I Circulating rights to resources: The evidence from a survey on indigenous law

Any attempt to recapitulate the shifting meaning of homestead, or kaujap, on Pohnpei around 1910 needs to take the scarcity of written documents from the time into consideration. The files about the land survey are seemingly too factual and one-sided to unfold the effects of the data collection all by themselves. For this reason, I want to draw on evidence gathered from another type of survey, on indigenous law, which was conducted in the area during those years. Several questionnaires circulated through missionary networks and colonial bureaucracies, where it fell to local officials to fill in the blanks (Post Reference Post and Steinmetz1894; Kohler Reference Kohler1897; Steinmetz and Thurnwald Reference Steinmetz and Thurnwald1906). Each of these raised hundreds of questions on issues such as inheritance, credit, adoption, punitive law, property and of course land tenure. These surveys mark the beginning of a crucial type of administrative knowledge making in the colonies, which would grow into the academic discipline of comparative law or legal anthropology.

One of the first advocates of a comprehensive collection of indigenous law in Germany, Joseph Kohler, frequently published on legal customs in his journal on comparative law. He mostly paraphrased material from questionnaires he requested and received from all over the German colonies. He gave a detailed account of the situation on the Marshall Islands, which lie to the north of Pohnpei (Kohler Reference Kohler1897). With respect to land, Kohler recognizes the institution of the commons (Gemeineigentum), but underlines how planting a palm tree on such land turned this tree into a private asset. The right to use reefs was interpreted by him as the epitome of private property (Alleineigentum) and hence an innovation, however uncommon ownership below sea level might have been in Europe. From the evidence others had sent him about Micronesia, he gathered that access to resources was more flexible. However, all that Kohler found when confronted with patterns of rotating land use was proof of the “early” development status of this society. Flexible access to resources was an instable affair, and—just like the sloppy partnership models of group marriage (Gruppenehe)—an indicator of “old” forms of society according to the prevalent scheme of evolutionary anthropology. Only for such primordial societies was it acceptable that land, children, spouses and even names were exchangeable (ibid., 444, 451, 449).

For Kohler, such shared relations and flexible land property regimes cast the society in question into an abyss of time (Fabian Reference Fabian2000). Never did he consider the ecological conditions on the island. Given that the French discussions on colonial land tenure in Algiers strongly associated the commons with specific climates or resource managements, this blindness towards the usefulness of economic institutions like communal property regimes is all the more surprising.Footnote ⁴ Yet, still remarkable for his time, Kohler recognized these uncodified institutions as “law.” With colleagues of the first generation of comparative law such as Felix Meyer and Albert Post, he worked within a paradigm of universal history of law (Universalrechtsgeschichte) and supported the equal status of the non-written customary law around the world. He saw the Caroline Island societies through the lens of evolutionary anthropology, according to which “early” cultures were prone to rank the group above the family, or the individual. His perspective on homestead or kaujap was thus heavily tainted by ethnographic preconceptions of evolutionism, as it was introduced by scholars of law like Lewis Henry Morgan and Johann Jakob Bachofen. Nevertheless, he was one of the inaugurators of a crucial field of colonial knowledge, which figured as comparative law or German ethnological jurisprudence at the time.

This emerging discipline, which would be subsumed as legal ethnography today, has not gone unnoticed in the history of law (Schott Reference Schott1982; Boin Reference Boin1996; Sippel Reference Sippel1997, Hardach Reference Hardach, Voigt and Sack2001, Habermas Reference Habermas2012; Zollmann Reference Zollmann and Duve2014) and the history of legal anthropology (Malinowski Reference Malinowski1926; Redmayne Reference Redmayne and Rogers1983; Lyall Reference Lyall2008; Tuori Reference Tuori2016). While the documented rules are certainly not all reliable, especially given the flexibility and ad hoc nature of unwritten common law (Kuppe 2000, Reference Kuppe2001), the results of the survey are still counted among the most important existing documents on indigenous law for the region around 1900. Recently, the content of the responses has been investigated as part of the enquête tradition (Herrnstadt and Renard Reference Herrnstadt and Renard2020; Midena Reference Midena and Yeo2022, Midena and Echterhölter Reference Midena, Echterhölter, Corbould, Greenhalgh and Warwickforthcoming). Local officials, although clearly dependent on informants and go-betweens, often knew more about indigenous rules and institutions than scholars of law in Berlin (Echterhölter Reference Echterhölter2020). As the example of Kohler showed, these documents give no direct access to historical legal customs and have to be read with caution, and compared to other sets of answers from Micronesia.

The original answers to the questionnaires on indigenous law from the island of Nauru, on which Kohler bases his account, were sent to the German Imperial Colonial Office (Reichskolonialamt) by station chief Ferdinand Jung (Jung Reference Jung1897; Storr Reference Storr2020). They tell a slightly different story of not just land but rather nature. Access to the environment was strongly organized and segmented into different categories of access, in line with the structure of one’s extended family. A “taboo” could be placed on trees and paths, fishing equipment and fruit bearing trees, which did not automatically belong to the owner of the land, but were guarded by proprietary signs. The separation of land and usufruct rights is a common economic institution in subsistence economies, if not a necessary one, and at odds with the idea of exclusively owned plots.

The property marks which supported this system of rights cast a powerful spell. They could not be multiplied in number and were thus treated as heirlooms or sold at high prices. Jung relates that on Nauru these protective signs had a high value, “if not higher value than land tenure” (Jung Reference Jung1897, 68). The order described by Jung makes access to resources dependent on one’s extended family: aside from collectively used land, the status of the mother’s family decided upon the rights to use land. But this system was undercut by specific rights to use the reefs for fishing or specific trees for harvesting, even if these grew on other people’s land: “Every patch (Fleckchen) of land and each palm tree, each of the reefs, which surround the island and even the sea breaking ashore has its proprietor. No indigenous person may, for example, position a creel (Fischkorb) beyond the reef without first obtaining the permission of the respective owner” (Ibid. 67).Footnote ⁵

Although Jung described collectively held land, when it comes to exclusivity, he came close to specifying a stratified order of ownership on the levels of sea, land or flora, which has been described in more recent legal ethnography (Crocombe Reference Crocombe and Gérard Ward1972). He also reported on a class of serfs who had no right to land. The intricate furcation of exclusive and private access to resources appears to have convinced Jung that private property existed, but he did not relapse into the categories of ownership presupposed by Kohler. In his mind, the inherited property signs surpassed land tenure in significance on Nauru. The markers are an excellent example for property regimes which are not about a metric space, but regulate access to very specific resources.

Another set of answers to the questionnaire on indigenous law was penned by Arno Senfft. He was district official and an old hand at German economic colonialism on the Marshall Islands.Footnote ⁶ Senfft describes a more permissive society as far as high-ranking women were concerned than Kohler (Senfft Reference Senfft and Sebald1903, 425–455).Footnote ⁷ As was the case most explicitly on Palau, societies in Micronesia around 1910 often followed matrilineal inheritance. Gender hierarchies thus had a differentiated structure. Yet, ownership on the Marshall Islands was of a very flexible nature too: not only was land tenure exchangeable within the extended family, but the society as a whole was not sedentary. Everyone was constantly on the move. Those who could afford it, that is.

In this context again, all rights to use the land could be revoked by the family heads at any time. While Kohler interpreted this as a rigid and unnecessarily hierarchical order, Senfft describes how the rules on the Marshall Islands were rather flexible and leniently applied, stresses the important role of women, and gives the strong impression that leaders had to provide and organize not only order, but also insurance and subsistence. This interpretation was recast by the Dutch legal historian Sebald Steinmetz, who edited the first collected volume of answers from the German empire (Reference Steinmetz1903). He never meddled with the original account, but frequently took the liberty of adding comments directly after the printed responses he received from the colonies. In one of these comments, he voiced the suspicion that the reverse of what Senfft claimed was true: That it was not the decisions of the real leaders that caused the rotation of land. Instead, Steinmetz points to economic and ecological pressure to account for this legal peculiarity: People had to be on the move because the islands could not permanently support chiefs with their entourage. This functionalist interpretation is largely free of explicit ecological concerns. Nevertheless, the economic institutions on the Marshall Islands emerged from Steinmetz’s account as well adapted to the habitat, for the conditions in the area were such that land was frequently devastated by tropical storms and may have needed extended periods of recovery, which was difficult to accommodate in a more fixed order of land tenure.

In this way, Jung saw a system of pointillist rights to use resources and Senfft stressed the leniency and adequacy of a rotational land tenure bestowed by the leaders. These ecological or environmental perspectives seemed to open the door to divergent institutional logics inherent to the local schemes of land tenure. In contrast, Georg Fritz, who briefly “governed” Pohnpei during an interlude in 1909–1910 and took decisive steps towards land reform, was appalled.Footnote ⁸ His was the most important set of answers to the questionnaire analyzed in this paper, because it concerned Pohnpei itself, not the neighboring Carolinian islands. Due to his fairly recent arrival, his answers were mainly based on information volunteered by the colonial physician Max Girschner.

Fritz used medieval terms to describe legal institutions he felt obliged to reform, and a society he saw as an “oligarchy.”Footnote ⁹ Gestures of submission towards the nobles from the five most paramount families were the order of the day. When high-born people approached, passers-by had to avert their faces and boats were expected to lower their sails. A specific form of grammar was used to refer to the high-born and a special functional elite mediated between the paramount kings and the people. According to Fritz, all land essentially belonged to these paramount chiefs, whose tenures were considered “sacred.”Footnote ¹⁰ Fritz stressed how the constant threat of the overlords of this stratified society discouraged agrarian investment, because a conferred palienjap could be withdrawn at any time.Footnote ¹¹ At the frequent feasts, pigs, chicken and fruit had to be given as tribute. A part of any extra money earned by tenants was owed to the person holding the higher land title of kaujap.

The overall impression was one of constant rotation of land, but the matriarchy (Mutterrecht) observed by Fritz consolidated access to land by social status. Marrying a woman from a high-ranking family could not secure the very same plot of land for the next generation. However, the right to have access to an appropriate amount of land was granted within the matrilineal inheritance scheme.Footnote ¹² This importance of women on the island was mirrored in the fact that girls had very old and untranslatable names, while boys were named at will after plants, objects and animals.Footnote ¹³

More generally, Fritz was radically opposed to the codification of indigenous law, but not because he wanted it to fall. Indeed, in some passages, he lamented its fast decline and observed how an absence of rules, orders or structure replaced the “old order.” Rather, Fritz frequently questioned whether the notion of law, in the sense of protection against capriciousness, could really be said to have existed on Pohnpei.Footnote ¹⁴ Primarily, it was violence that Fritz saw being played out on the island. The rapid decay of legal institutions was attributed by him to external reasons like typhoons and epidemics, and most prominently to foreign influences like the relentless extraction of the planation economy, political measures of the colonial administration, and irresponsible missionary zeal.

One of the most valuable insights into the Pohnpeian system of land tenure is preserved in a note by Albert Hahl.Footnote ¹⁵ Trained in law, he briefly served as administrator of the island, before he moved on to become a defining figure as governor of German New Guinea.Footnote ¹⁶ He distinguished nanuel, the wild forest, from jap, cultivated land. Like Fritz, he stressed that all land belongs to the paramount chiefs of Pohnpei, of which he counted five important families. Whether or not the intricate structure of rights and power in this region derived from the traditional theocracy, as is sometimes said, it was apparent that the lineages of the paramount chiefs only intermarried with a second line of dignitaries. When the German administrators tried to make sense of this, they resorted to terms like “king” and “ministerial aristocracy” (Königsadel, Ministeradel). Ethnography offers the category of “talking chief,” which would be more appropriate, since only the joupeiti, not the higher ranking nahnmwarki, dealt with the population. Astoundingly, Pohnpei was not just segmented into these five landscapes with their aloof dignitaries, but there were also orders that undercut this territorial structure, in particular twenty-two allegiances or totem groups, whose members were spread across the whole island.

Hahl’s description is brief and pragmatic, but the fact that he uses the term hide (Hufe) is telling enough (Bloch Reference Bloch1938; Biskup Reference Biskup1968, Reference Biskup and Ken1971). A hide was originally a measure of land. Such a privately held plot could imply access to the commons (Allmende) or the shared woods and meadows in the vicinity of a village. In the European middle ages, the size of a hide could vary with the quality of the soil since the measure depended on the capacity of the plot to sustain a family. The term and this criterion of adequate subsistence are recurrent in Hahl’s writing. For example, in instructions to his successor on Pohnpei, he writes: “The principle that by discerning the hide (Hufestellen), the retraction of tribute by a dignitary and the eviction of the residents may no longer occur, has to be implemented with vigor after the measurement and marking with stones and registration of the property relations has occurred. The tenth is to be abolished by all means.”Footnote ¹⁷

In accordance with the ancient European legal terms he used, Hahl conceived of Pohnpei’s island society as a quasi-feudal order, which he strove to abolish. But neither the replacement of the tenth with taxes, nor the cadastral order seemed to have been Hahl’s main motivation for land reform. Rather, he targeted the capacity of the paramount families to grant and withhold land and resources, which made up the core of their power.Footnote ¹⁸ Of course, the language of Hahl’s directive strongly evoked the emancipation of feudal serfs. Undoubtedly, some members of the stratified island society benefited from the new land order, and while the “aristocracy” was compensated for their loss of the tenth by a proportion of the newly introduced taxes, the women of the island did not only lose land, but also their associated rights.

Hahl’s account leaves no doubt that for male members of the island society, the term kaujap, which later adorned the printed land titles, had the superior ring of aristocratic status. This category of land was not only fairly free of tribute, it also entitled the holder to ask for services from others. Needless to say, the obligations attached to land had previously taken the form of contributions to festivities, and had more complex symbolic dimensions than taxes, or a “tenth.” From the brief and factual account sketched by Hahl it is difficult to judge what he made of the rotating access to resources. He must have been aware of the imminent danger of typhoons, which had just devastated Pohnpei, yet his feudalist vocabulary assigns no ecological function to the rotational manner of land tenure. More importantly, Hahl saw the absence of a cadastral order as an impediment to further extractive economies, and he has no ear for the systems of insurance in a subsistence economy based on fish and yams. The strong legitimation derived from the laudable cause of freeing men had an almost too familiar flipside of turning a blind eye to nature, ecologies, and animals. Moreover, the land reform also deteriorated the rights of women, at least those who had previously enjoyed a higher standing in the island’s society.

All preserved questionnaires from surveys of indigenous law suggest that land rights were allocated with a high degree of flexibility. Persons belonged to a homestead, although this relation could be revoked. Harvests, the catch from fishing, or quarries from hunting were shared according to schemes governed by complex kinship relations. Thus, access to resources like land was guaranteed for some. Yet, the land in question was never permanent; it rotated. This flexibility was still reported as typical for Micronesian land tenure in the late twentieth century (Pollock Reference Pollock and Lundsgaarde1974, 100). On Pohnpei, it is not land ownership per se, but access to resources that mattered and constituted social status. The land from which someone could benefit depended on status and deeds. Hahl relates that grown men were addressed by the title of their land, which means that land tenure was something closely tied to an office (Hahl Reference Hahl1899). None of this was permanent. Among the sixteen offices he counted, not even the highest title was inherited. They depended on a vote among the entitled elite.

It goes without saying that Micronesian common law from this period was neither autochthon nor pristine. It varied from island to island. Centuries of whaling, trade, and Pohnpei’s notorious beachcombing communities of the mid-nineteenth century had left their mark (O’Connell Reference O’Connell1841; Maude Reference Maude1968; Zelenietz and Kravitz Reference Zelenietz and Kravitz1974). Spanish colonialism in the Eastern Carolines (1885) is considered to have had a small impact.Footnote ¹⁹ Religious influence, departing from cannon law and typically affecting institutions such as inheritance and marriage in particular, was of significant legal impact on the island.Footnote ²⁰ Nevertheless, by the time the Germans began to inquire about indigenous rules and customs, the notions of circulating land rights were still observed, and the buying and selling of land, for instance, was mainly left to the foreigners or those who rose among their ranks. Hanlon emphasizes how the decentralized system of land tenure was considered the cornerstone of the overthrow of and liberation from the saudeleur-dynasty, and that Pohnpeians conceived of their land as “a land of borrowings” (Hanlon Reference Hanlon1988, 189). One of the most economically successful and high-ranking individuals on the island, Henry Nahnpei, however, was in possession of a piece of paper bequeathing land directly to him, making the most of the privatization campaign of the German government (ibid. 176).

Collecting data about the common law of the island yielded and in part constructed crucial governmental knowledge. The survey comprises land tenure, punishment, property, inheritance and political order, and helped the colonizers to apply various forms of indirect rule and make use of existing institutions. The revision of the answers from Micronesia shows that according to common law, a homestead or kaujap implies much more than just a two-dimensional, exact measurement of one’s homestead or doorstep. During the German land reform, which was decreed in 1907, the word was still in use. The next section will show that it was not until after the surveying campaign conducted by Hermann Kersting that the land was changed. The basic categories of land tenure were related to perceptions of property more generally, but— due to their ties to systems of inheritance and gender issues—they also contributed to the ongoing organization of social and family relations.

II Self-Measurement: The Cadastral Survey by “the People” of Pohnpei

The evidence from early legal anthropology points to some fundamental differences between Germans and Pohnpeians regarding land tenure. In the second surveying campaign, which was completed in 1911, land tenure was not merely discussed as a category; it was measured and registered as private property. Moreover, cadastral land surveying is a specific form of measuring the land, where the ties to bureaucracy, taxation, and governance are much stronger than in indigenous, military or private cartography.Footnote ²¹

It is not easy to reconstruct the meaning of a measured plot of land in the colonized societies of Pohnpei and the Eastern Carolines. First of all, measurement and mapmaking play different roles, as the history of colonial cartography and the discussions surrounding the Polynesian case of “Tupia’s map” have established (Latour Reference Latour, Dodge, Kitchin and Perkins2011; Eckstein and Schwarz Reference Eckstein and Schwarz2019). The rough outlines of an island, which Tupia drew in the sand at the shore, were perishable. While perfectly apt for providing orientation, this form of representation does not use the internationally agreed standards of measurement to lend portability to the map. Perception and representation of space differ in industrialized and non-industrialized societies, and so does the role of measurement. To correctly read this land survey, the findings of studies in ethnomathematics should be kept in mind (Alkire Reference Alkire and Henry1974; Lean Reference Lean1985; le Roux Reference Roux2008; Owens Reference Owens, Lean, Paraide and Muke2018; Verran Reference Verran2018). Land was measured within a different framework, just as the famous Carolinian navigators sailing the shores of the Marshall Islands did not calculate with longitudes and latitudes. They excelled in a version of dead reckoning, which drew on patterns of the swell, as well as constellations of stars, coastlines and wind (Winkler Reference Winkler1898; Lewis Reference Lewis1994; Turnbull Reference Turnbull, Morrison, Geraghty and Crowl1994).

These are already strong indications that land, or a “homestead,” in Pohnpei was not necessarily thought of as a measurable patch of private property. Reports from neighboring Melanesia showed how land was defined from a focal point, as Peter Sack maintained in his now classic study on “Land Between Two Laws” (Reference Sack1973). A homestead would thus be characterized by a center, an event and a name for a place, rather than having “four sides like a box,” as one informant from Melanesia put it.Footnote ²² If land pertained to the body parts of the chief, as Sack relates (which makes trespass a fraught undertaking), then it is clear that social order is directly affected by the way a plot of land was measured for registration as private property. The tradition of the rahui, which could ban the use of specific resources, was observed throughout Polynesia (Bambridge Reference Bambridge2016). Land may also have had much deeper social meanings for extended families, as one of the foremost historians of the Pacific, Ron Crocombe, emphasizes: “Land tenure may be broadly defined as the system of relationships between men in respect of land. … Land tenure then is a system of patterns of behavior that specifically serve to control a society’s use of environmental resources” (Crocombe Reference Crocombe and Henry1974, 1–2).

These cases of relational definitions of land from adjacent island societies suggest that the very concept of measuring land in light of an abstract, neutral and universal system was foreign to Pohnpei, and an uncommon practice for the people involved in the survey. For the colonial powers, cadastral mapping was considered a cornerstone of taxation and economic growth. Historians of colonial administration have emphasized just how important land tenure was as an instrument of colonization (Eckert Reference Eckert1999, Reference Eckert, Heine and van der Heyden1995; Pesek Reference Pesek2005). Still, a reoccurring problem of colonial surveying remained: if the data was procured professionally, by certified land surveyors and their trained assistants, the cost of measuring a plot could easily exceed the profit that the land could yield (Stampa Reference Stampa1949; Aguilar-Robledo Reference Aguilar-Robledo2009).

As far as the remote and not particularly arable island of Pohnpei was concerned, the newly installed district official (Bezirksamtmann) Hermann Kersting (1863–1937) did not have a technical solution for the problem of exceeding costs. However, he could be said to have found an ingenious social or even governmental solution. With pragmatic disregard for the precision of the results, he went against the declared plan of the Colonial Office to professionalize surveying. While Governor Hahl in Rabaul had to dismiss three experienced but uncertified land surveyors in his service, Kersting launched a rather remarkable lay measurement campaign, relying on the skills of the Pohnpeians alone. In principle, the indigenous inhabitants of Pohnpei were required to produce the necessary data about their homesteads themselves, according to a specific choreography, as will be explained below. Kersting then asked the trained and certified Prussian land surveyor Dulk (Kaiserlicher Landvermesser) to merely aggregate the data and to compile the map of Pohnpei from existing lay measurements, which the surveyor considered to be little more than fictional sketches.Footnote ²³

This fell short of the initial plans for a proper survey of Pohnpei, which were pushed for immediately after Kersting announced the cadastral order. When the licensed land surveyor Dulk estimated what it would cost for him to triangulate the Carolinian island,Footnote ²⁴ the Colonial Office was unimpressed by his proposal, although Dulk suggested measuring land held by Pohnpeians by means of cheaper methods compared to those used for measuring land of the colonialists. Against this, surveying professionals conjured up the horrors of the imprecise Egyptian land charge register later described by Mitchell (Reference Mitchell2012), which had produced instances of conflicting ownership by more than one party. The surveying experts pleaded with the Colonial Office not to unsettle the “public faith” in the entries of the cadastral roll, which could only be sustained by the honesty and precision of their metric craft.Footnote ²⁵ These pleas fell on deaf ears. Instead, it was decreed that foreign companies and plantation owners were responsible for the cost of having their property legally described, although they immediately protested.Footnote ²⁶ Those plots in the Pacific that were subsequently registered by owners were defined in rather vague terms, which demonstrates an acute lack of surveying expertise among them.Footnote ²⁷

Seen from this pragmatic side, Kersting’s disregard for modern measuring standards was more plausible. In fact, he boasted about his “democratic” surveying campaign. He reported to his direct superior, the governor of German New Guinea, Albert Hahl, how he had established order through data collection: “The land and inheritance order in Ponape … has been adapted to the understanding … of the natives, and has been drawn from the needs of their local life in joint work with the people.”Footnote ²⁸

Responding to a specific request, Kersting also forwarded an exemplary land title with handwritten notes, consisting of the preprinted certificate in Pohnpeian, with solemn frame and simple heraldic embellishment. It further comprised a few pages of small print, in both German and Pohnpeian, attesting to the new politics of male inheritance lineages or primogeniture. Since Pohnpei had the flexible, matrilineal inheritance scheme, the governor had taken care to spell out how it would all work: the land was now continuous property and belonged in its entirety to the oldest son, then his son. No longer would it fall back to the chief, who had given up his rights to allot new land to the heirs according to their mothers’ social status.Footnote ²⁹

Reflecting this unusual collective survey methodology, instead of exact measurements, the “number and form of the border signs” needed to be listed on each document (fig. 1). As in many agrarian areas in Europe, trees, rivers, valleys and landmarks were described to identify the borders of a plot of land (Aust Reference Aust2003, 50). These landmarks were given full effect by artificial inscriptions, and in Pohnpei several border demarcations (Grenzzeichen) were used to delimit premises, such as: crosses in the bark of trees (X) and piles of stones of one square meter. The latter in particular may have made intuitive sense to the population, since Pohnpei translates as “stone altar” or “stone setters.” Rituals performed by a cast of priests, who derived their status from the secrets of a former theocracy in Uana/Kiti, revolved around holy stones. Furthermore, local legends, connected with the remnants of the basalt palace of Nan Madol in the island’s southwest, attribute the power to marshal stones at will to particular princes of the saudeleur-dynasty and the nahnmwarki-dynasty.Footnote ³⁰

What was more surprising about this land title is the number of signatures it bore. As one might have expected, there were spaces for the signatures of the district official (Bezirksamtmann) and his or her secretary. In addition, the document required signatures with the “names of the 7 men who set the demarcations on the ‘kaujap’”, a Pohnpeian legal term for the land allotted to a family for the purpose of subsistence farming. Furthermore, the document bore the signatures of three men who witnessed and supervised the land measurement and demarcation performed by the seven men. Finally, the indigenous authorities, the nahnmwarki and joumen joupeiti, who held the highest ranks in the island society, had to certify the content of the document.

Due to this remarkable degree of involvement of Pohnpeians from all walks of life, Kersting’s idea to use laymen was at the same time a means to communicate with the population in the very moment of data collection. I argue that he aimed for exactly the effect that people would recognize the new plots and homesteads as their own will.

This is hardly a democratic gesture or a show of unanimity addressed at the Colonial Office in Berlin, and only in part due to the lack of sufficient funding for a more professional surveying campaign. For a history of data, colonial cadastral surveys are even more telling than simple map making or the famous reorganization of space in the Spanish “reductions.” The “logistical power” of the state, to remake space via surveying techniques (Mukerji Reference Mukerji2011; Olesko Reference Olesko2020) is enhanced by the involvement of the Pohnpeians. While the deep entanglements of measurement, data collection and the establishment of colonial administrations where announced early on (Kula Reference Kula1986; Scott Reference Scott1998), recent research on colonial cadastral mapping increasingly recognizes the indigenous contribution to this process. All of these land surveys drew on local participation. The French colonial administration in neighboring New Caledonia, for example, modelled this procedure on experiences in Algeria, and the famous examples of the triangulation of India, as well as the case of the map making in New Spain, all give ample evidence of a coproduction of land measurements. For example, it was Acolhua metrology that underlined the distribution of cédulas in South American conquests (Edney Reference Edney2009 [1997]; Mundy Reference Mundy2000; Aguilar-Robledo Reference Aguilar-Robledo2009; Darrow Reference Darrow2018; Jorge Reference Jorge2011; Huber Reference Huber2020). However, as Kapil Raj has shown, the local workforce of the pundits should be seen as a particular class of savants or experts, which were sent out by the survey of India, rather than as peasants measuring their own plots (Raj Reference Raj2017). This is a slight difference compared to an overall reliance on the local workforce and an active involvement of the majority of the peasants. It should not be forgotten, however, that the administrative technology of cadastral mapping, which was aimed at levying taxes, was established only a few decades earlier in Europe.

Inevitably, the local population participated in nineteenth-century European cadastral surveys as well. To establish one of the largest cadastral roles, that of the Habsburg Empire from 1817 onwards, the peasants were called upon to help as well (Drobesch Reference Drobesch, Furter, Head-König and Lorenzetti2009; Liebhart Reference Liebhart, Rumpler and Scharr2015; Scharr Reference Scharr2017). Whenever a group of military surveyors arrived in a village, the inhabitants had to delineate their traditional homesteads by marking them. Then the authorities, mostly military officers, took over. After the measurement and mapping was completed, a questionnaire was used to determine the most probable value of the land for taxation. A scale of values was required, but the size of the land was a faulty indicator, since equal taxation for non-arable rubble, swamps, or woodland would have caused vexation among landholders. After all the data had been collected and each homestead had more metrical and precise contours than ever before, it was customary, and indeed a longstanding tradition, that each village embarked on a site inspection and verified the new order during a collective walk, as documented for the 30,000 districts of the Franciscan cadaster (Franziszeischer Kataster), which was completed only fifty years prior to the survey of Pohnpei.

Regardless, there are some crucial differences that made the survey of Pohnpei a more radical data collection. Firstly, while in the Habsburg case external experts collected and produced the data, on Pohnpei the local “seven men” carried out the work. The local “three men” only supervised it, and among them indigenous authorities counted just as much as the single certified land surveyor, who was hastily travelling the island. While Habsburg peasants had to agree to the demarcations of a technical and administrative elite that largely followed the same legal philosophy, the Pohnpeians erected the piles of stones and carved the barks of protruding trees, thus creating imprecise property lines that appeared to be their own, and rendering the new order and imposed system of ownership ever more invisible. What is more, an observer reported that the boundary commissions had worked with “great eagerness” and that this responsibility to measure every homestead themselves “flattered their pride.”Footnote ³¹ What district official Kersting wanted to achieve with this self-measurement of each homestead, or “system of self-regulation,” was to make his colonial subjects believe the new order of land was being established by themselves, which, he claimed, “they are willing to believe[, though] in reality only what the district official wants happens” (ibid). Kersting selected the data collectors from amongst the locals, who created the necessary demarcations almost as a practical commitment to these boundaries, and to the legal system introduced and sealed by the selfsame border signs. It is evident that all paramount chiefs and the extended families pursued their own interests during these reforms, though, as stated in the beginning, the material does not provide access to the voices of the islanders involved.

Collective strolls along plot boundaries helped to establish the Habsburg cadaster. This post-measurement ritual is easily identified as a “formative act” that affirmed and inaugurated the legal structure anchored in the new measurements. The self-measurement of the Pohnpeians’ seven men also truly shows “how to do things with data” (to paraphrase John L. Austin). Everyone was involved in this land survey and data production for the authorities’ lists. Everyone was bound to agree. The district official Kersting explained to the Colonial Office in Berlin that this was the leading idea behind the rough and ready measurement, conducted without much help of experts: “The people in particular are satisfied … because they see this reorganization of their life as their own work. The regulation was carried out quickly and free of charge, and if handled correctly, it offers sufficient legal certainty.”Footnote ³²

Part of the reorganization of the life of the Pohnpeians to which Kersting is referring was a redefinition of legal terms and the kaujap for each homestead, described above. It was clear from the paragraphs translated as annex of each land title that inhabitants were still required to work for the elites a certain amount of days. The land survey Kersting devised did not render an existing order more recognizable, as the Habsburg example did. It blatantly imposed a new system of land tenure, if not the concept of private property itself, and broke the power of the local elites to keep land ownership fluctuant and assigned by them. Kersting’s outright disregard for modern surveying standards and exact measures like triangulation points to the fact that it was not the precision of the list, but the consent to the new structure of land tenure, that he was trying to produce with this land survey. The practice perspective on data collected about homesteads proves the procedure to be anything but neutral.

It is here that the survey on land coincides with the legal reform. Once registered on a land title (fig. 1), land took on the meaning of fixed and private property, which could exclusively be inherited by males, ideally the oldest son. This abolishment of matrilineal circulating rights to resources was probably the biggest step, and directly impacted the kinship relations which governed the island. This is one of the ways the measuring campaign, not the decisions in Berlin or Rabaul, formed the society, which is why data collection is described as a formative ritual in this colonial setting. Another reason why land reform was considered to be the cornerstone of colonialism is that it forms the basis of taxation as well as modern capitalistic forms of trade, as was described with great detail for other German colonies (Eckert Reference Eckert1999; Eckert and Pesek Reference Eckert, Pesek, Conrad and Osterhammel2004; Pesek Reference Pesek2005), and for Egypt and Asia (Mitchell Reference Cheung2012; Cheung Reference Mitchell2017). Only with durable private property in land could the collection of taxes be achieved, since these were collected from free landowners. In Pohnpei there is mention that a list of male Pohnpeians was kept that served as a key instrument for the collection of dues (in kind or in the form of German coin, when taxation and monetarization followed the ordering of land).

To summarize the findings on the two surveying campaigns so far: The results from the survey on indigenous law showed a pattern of circulating land ownership, which was at the core of the constitutions of several Micronesian island societies. Some of the observers hinted at a deeper ecological meaning of this resource management. With this in mind, data collected on Pohnpei, on each home or homestead, proved to have a deeper meaning. As is often the case, more precise measures indicate a transformation to a more extractive, foreign trade and capitalist orientations. Two aspects make the Pohnpei surveying campaign stand out within a history of colonial data collection. Neither the participation of peasants nor the fact that land tenure was registered are entirely singular to this particular colony. What is remarkable about Pohnpei is the fact that the surveying happened in the immediate aftermath of the most violent resistance against German colonial rule in the Pacific. The measuring campaign is thus discussed as a prolongation of this violence with other means. Moreover, the gap between the two legal traditions of land tenure was particularly wide: the matrilineal and circulating access to resources had almost nothing in common with the private property defined by Roman law imported from Europe. While most land reforms in colonial settings would have impinged on commons and other pre-colonial notions, the transformation from matrilineal inheritance schemes to strict primogeniture in the case of Pohnpei was very visibly to the detriment of women and nature. To highlight these two aspects of German rule on Pohnpei as a form of epistemicide or as impoverishment of patterns of justification (de Sousa Santos Reference Sousa Santos2017; Smith Reference Smith1999), I will now outline the deep ties of the land reform and the Pohnpei Rebellion, a gory event spanning several months, which is still remembered on Pohnpei today.

III Statistical gaps and colonial surveying as violent data

After all parties involved in the survey on land—the chosen indigenous representatives, the indigenous authorities and the German administration—had signed off on a measured homestead, the information was aggregated into a comprehensive land roll, corresponding to the many singular land titles distributed. This file comprised genealogical lists as well as a brief account called “statistical results,” which showed the number of land owners of each district (fig. 2). This series of spreadsheets represents a reassuring sense of comprehensiveness and attention to detail. A good example for this would be the number of girls on each plot, which new property signs demarcated as a homestead (heaps of stones, planted palm trees, crosses in the bark) and the number of male heads of households for the purposes of taxation. Furthermore, the totality of the plots and the way the land was distributed over the provinces of the four “nations” or “chiefdoms” of U, Metalanin, Not and Kiti could be grasped. Nothing on this list gave the impression that an entire column and nation was missing: the land of the Sokehs, who were driven out in the aftermath of the Pohnpei Rebellion and banned from the island, losing all their land to the colonial power in the process.

The surveying campaign began after the uprising, which undoubtedly hinged on more than one cause.Footnote ³³ However, several of the highly contradictory accounts of eyewitnesses from the turn of the twentieth centuryFootnote ³⁴ clearly established the significance of the planned reform on land tenure, which was implemented and carried out by the self-measurement of the people of Pohnpei. This measurement of land was, in fact, a well-aimed strike against the old constitution. Historiography of the event is almost as contradictory as the scarce sources, but it deemphasizes land reform as a cause of the rebellion (Hempenstall Reference Hempenstall1978; Sack Reference Sack1997; Morlang Reference Morlang2010).

One of the first newspaper articles about the rebellion, which simmered for half a year until enough (now proverbial) gunboats could finally be gathered in the Caroline Islands to defeat the Pohnpeians, was published by the ethnographer and member of the largest German expedition to Oceania, Paul Hambruch. As a former employee of the Jaluit-Company, he may have even known the leader of the uprising, Jo Matao, who had previously worked for the Etscheit trading house, spoke sufficient English and was all but destitute.

What is remarkable in Hambruch’s report is the central role assigned to Pohnpei’s legal frameworks. He explicitly states that the Sokehs fought for “lamlam en Ponape”.Footnote ³⁵ This expression points to the legal order, the customary law, on Pohnpei, or the old constitution, which he describes as intricate. It is one thing to mention land tenure as one element, alongside the faulty character of the governor who lost his life, and the refusal to participate in roadworks. It is another thing to recognize the whole cosmos of rules, which the German colonizers sought to reshape to introduce modern capitalist forms of life. Hambruch further relates how Sokehs women cut their hair and fought for “lamlam en Ponape, their Ponape, their custom, their law, their freedom.”Footnote ³⁶ All in all, Hambruch’s analysis is limited by his disregard for people who were not white. Understanding the other side was out of the question, and a “weakness” that threatened to compromise German rule. In this regard, he bluntly blamed the soft touch of the former district official Georg Fritz for the upheaval (Spennemann Reference Spenneman2007, 30–33). Fritz sued him for slander in the aftermath of the rebellion, and in turn reproached the catholic missionaries of the Capuchin Order for having caused the trouble by trying to defend a theocratic order with the help of the people from Kiti.Footnote ³⁷

Georg Fritz always emphasized that he felt tasked to accomplish land reform.Footnote ³⁸ He knew perfectly well he was playing with fire. In an internal defense of his time in office, for which he was sent to Berlin in the aftermath of the rebellion, he justified his actions by describing how he travelled to village assemblies to campaign for the project and how earlier attempts to curtail the local elite’s power to distribute land without compensation had failed. Fritz did not only promise to remunerate the old elites, as had been the case in early nineteenth-century Germany when land tolls were abolished (Grundlasten) and the aristocracy was paid compensation for this cessation, but he went above and beyond, promising the Pohnpeian authorities half of the tax revenue, much to the chagrin of Berlin and other district officials in the region.Footnote ³⁹ In one document, Fritz even explained to the ruling houses of Pohnpei in simple English how exactly they would receive a cut. What is more, he left to their discretion the decision of how the allocation of the tax revenue would work: taxes would begin to be levied and paid to the German administration in the form of money or workhours. Fixed equivalences of working days and the introduced colonial currency of the Reichsmark (or the phased out Neuguinea-Mark) were established. The key of the taxation system was that the ruling houses would get their cut and that various models of taxes were suggested to them with examples: “Let’s expect in Kiti there are 250 men able to work … expressed in money this is 3,750 Mark. Half of the sum, 1,875 Mark, would be distributed among the chiefs. Who these chiefs are, you, the nanmariki, will have to impart to me.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Strikingly, Fritz wanted to leave the scale of the levied taxes and the key to distribution in part to the ruling houses of the five nations of Pohnpei themselves, because they in turn had to give up their rights to distribute land. This resignation is why he gives example calculations of which key of allocation of political income (Maßstab) to employ. And much to the fury of the Colonial Office in Berlin, Fritz did not limit indigenous political shares of the income to one third of the taxes, which was common practice. Fritz publicly offered up to one half.Footnote ⁴¹ He is also on record as having promised an entirely voluntary transition to the Sokehs.Footnote ⁴²

Fritz’s successor von Boeder did not honor these agreements and he did not live to give his account. He was shot after he ordered the punishment of road workers who now had to work for their taxes for the first time. But it is all too clear that the underlying conflict was about land tenure and that in this sense dissent in the roadworks was entangled with the newly introduced taxes, which in turn were seen as necessary to pay the paramount chiefs for abandoning their rights to distribute land and to receive tribute in kind.

In turn, when the next district official Kersting reported on the survey campaign he had pulled off to his superiors in Berlin, he too was very clear that ideas of land tenure native to Pohnpei were the key to power. He even tried to explain some of the indigenous system to the Colonial Office and highlighted its importance to the governance of the island. While Berlin based its actions upon that most expedient fiction of colonial rule, the much-discussed pseudo-Roman doctrine of terra nullius or “no man’s land,” Kersting stressed that such land did not exist on Pohnpei, noting that: “On the whole island there was just as little unowned land as there was land as personal property. The land belongs to the tribes who inhabit the islands. The highest chiefs control the land and distribute plots to the people for mostly inheritable use. Land that is not needed temporarily becomes unused tribal property.”Footnote ⁴³ In passages like these it becomes obvious how the notion of unowned land was a rarely questioned assumption of the colonial administration, and probably even motivated efforts to impose cadastral order. Fearing for the feeble balance on the island, Kersting argued for legal notions more at home on Pohnpei, instead of root and branch reform of land tenure. In particular, he suggested that the new German administration should legitimize its superiority and rule over the island in terms that would make sense to its people. Conveniently, this would still facilitate ownership of the whole island.

Kersting suggested that a native understanding of land tenure should be adopted, but not because he favored the people of Pohnpei. Anyone who “led” the island politically had the right to command land use. This understanding could be put to good use, according to Kersting, once the same rule could be usurped by colonizing governments. The local people knew that theoretically land could be bought and sold (the trader Neissen in particular had introduced the idea), but they rarely followed this foreign tradition.Footnote ⁴⁴ With one eye probably set on the missionary possessions, which had much older claims on the island, Kersting seems primarily concerned with indirect rule. He dismissed the endeavor of land reform on Pohnpei as futile, arguing that: “We could have achieved approximately the same without abolishing the living constitution, however. We would then continue to enjoy some of the advantages of the organization of the people, which will now gradually be lost.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Conclusion: Data collection at the doorstep and the colonial situation

In this paper, I have shown how the categories and governmental methods implicit in the land survey of Pohnpei impacted the lives of the people surveyed, measured, registered and counted. Through self-measurement of plots of land, the local population was made complicit in the new order that defined a homestead as private property, inheritable by male succession only. Colonial statistics may be considered a specific chapter in the political economy of personal data, laid out by Dan Bouk (Reference Bouk2017). In his genealogy two elements of data collection have had the most political impact: up to the late nineteenth century, aggregates—the large numbers of data derived from all the individual counting slips—exerted the most political influence. Slowly, the collection of individual data sets began to usurp this role, creating the individual addressability of the citizens. The colonial surveys concerning land tenure and indigenous law on Pohnpei reveal another dimension of political impact: the moment of information gathering, when data collectors arrived on people’s doorsteps to register homesteads, which had a profound impact on the social fabric of the colony around 1910. In the colonial situation, analogue data collection does not only presuppose an awkward dialogue or hierarchical encounter at some point in time of the data collection. Rather, the list of homesteads, male heads of households and the statistical survey about four of the five “nations” of Pohnpei, all testify to a profound shift in legal categories, imposed upon the land by the unsuspicious elements of measurement and counting.

The most decisive negative outcome of German colonialism occurred probably for high ranking female members of the island society of Pohnpei. Their families standing decided, which new plot of land their children would be assigned, and this matrilineal organization was put to a halt quite independently from the circulation of land itself. The economic participation for female Pacific islanders within the island societies and within the foreign trade of the colonies was considerable. Large parts of the land of German New Guinea, for example, were managed by “Queen Emma,” a Samoan woman with an American father, trading with her subsequent European and North-American husbands in the area before the Germans even took possession (Salesa Reference Salesa2014). Her Pohnpeian counterpart, Anna Yelirt, experienced no such privilege. Of high-ranking Micronesian background, and married to the Polish naturalist, colonizer and plantation owner John Stanislaw Kubary, she traveled to Europe and was a known figure beyond Pohnpei. But when Kubary committed suicide, she could not obtain possession of his lands, neither during Spanish, nor during German colonialism. With Kersting’s land reform, she would have even lost the right to inherit rights to access resources, as was customary. This, however, was never put to the test. Yelirt’s second husband went by the name of Keroun en Toi e tik and was one of the seventeen political leaders of the Sokehs Rebellion who received the death penalty at the hands of German police officers in the days after 17 February 1911. It is unclear whether she subsequently perished with the majority of the 500 banished Sokehs on the islands of Palau (they were forcibly resettled to Amelik on Babeldoab). The Germans annexed the land of the Sokehs in its entirety and resettled other groups there, in exchange for the promise of planting 300 palm trees for copra. Anna Yelirt may thus give a name to all the women on Pohnpei who were disadvantaged by German colonialism, reminding us in particular of those people who are in the missing column of the statistics in Pohnpei.