https://www.bourdaghs.com/fukuzawa.htm. Fukuzawa makes no mention of pigs, whose omnivory fit them poorly in his schema.

66 Ishige Naomichi, The History and Culture of Japanese Food (Routledge, 2001), 148.

67 The precise source of Fukuzawa’s ideas about meat-eating in 1870 is uncertain, but he read widely in European utilitarian writing. In 1882, Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation was listed among the textbooks at the college Fukuzawa had founded. Albert Craig, ed., Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa (Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 361 fn. 199.

68 William Bligh, A Voyage to the South Sea (London: G. Nicol, 1792), 70. Bligh and others called the Tahitian pigs ‘Chinese’ although they were likely a distinct strain from New Guinea or Southeast Asia.

69 Yukiko Kimura, ‘Okinawans and Hog Industry in Hawaii’, in Uchinanchu: A History of Okinawans in Hawaii, edited by Ethnic Studies Oral History Project, University of Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1981), 118.

70 Shimojima, 64–5.

71 Kimura, 217; F.G. Krauss, Swine Raising in Hawaii (Washington, DC: Department of Agriculture, 1923), 1–2.

72 Shimojima, 132.

73 Shimojima, 162.

74 Shimojima, 109–10, 194–5.

75 Ishigaki Chōzō, ‘Buta no kaikata o aratamemashō’, Ryūdai nōka dayori no. 45 (August, 1959), 4–8.

76 Rima Higa, ‘A Problematization of Pigs and Pork: A History of Modernity to Invent and Deodorize Odor’, Inter Faculty (University of Tsukuba, Japan; https://journal.hass.tsukuba.ac.jp), 57–75; Higa, Okinawa no hito to buta, 28.

77 The recent revival of the traditional Okinawan pig reflects both nostalgia for a more harmonious time in pig-human relations and the ongoing effort to exploit island traditions for tourism. See ‘The Strange Case of the Agū Pig’, Slow Food, November 16, 2015 (https://www.slowfood.com/strange-case-agu-pig/).

78 George Dalton, ‘Introduction’, in Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies: Essays by Karl Polanyi, edited by George Dalton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1968), xii–xvii.

79 For a comparable case of social disembedding in Southern Africa, see Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1991), vol. 2, 166–217.

80 Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1972). For assessment of both contemporaneous accounts and later epidemiological studies of Hawaii’s demographic decline, see O. A. Bushnell, The Gifts of Civilization: Germs and Genocide in Hawaii (University of Hawaii Press, 1993).

81 Politically, the Great Māhele was a complex event. For a study from the indigenous perspective, see Lilikalā Kame’eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires: How Shall We Live in Harmony? (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1994).