INTRODUCING URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY 2016TH EDITION RIVKE

JAFFE - QUICK DOWNLOAD

https://ebookgate.com/product/introducing-urban-
anthropology-2016th-edition-rivke-jaffe/

★★★★★
4.8 out of 5.0 (77 reviews)

Quick Download

ebookgate.com
EBOOKGATE

Free ebook:

Introducing Urban
Anthropology 2016th
Edition Rivke Jaffe
Dive into the world's most fundamental
information. This compact volume
presents key facts, historical
timelines, and scientific concepts
organized for clarity. Quickly access
the context you need to understand
today's complex world.

Introducing Urban Anthropology 2016th

Edition Rivke Jaffe
DOWNLOAD

Synthesizing Facts
for Deeper
Understanding
Designed for curious minds, this book
helps you build connections between
diverse subjects. It offers frameworks
for critical thinking and knowledge
retention, ensuring that new
information is not just memorized, but
truly understood and applied.
Discover Related Ebooks Now

Introducing Anthropology of Religion 2nd Edition Jack

David Eller

https://ebookgate.com/product/introducing-anthropology-of-
religion-2nd-edition-jack-david-eller/

Politics in Scotland 2016th Edition Duncan Mctavish

https://ebookgate.com/product/politics-in-scotland-2016th-edition-
duncan-mctavish/

Slow Movies Countering the Cinema of Action Ira Jaffe

https://ebookgate.com/product/slow-movies-countering-the-cinema-of-
action-ira-jaffe/

I T apps_7 Kips Publishing World LLP 2016th Edition

Unknown

https://ebookgate.com/product/i-t-apps_7-kips-publishing-world-
llp-2016th-edition-unknown/
The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow 2016th Edition
Victoria Aarons

https://ebookgate.com/product/the-cambridge-companion-to-saul-
bellow-2016th-edition-victoria-aarons/

Solution Manual for The Physics of Energy 1st Edition

Robert L. Jaffe

https://ebookgate.com/product/solution-manual-for-the-physics-of-
energy-1st-edition-robert-l-jaffe/

Introducing ZBrush Eric Keller

https://ebookgate.com/product/introducing-zbrush-eric-keller/

Introducing Covenant Theology Michael Horton

https://ebookgate.com/product/introducing-covenant-theology-michael-
horton/
Introducing Meteor 1st edition Edition Gray

https://ebookgate.com/product/introducing-meteor-1st-edition-
edition-gray/
This page intentionally left blank
I n t rod u c i n g Ur b an
A n t hr o p o l o gy

Rivke Jaffe and Anouk de Koning

First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 R. Jaffe and A. de Koning
The right of Rivke Jaffe and Anouk de Koning to be identified as authors
of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jaffe, Rivke.
Introducing urban anthropology / Rivke Jaffe and Anouk De Koning.
  pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Urban anthropology. I. Koning, Anouk de. II. Title.
GN395.J34 2016
307.76–dc23                   2015018436
ISBN: 978-0-415-74480-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-74481-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-66939-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by HWA Text and Data Management, London
 Visit
https://ebookgate.com
today to explore
a vast collection of ebooks across various
genres, available in popular formats like
PDF, EPUB, and MOBI, fully compatible
with all devices. Enjoy a seamless reading
experience and effortlessly download high
quality materials in just a few simple steps.
Plus, don’t miss out on exciting offers that
let you access a wealth of knowledge at the
best prices!
Co ntent s

List of figures and boxes vi

Preface viii
1 Introduction 1

Par t I
A t h o m e i n the c ity ? 21
2 Urban places 23
3 Urban mobilities 41
4 Social life in public space 55

Par t I I
Cr a f t i n g u r ban liv e s and lif e s tyles 69
5 Urban economies 71
6 Consumption, leisure and lifestyles 87
7 Cities and globalization 101

Par t I I I
Po l i t i c s i n and of the c ity 117
8 Planning the city 119
9 Cities, citizenship and politics 137
10 Violence, security and social control 151

11 Conclusion: the future of urban anthropology 165

Bibliography 168
Index 182
Fig ure s an d bo xe s

Figu r es
1.1 Bandit’s Roost, Mulberry Bend, New York City, 1888 7
1.2 Fieldwork in Kafanchan, Nigeria, 1975; Ulf Hannerz with Chief Ladipo,
leader of the Yoruba ethnic community in Kafanchan 10
1.3 Fieldwork in Kafanchan, Nigeria, 1975; Silver 40, a commercial artist and
major informant, in front of his workshop 10
1.4 Setha Low interviewing in Parque Central, San Jose, Costa Rica, 2014 12
2.1 Pentecostal church Deus é Amor (God is Love) in Rio de Janeiro 26
2.2 Roadside shrine in Mexico City, 2010 28
2.3 An example of Dutch colonial modernism in Indonesia 31
2.4 Public square in the favela of Pavão-Pavãozinho, Rio de Janeiro 35
3.1 Traffic in Hong Kong, 2013 49
3.2 Customized ‘low-rider’ car in Austin, Texas 51
3.3 Young women on motorbikes in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2015 53
4.1 Traders in Khari Baoli, Old Delhi, 2007 59
4.2 Young women in Istanbul, 2007 63
5.1 Office personnel at the Suriname Bauxite Company, Moengo,
Suriname, 1940 77
5.2 Abandoned houses in Detroit 78
5.3 Harrison Road Night Market, Baguio City, Philippines 81
6.1 Advertisements for host clubs in Kabukicho, Tokyo, 2013 92
6.2 1970s bar scene in Kafanchan, Nigeria 98
6.3 Bluffeurs at home in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire 99
7.1 Trianon, an upscale coffee shop in Cairo, 2004 107
7.2 Street vendors in Dar es Salaam, 2003 109
7.3 Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, 2010 111
7.4 Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong, 2013 113
8.1 Downtown Cairo, 2009 120
8.2 The Garden City concept by Ebenezer Howard, 1902 125
8.3 Jacarezinho favela in Recife, Brazil, 2004 129
8.4 New Prometropole housing project in Jacarezinho, Recife, Brazil, 2008 131
8.5 Dubai as construction site 133
8.6 Construction workers playing cards in a labour camp near Dubai, 2006 134
9.1 Urban village in Guangzhou, China, 2006 139
 List of figures and boxes vii  

9.2 Young men dismantling downtown walls near Tahrir Square, Cairo, 2012 148
9.3 Occupy Wall Street, New York City, 2011 149
10.1 Martyrs mural in downtown Cairo, 2013 158
10.2 Private security in Durban, South Africa, 2009 159

Boxes
1.1 City typologies 2
1.2 What is a city? 4
2.1 Space and place 24
2.2 Representing poor neighborhoods 34
3.1 Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City 42
3.2 The new mobilities paradigm 43
4.1 Public space 56
4.2 Goffman’s symbolic interactionism 57
4.3 Intersectionality 62
5.1 Fordism and Post-Fordism 72
6.1 Bourdieu and cultural capital 89
6.2 Hebdige and subculture 96
7.1 Globalization 102
7.2 The global city 105
8.1 Foucault on space and power 121
8.2 James Scott and high modernism 124
9.1 The right to the city 145
10.1 Typologies of violence 152
Pref ace

We hope that Introducing Urban Anthropology will be able to fill a significant gap in the range
of existing introductory textbooks that cover anthropology and its subfields. We are both
city enthusiasts, interested in getting to know different cities, and excited to experience
the diversity, creativity and unexpected encounters they offer. We are also committed
to analyzing the various social problems found in cities, such as inequality, insecurity
and pollution. We hope our passion for city life and our critical engagement with urban
questions is evident throughout this book.
As is true of any text, and certainly of anthropological texts, our own personal and
academic trajectories inform the content of this book. While this book seeks to cover the
most important themes in current urban anthropology and includes a wide geographical
range of cities, our emphases will betray the influence of our own trajectories. Our
location in the Netherlands may provide the reader with a slightly different perspective on
urban anthropology and on cities across the world than if we were located in, for instance,
the United States. Our academic trajectories also influence the examples we give, our
selection of case studies to illustrate specific themes, and the particular insights we bring
to bear on the wider field of urban anthropology.
Rivke has worked mostly in the Caribbean, particularly in Kingston, Jamaica. Her
earlier research concentrated on urban pollution and environmental justice in Curaçao
and Jamaica, followed by a research project on the governance role of criminal ‘dons’ in
Jamaica. Her current research examines the political implications of the pluralization and
privatization of security provision in Kingston, Jerusalem, Miami, Nairobi and Recife. In
addition, her research has focused on the role of popular culture (music, video clips, street
dances, murals and graffiti) in how people experience and communicate urban exclusion
and solidarity.
Anouk’s academic career started with a study of middle-class professionals in
neoliberalizing Cairo, and she maintains strong ties to the city. Following this, she studied
Surinamese social history, including a focus on the bauxite mining town of Moengo. She
then turned to study her own city, Amsterdam, analyzing how new nationalist, racialized
public discourses shaped policy and everyday life in this multi-ethnic city. Her current
research uses migrant parenting as a vantage point from which to explore how citizenship
is negotiated in a Europe where migrants have increasingly been framed as a burden or a
threat.
Writing Introducing Urban Anthropology has been a stimulating journey. It has expanded
our understanding of current research in the field, and helped us discover the work of
 Preface ix  

colleagues around the world. Many of them have been kind enough to provide us with
photos to illustrate our discussion of their work. We have also benefited from informal
crowdsourcing, asking our colleagues for advice and tips.
We are grateful to the many people who have helped along the way. In addition to
the anonymous reviewers who provided constructive comments, we want to thank our
friends and colleagues who read parts of this manuscript closely and provided us with
invaluable feedback: Freek Colombijn, Henk Driessen, Martijn Koster, Eileen Moyer and
Martijn Oosterbaan. Rivke would also like to thank Peter Nas for encouraging her interest
in urban anthropology from early on in her career.
This book would not have come about if it were not for our editor at Routledge,
Katherine Ong, who launched the idea and helped us along the way, assisted by Lola
Harre. We also thank our partners, Wayne Modest and Ivo Bol, for their encouraging
words and patience throughout the process of writing. We are grateful to Anouk’s parents,
Marijke and Tom de Koning, for their baby sitting, which allowed us to go on writing
retreats together. We hope that this book will find its way into the classrooms and onto the
bookshelves of readers who are curious to learn more about the distinct approach to city
life that urban anthropology can provide.

Amsterdam, May 2015

Rivke Jaffe and Anouk de Koning
 Visit
https://ebookgate.com
today to explore
a vast collection of ebooks across various
genres, available in popular formats like
PDF, EPUB, and MOBI, fully compatible
with all devices. Enjoy a seamless reading
experience and effortlessly download high
quality materials in just a few simple steps.
Plus, don’t miss out on exciting offers that
let you access a wealth of knowledge at the
best prices!
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 1

Intro d u ct i on

For the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities.
This demographic change, resulting from rapid urbanization, has coincided with a shift
within anthropology towards doing research in cities. Anthropology that takes place in
cities, therefore, has become increasingly common. Part of this research has explicitly
taken the urban as its object of study, understanding the city more as a set of processes
than as a setting, and taking its material and spatial form into explicit account (Low 2014:
16–17). Urban anthropologists seek to understand the changing nature of urban social
life, the influence of urban space and place, and more broadly what constitutes a city in the
context of global flows and connections.
This textbook provides an introduction to urban anthropology, an increasingly
important field within anthropology. While anthropology’s traditional focus was on
small-scale communities in non-urban settings, cities have become a prominent context
for anthropological research. However, the fact that many anthropological studies are
conducted in cities does not necessarily make them urban anthropology in our view.
In this respect, we differ from some other authors, who consider any anthropological
research conducted in the city to be urban anthropology (e.g., Sanjek 1990; Pardo and
Prato 2012). This book takes as its starting point that, while urban anthropologists study
a broad range of social phenomena, what makes their work urban anthropology is their
explicit reflection on the implications of the urban context in which these phenomena
occur.
This introductory chapter gives a brief overview of the development of urban
anthropology. It starts with a section that discusses the background factors that influenced
the growth of urban anthropology in the twentieth century, and the distinctions between
urban anthropology, general anthropology and other disciplinary approaches to urban
life. In the next section, we sketch the historical development of the field, starting from
nineteenth-century predecessors and describing a number of ‘schools’ and trends or
‘turns’ that characterized urban anthropology in the twentieth century. This section also
briefly explores the themes and approaches that are specific to anthropological research
on the twenty-first century city. The third section discusses the specificities of doing
anthropological research in and on urban settings, elaborating how the concerns and
methodologies of ethnographic research are adapted to urban contexts. We address a
number of approaches and methods, including ‘studying up’ and ‘studying through’,
mobile methods, cognitive and participatory mapping, and the study of popular culture.
The chapter ends with an overview of the structure of the book.
2 Introduction

Why u r b an a nt hropology?
The emergence and growth of urban anthropology can be related to a number of background
factors. Two main factors have been global processes of rapid urbanization and shifts within
broader anthropology. The first straightforward factor feeding into the growth of urban
anthropology, then, has been the growth of cities. For most of human history, the majority of
people did not live in cities. This is not to say that cities are a new phenomenon. Around 5000
BCE, concentrated ‘proto-urban’ settlements emerged in the fertile floodplains of the Nile
and Mesopotamia, with temple complexes or royal compounds housing populations who
did not work in agriculture. Other early urban areas developed as trade cities. The number,
size and political reach of such dense ceremonial, administrative and commercial settlements
grew gradually over the millennia, until the concept of a ‘city’ had become commonplace in
most parts of the world (see Box 1.1 on city typologies).
In the nineteenth century, Europe saw rapid, large-scale urbanization as the Industrial
Revolution concentrated masses of factory laborers in overcrowded shanty towns.
Twentieth-century industrialization and urbanization swelled the cities of countries
across the world. Notwithstanding these long histories of urbanization, agriculture
long remained the most important source of livelihood for the majority of the world’s
population, and most people continued to live in rural areas. It is only in the twenty-
first century that more than half of humanity lives in urban areas. The social, cultural,
political and economic changes that accompanied this massive demographic shift drew the
attention of anthropologists.
Whereas the growth of industrial cities in Europe and North America in the nineteenth
century was key in the development of sociology as a discipline, urban anthropology has

Box 1.1 City typologies

In his classic work on urban anthropology, Ulf Hannerz (1980) used the typology
of Courttown, Commercetown and Coketown to distinguish between cities that
develop and function as administrative centers, versus those that depend on their
trade function or on the concentration of industry. The first type, Courttown, refers to
ceremonial cities. These urban areas were grounded in the concentration of political
and ceremonial power, centered on the court and monumental political buildings.
The second type, Commercetown, emerged as the consequence of the growth of
trade networks, within which cities developed as crucial nodes. In such trade cities,
the marketplace played a crucial role and represented an important urban site (and
continues to do so, as we discuss in Chapter 5). Coketown, finally, refers to a new
city type that came into being in the nineteenth century. These massive industrial
cities were marked by their economic basis in, for instance, textile manufacturing.
While useful in thinking through different trajectories of urban development,
such functional typologies obscure some of the diversity and dynamic nature of cities.
Many cities, of course, combine various functions. In addition, shifts in political
function or economic activities can drastically transform urban landscapes, leading
to the eventual decline or even abandonment of urban sites. This is illustrated by
the decline of some of the earliest Mesopotamian cities, or in recent years by the
deserted stretches of urban space in former ‘Motor Town’ Detroit.
 Introduction 3  

developed along multiple trajectories. While a number of important early studies were
based on fieldwork in North American and European cities, urban anthropology also
developed in the global South, where researchers studied processes of urbanization in
the colonial and postcolonial world, often in relationship to research on development,
modernity and decolonization. Notwithstanding, the growth and diversification of cities
in North America and Europe, and the social problems associated with these changes
(such as overcrowding, pollution, criminal violence and ethnic conflict), similarly garnered
anthropological attention.
In the late twentieth century, processes of urbanization were increasingly associated
with major social, cultural and economic transformations often grouped under the rubric
of globalization. The central role of cities in globalization (see Chapter 7) has meant
that the attention of anthropology and other social sciences to global processes has often
involved an increased interest in urban processes and urban social life.
In addition to these broader demographic and societal changes, shifts within the
discipline of anthropology itself have been a second important factor informing the growth
of urban anthropology. Anthropology’s earliest roots are entangled with the history of
colonialism. While not a straightforward ‘handmaiden of colonialism’, the discipline did
develop as a colonial science, stimulated by a demand for enhanced knowledge of ‘native
populations’ (Asad 1973). Early European anthropologists conducted research on these
subjugated populations within the parameters of colonial imperatives, which included
facilitating control of colonial subjects and justifying European domination. In the
United States, in a tradition that became known as ‘salvage anthropology’, early research
concentrated on documenting Native American cultural practices, which were thought to
be in danger of becoming extinct.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the move to decolonize anthropology involved a critique of
the disciplinary focus on ‘the Other’ (Hymes 1972; Clifford and Marcus 1986). Critical
anthropologists questioned the discipline’s preoccupation with ‘exotic’ difference and its
tendency to privilege fieldwork in sites far away from the researcher’s home (Gupta and
Ferguson 1997). They sought to expand the long-standing interest in people living in
‘traditional’ hunter-gatherer or peasant economies, by giving more attention to social life
in ‘modern’ urban economies.
This decolonizing movement within anthropology emphasized the need to ‘bring
anthropology home’ and to study those sites where researchers themselves lived and worked
– often cities in Western Europe and the United States. The move to study countries ‘at
home’ in many cases also meant a turn to urban anthropology. In 1970s France these two
shifts – towards an anthropology of the modern, and an anthropology at home – were even
indistinguishable; the move from the traditional subjects and sites of anthropology to an
‘anthropology of the present’ inaugurated a flurry of work on French cities (Rogers 2001).

Situating urban anthropology

Urban anthropology has developed into a sprawling field that uses a highly interdisciplinary
approach to study an extremely varied range of topics. How can we distinguish urban
anthropology from general anthropology, and from adjacent fields such as urban studies,
urban sociology and urban geography? In this book, we define ‘urban anthropology’ as
anthropology that engages explicitly with the question of how social life is structured by
and experienced within urban contexts. Such urban contexts are characterized by specific
4 Introduction

features such as size, density, heterogeneity, anonymity and inequality (see Box 1.2 on
definitions of the city).
In urban settings, people tend to engage in a broad variety of social relations, ranging
from intimate and personal relations amongst household members, close friends
and kin, to more segmented relations structured by clearly delimited roles (such as
economic relations), to very fleeting, anonymous encounters, for example in traffic. The
heterogeneity of urban populations and the prevalence of public spaces such as sidewalks
and plazas mean that cities are often the site of unexpected encounters between people
with diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.

Box 1.2 What is a city?

One of the enduring debates in urban anthropology and urban studies more broadly
has been on how to define the field’s core concept: the city. Early definitions tended to
emphasize the functions of cities in relation to their surrounding ‘hinterland’. From
this perspective, cities are local centers of power, places where political, economic,
cultural and religious activities converge and are concentrated. Other definitions
emphasized physical form and demographic characteristics, focusing on the
crowded built environment and dense population of cities. An influential definition
by Chicago School sociologist Louis Wirth (1938: 8) included size, density and
population heterogeneity as the three main characteristics of a city: ‘for sociological
purposes a city may be defined as a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement
of socially heterogeneous individuals’.
Wirth also focused on different types of social relationships and attitudes to define
urbanism as a way of life. In contrast to rural areas, which he saw as characterized
by face-to-face, intimate social relations between family, friends and community
members, Wirth argued that what defined the city were the impersonal, formal and
business-oriented relationships between its residents, and their blasé attitudes. The
association of cities with anonymity and heterogeneity has been very influential,
shaping our understanding of urban space as a public realm, which Richard Sennett
defines as ‘a place where strangers meet’ (2010: 261).
Definitions drawing from constructivism understand the city as a social construct:
a city is a city, rather than a village or a town, if people believe that it is one. In
essence, a city might just be a line on a map that enough people have agreed should
be there. This attention to the social constructedness of cities also means studying
who has the power to define a city as such. Political and administrative definitions
that allow a place to label itself as a city have fiscal, economic and legal implications.
Municipal authorities can tax residents and businesses independently of national
governments, while real-estate prices and zoning regulations might vary drastically
based on whether a site is inside or outside the city limits.
More recently, scholars have begun to approach city not so much as a place but
as a social-material-technological process, or an assemblage (Brenner et al. 2011). From this
perspective, cities are the intersection of multiple dynamic and unstable networks
and flows of people, animals, money, things, ideas and technology. Emphasizing the
interwovenness of cities and nature, urban political ecologists frame the city as the
process of the urbanization of nature (Swyngedouw 1996).
 Visit
https://ebookgate.com
today to explore
a vast collection of ebooks across various
genres, available in popular formats like
PDF, EPUB, and MOBI, fully compatible
with all devices. Enjoy a seamless reading
experience and effortlessly download high
quality materials in just a few simple steps.
Plus, don’t miss out on exciting offers that
let you access a wealth of knowledge at the
best prices!
 Introduction 5  

Moreover, the size and diversity of cities facilitate the emergence of particular scenes or
subcultures, for example based on lifestyle choices or popular culture preferences, leading
to an association of the urban context with cultural creativity and aesthetic innovation.
Demographic density enables the very urban phenomenon of the crowd, which has strong
social and political implications – crowds can shape sensations of anonymity, loneliness
or freedom, but they can also be the start of riots and other forms of collective violence
and political action. More broadly, cities are often places where political power manifests
itself in spectacular ways. Official buildings are monuments to state power and particular
visions of society; symbolically important public spaces provide the grounds for both state
spectacle and political contestation.
These various characteristics of the urban context inform the type of questions that
urban anthropologists ask. Crucial concerns include the following broad questions: how
do cities shape forms of identification and social relations? What cultural repertoires and
imaginaries emerge in urban contexts of anonymity, diversity and inequality? How do
urban spaces shape power relations between groups or institutions, and, conversely, how
do power relations shape urban spaces?
Anthropology has turned to the city relatively late in comparison to related fields such as
urban sociology and urban geography. While it has often been inspired by and in dialogue
with studies in sociology and human geography, urban anthropology has distinguished
itself from these adjacent fields in a number of important ways. From early on, urban
anthropologists studied cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America as well as those in Europe
and North America. This has given urban anthropological research a more global character
than more ‘mainstream’ urban studies, which tended to focus exclusively on European
and North American cities.
Urban anthropologists have also distinguished themselves from urban sociologists
and urban geographers through their methods. While they often draw on a range
of methodological tools including surveys, interviews and media research, urban
anthropologists tend to rely primarily on ethnography and its main component, participant
observation. Participant observation provides access to hidden aspects or segments of
urban life, to intimate, informal and illegal processes. It allows researchers to map tacit
knowledge that cannot easily be verbalized, and can shed light on the many less obvious
routines that structure social life in the city.
The use of ethnographic methods also connects to the distinctive anthropological focus
on everyday life in the city, and on the less quantifiable imaginaries and symbols through
which people make sense of their urban surroundings. Perhaps the most significant
contribution of urban anthropology has to do with the hallmark of anthropology as a
discipline: its insistence on understanding people and social situations in their full
complexity, rather than seeing them as abstracted from their contexts or as easily
generalizable. Urban anthropology tries to capture the complex social and cultural lives
that people develop in cities, and documents how they negotiate heterogeneous, unequal
and constantly changing urban landscapes.

H is torical devel opment s

Urban anthropology only really emerged as a distinct subfield in the mid-twentieth century.
However, tracing its historical development draws our attention to a number of important
predecessors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this section, we start with
6 Introduction

a discussion of these early antecedents to urban anthropology, followed by an overview of

twentieth- and twenty-first-century developments in the field. This overview is somewhat
skewed towards anthropological literature published in or translated into English, and
hence does not fully cover those urban anthropological traditions that developed in other
languages, such as French, German, Spanish or Dutch.

Urban anthropology ’s predecessors

A number of urban anthropology’s ethnographic and analytical predecessors can be found
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We can distinguish three broad groups
of influential writers describing and analyzing urbanization and industrialization in
European and North American cities: literary journalists, academically minded reformers
and empirically oriented sociologists studying Chicago. The first group consisted of non-
academic writers, including investigative journalists and novelists. Middle-class, educated
authors such as English writer and social critic Charles Dickens (1812–1870), English
novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) and French writer and journalist Émile Zola (1840–
1902) sought to research the lives of the urban poor in the context of industrial urbanism.
What was it like to work in a factory or to live in a slum? In order to find answers to
such questions, journalists attempted to immerse themselves in the lived realities of the
urban poor. Their semi-ethnographic forays resulted in sometimes sensationalist accounts of
poverty, overcrowding, squalor and disease. Many of these journalistic and literary writings
did have a political purpose: the authors wanted to highlight the exploitation of the urban
poor and used their ‘research’ to make a case for governmental and charitable interventions.
As photography became increasingly accessible, illustrated accounts provided similar
arguments in visual form. In his famous book of photojournalism, How the Other Half
Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890), social reformer and journalist Jacob
Riis (1849–1914) documented the squalor of New York City slums in order to mobilize
the public to address the deplorable living conditions of the urban poor (Figure 1.1).
A second prominent group of nineteenth-century predecessors to urban anthropology
consisted of more academically oriented authors. In addition to semi-ethnographic
methods, some of them began to draw on statistics and cartography, novel methods at
the time. Like their more journalistic contemporaries, many of these researchers were
associated with the Victorian-era political project of sanitary reform (see Chapter 8), while
others were more radical.
An important author was German social scientist and philosopher Friedrich Engels
(1820–1895), who wrote The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx. In 1844, Engels
published a harrowing account of the conditions of the working class in England’s
industrial cities. This book followed two years of observations in Manchester and
Salford, where his working-class partner Mary Burns introduced him to the slums. The
cholera epidemics that ravaged many cities in the nineteenth century also fed into urban
research, including early forms of social epidemiology and detailed medical mapping.
In London, philanthropist and social researcher Charles Booth (1840–1916) compiled a
seventeen-volume publication on the lives of the city’s poor, Lives and Labour of the People
in London (1889, 1891), based on years of statistical data collection and analysis. These
works highlighted the high rates of death and disease that the urban poor suffered, and
demonstrated the relation to low wages and overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions.
Other documents randomly have
different content
 The Karolin birds were returning, drifting like a curl of smoke. A
wind seemed blowing them lazily through the sky, a wind seemed
moulding them and the invaders, till, in the form of two great vortex
rings, they overhung the lagoon: a moment and then clashing in
battle, they broke, reformed, and broke again, snowing dead and
wounded gulls beneath the moon. The storm of their cries filled the
night from reef to reef— now they would be dark against the moon,
now away like blown smoke.
Sometimes the battle would drift towards the southern beach only
to return gliding towards the northern. It was truly the battle that
drifted, not the birds.
Just as a flock flies like one bird, moving here, heading there,
under the dominion of a common mind, so these two great flocks
fought—each not as a congregation, but as an individual; till, of a
sudden and as if at the sounding of a trumpet, the combat broke,
the storm ceased, the clouds parted, one still circling above the reef,
the other drifting away southeast beneath the moon.
Southeast to find some more likely home, to die in the waves, to
split up into companies seeking shelter in the Paumotuan atolls—no
man could say, or whether the birds of Karolin were the victors or
the strangers from the north. Wanderers lost for ever to sight as
their home sunk beneath the waves.
 CHAPTER IV—WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE REEF?

Three weeks’ work had recreated the houses broken by the great
waves, and put a top knob to the work of the builders. Nan had
been recovered. A boy found him cast up in the sand near the break.
A new post for him was cut, and Karolin, no longer godless, was
itself again. But Aioma was not happy.
The sea when it had swept the reef had not disturbed the tree
trunks felled and partly shaped, or had only altered their position
slightly as they lay waiting for the canoe-builders to resume work;
but Aioma had lost heart in the business. He had come to the
conclusion that the schooner was better than any fleet of canoes,
and all his desires were fixed on her.
Yet still something called him to the shaping of the logs, the voice
of the Unfinished Job perhaps calling to the true workman, or maybe
just the voice of habit—all the same he did not turn to it. He was
under the spell of the schooner. Pulled this way and that he was
unhappy. It is hard to give up a life’s vocation even at the call of
something better, and he would sit sometimes squatting on the
sands, his face turned now to the object of his passion, and now
towards the trees that talked to him of the half-born canoes.
Meanwhile in his mind there lay side by side and growing daily, a
great curiosity and a great ambition.
The curiosity had been born of the battle of the gulls.
“What,” asked he of himself, “has happened to the reef of Marua
(Palm Tree)?” He knew Marua, he had been one of the fighters in
the great battle of long years ago when the men of the north of
Karolin had pursued the men of the south and slain them on Palm
Tree beach. He had seen the reef and instinct told him that the
invading gulls of three weeks ago had come from there.
They were seeking a new home. Why? What had happened to the
reef, or what had driven them from the reef?
 Had the great waves of the same day, those three great waves
that he still beheld scintillating in his mind, had they destroyed the
reef? But how could that be, since they had not destroyed Karolin
reef? The whole thing was a mystery and beside the curiosity that it
excited, there lay in his mind the great Ambition, to take the
schooner into the open sea and sail her there.
The lagoon, great as it was, was too small for him, besides, it was
dangerous to the west with shoals and banks.
No, the outer sea was the place for him and there came the rub—
Katafa.
Katafa had a horror of the vessel. She would not go on board it
and well he knew that Taori would not go any distance from Karolin
without Katafa, and he (Aioma) greatly daring, wished to go a long
way, even as far as Marua, to see what had happened to the reef.
There you have the whole tangle and you can see how the
curiosity and the ambition had grown together whilst lying side by
side in his mind.
There was also a scheme.
Katafa would not object to Taori going out in the schooner a little
way, and Taori would not mind leaving Katafa for a little time. And,
thought the cunning Aioma, once we are out beyond there I will tell
him what is in my mind about the gulls and the reef and he will want
to go and see; it is not far and the colour of the current will lead us
as it always has led the canoes, and the light of Karolin in the sky
(ayamasla) will lead us back; besides, I will take with me Le Moan,
who can find her way without eyes. Cooking this scheme in his mind
he said nothing for some days till one evening, getting Taori and
Katafa alone with him, he broached the idea of taking the ayat out a
little way and to his surprise there was no resistance to it on the part
of Katafa.
She had seen Dick’s face light up at the suggestion. His trouble on
account of the lost toys had affected her as though the loss had
been her own, and she would say no word to mar this new pleasure,
she would even overcome her hatred of the schooner and go with
him, if he asked her.
 But he did not ask her, he knew her dislike of the ship and the
idea of taking her along never occurred to him.
“Then,” said Aioma, “to-morrow I will get all things ready with
water and fruit, for it is a saying of Karolin that no canoe should ever
pass the reef without its drinking nuts lashed to the gratings—one
never knows.”
“Aie,” said Katafa. Then she checked herself and turned away
whilst Dick and the old man finished their talk.

They had several names for the sea in Karolin, names to suit its
moods in storm and calm; one of these names spoke volumes of
past history, history of sufferings endured by canoe men through the
ages—The Great Thirst.
The sea to the people of Karolin was not an individual, but almost
a multitude; the sea of calm, the sea of storm, the sea that canoe
men encountered when blown off shore with the last drinking nut
gone—The Great Thirst.
Katafa had known of it all her life. Once she had nearly sailed into
it, and the words of Aioma about the water for the Kermadec
recalled it to her. She shivered, and as the others talked, she
scarcely heard their voices, contemplating this new terror which had
arisen above her horizon.
But she said nothing, neither that night nor the next day when
the casks were being brought on shore to be filled, when the nuts
and pandanus fruit were being brought down to the boat by the
women, many of them wives of Poni and the others of the crew.
Aioma had told Poni about the coming expedition and the men of
the schooner were not only willing to take their places on board
again, but eager. Maybe they were tired for a moment of their wives,
or just craving for something new—however that may be, they went
aboard that night to make preparations for a start on the morrow,
leaving their wives on the beach to look after themselves—all but
Kanoa.
Kanoa did not go on board. He had had enough experience of
that schooner, he did not want to set foot on her again; besides, he
wanted to be left behind for his courage was growing and with it the
determination to have it out with Le Moan.
So when the others were putting off, Kanoa was not with them.
He had gone off along the beach towards the great trees,
determining to hide till the schooner was beyond the reef. She was
due to go out at dawn or a little later with the ebb tide and he would
hide and watching till her topmasts were visible beyond the coral he
would come back to the village to find Le Moan.
He would pretend that he had gone fishing on the reef and so had
lost the schooner. As he sat down by the great logs of the canoe-
builders and watched the stars looking out above the foam, he saw
himself returning to the village, the sun in his face, the hateful
vessel gone and Le Moan waiting for him.
Kanoa thought in pictures. Pictures suggested to him pictures. He
did not know, neither did he picture the fact that Aioma, having
decided to take Le Moan with him as a sort of navigating instrument,
the girl was at that moment on board of the schooner, asleep,
waiting for the dawn, dreaming, if she dreamed at all, of Taori.
 CHAPTER V—MAINSAIL HAUL

The dawn rose up on the shoulder of a southeast wind, warm,

steady, and breezing the gold of the lagoon water.
Gulls flew about the schooner on board of which Dick and Aioma
had slept so as to be ready for an early start.
Now could be heard Aioma’s voice calling up the hands from the
foc’sle and now Katafa, watching from the shore, could hear the
sound of the winch heaving the anchor chain short.
Poni, who had been chief man under Sru, knew all the moves in
the game. He watched the mainsail set and the fore, the gaskets
taken off the jib; talking to Aioma and explaining things, he waited
till the canvas was set and then gave the order for the anchor to be
got in.
Le Moan watched as Poni, taking the wheel, let the mainsail fill to
the wind that was coming nearly dead from the south, whilst the
schooner, moving slowly against the trickle of the ebb, crept up on
the village and then turning south in a great curve made for the
break on the port tack.
Le Moan could see Katafa far away on the shore backed by the
trees of the village, a tiny figure that grew less and less and less as
the Gates of Morning widened before them and the thunder of the
billows loudened.
The sun had lifted above the sea line and the swell and the wind
whipped the spray across the coral of the southern pier whilst
Aioma, hypnotized, half terrified, yet showing nothing of it all stood,
his dream realized at last.
Oh, but the heart clutch when she heeled to starboard and he
recognized that there was no outrigger to port—for the outrigger is
always fastened to the port side of canoes—no outrigger to port for
the crew to crawl out on and stabilize her by their weight, and when
she heeled to port the terror came lest the outrigger should be run
too deep under.
 There was no outrigger, he knew it—but, just as in the dream
ship, he could not get rid of the obsession of it.
Moreover, now that the canvas was raised, now that the wind was
bravely filling it, the enormousness of the size of those great sails
would have set his teeth chattering had he not clenched his jaws.
To take a ship out of Karolin lagoon with the ebb running strong
and a south wind, required a cool head and a steady nerve on the
part of the steersman. The great lagoon emptying like a bath met
the northerly current, the outflowing waters setting up a cross sea.
There was also a point where steerage way was lost and it all
depended how the ship was set for the opening as to whether she
would broach to and be dashed against the coral.
But Poni was used to lagoon waters and the schooner safe in his
hands came dead for the centre of the opening; then the ebb took
her, like an arrow she came past the piers of coral, met the wash of
the cross sea, shook herself and then to the thunder of thrashing,
cleared the land and headed north.
“She will eat the wind,” Aioma had once said, “there will be no
more wind left for canoes in all the islands”; and now as Poni shifted
the helm and the main boom stuttered and then lashed out to port,
she was eating the wind indeed, the wind that was coming now
almost dead aft. The smashing of the seas against her bows had
ceased: with a following swell and a following breeze, silence took
them—silence broken only by the creak of timber, block and
cordage.
Le Moan looked back again. Almost behind them to the sou’-
sou’west Karolin lay with the morning splendour on its vast outer
beach whose song came faint across the blue sea, on the tall palms
bending to the wind, on its gulls for ever fishing.
Her eyes trained to great distances could pick out the thicker tree
clumps where the houses lay and near the trees on a higher point of
coral something that was not coral; the form of a girl, a mote in the
sea dazzle now perceived, now gone.
Le Moan watched till the reef line was swallowed by the shimmer
from which the trees rose as if footed in the sea. She had stirred no
hand in the whole of this business: her coming on board had been at
the direction of Aioma, the fate that threw her and Taori together
even for a few hours whilst separating him from Katafa was a thing
working beyond and outside her, and yet it came to her that all this
was part of the message of the cassi flowers, something that had to
be because of her love for Taori, something brought into existence
by the power of her passion—something that united her for ever
with Taori.
The mind of Le Moan had no littleness, it was wanting in many
things but feeble in nothing; it was merciless but not cruel, and
when the sun of Taori shone on it, it showed heights and depths that
had only come into being through the shining of that sun. For the
sake of Taori she had sacrificed herself to Peterson, for the sake of
Taori she had destroyed Carlin, for the sake of Taori she would
sacrifice herself again, she who knew not even the meaning of the
word “unselfish” or the meaning of the word “pity.”
She could have killed Katafa easily, and in some secret manner—
but that would not have brought her Taori’s love, and to kill the body
of Katafa, of what use would that be whilst the image of Katafa
endured in Taori’s mind.
Katafa was a midge whose buzzing disturbed her dream, it was
passing, it would pass.
She turned to where Aioma, who had recovered his assurance and
stability of mind, had suddenly flung his arms round Dick, embracing
him.
There was something of the schoolgirl in this old gentleman’s
moments of excitement and expansion, something distinctly
feminine in his times of uplift. No longer fearing capsize, free now of
the obsession of the outrigger and glorying in the extraordinary and
new sensations crowding on him, he remembered the gulls, the reef
of Marua and his scheme.
“Taori,” cried Aioma, “the canoes I have built, nay the biggest of
them, are to this as the chickens of the great gull to their mother.
Let the wind follow us till the going down of the sun and we will see
Marua.”
 Dick, for the first time, looked back and saw the far treetops of
Karolin. They seemed a vast distance away.
He thought for the first time of Katafa. She had said no word
asking him to limit the cruise. Aioma had only suggested taking the
ship beyond the reef and the provision of water and fruit had only
been taken as a precaution against the dangers of the sea. She had
dreaded the business but had spoken no word, fearing to spoil his
pleasure, and sure that he would risk nothing for the love of her. But
she had reckoned without his youth and the daring which God had
implanted in the heart of man; she had reckoned without the
extraordinary fascination the schooner exercised upon him and of
which she knew next to nothing. She had reckoned without Aioma.
A thread tying his heart to the distant shore twitched as though at
the pull of Katafa.
“But Marua is far,” said he.
Aioma laughed. “The canoes have often gone there,” he replied,
“and what are they to this? Besides, Taori, it is no idle journey I wish
to make, for it is in my mind that it was from the reef of Marua those
gulls came that fought the gulls of Karolin, they were seeking a new
home. Why?”
“The gulls only know,” replied Dick, “and then there are the bad
men whom some day I mean to slay, but not now, for we have not
enough men, not a spear with us.”
“We have the speak sticks of the papalagi,” said Aioma, “and I can
use them. Le Moan taught me, but the bad men are out of sight; in
this business we need not draw nearer to Marua than we are now
from Karolin, or only a little. It is the reef I wish to see and what
may walk on it, for gulls do not leave their home just because the
wind blows hard or the sea rises high. They have been driven, Taori,
and what has driven them—greater gulls, or some new form of man
—who knows? But I wish to see.”
Dick pondered on this. He had only intended to sail the schooner
a short way, to feel her moving on the outer sea, to handle her; with
the eating had come the appetite, with the handling of power the
desire to use it. He had no fear about getting back, Karolin lagoon
light would lead them just as it had led him and Katafa, and his mind
was stirred by what Aioma had said about the gulls.
What had happened to drive them away from their home? He had
never thought of the matter before in this light, thinking of it now he
saw the truth in the words of the other, and having a greater mind
than the mind of the canoe-builder, he linked the great waves with
the business more definitely than the latter had done.
“Aioma,” said he, “the great waves that broke our houses drove
the gulls.”
“But the waves,” said Aioma, “came before the gulls.”
“But the gulls may have rested on the water and come after,” said
Dick, “the waves may have broken the reef as it broke our houses.”
“But the reef of Karolin was not broken,” said Aioma.
“The waves may have been greater at Marua,” replied Dick, “and
have grown smaller with the coming.”
“I had thought of the waves,” said Aioma; “well, we will see; if the
reef of Marua is broken, it is broken; if greater gulls are there, we
will see them.”
Dick looked back once again. The treetops of Karolin so far off
now showed only like pins’ heads, but the lagoon glow in the sky
was definite; ahead could be seen the north-flowing current. Like
the Kuro Shiwo of Japan, the Haya e amata current to the east of
Karolin showed a blue deeper than the blue of the surrounding sea;
but the Kuro Shiwo is vast, many miles in breadth, sweeping across
the Pacific from Japan, it comes down the coasts of the Americas—a
world within a world, a sea within a sea. The Haya e Amata is small,
so narrow that its confines can be seen by the practised eyes of the
canoe men, and from the deck of the schooner its marking was
clearly visible to the eye that knew how to find it; a sharp yet subtle
change of colour where the true sea met its river.
Dick could see it as plain as a road. With it for leader and the
lagoon light of Karolin for beacon, they could not lose their way.
Then there was Le Moan, the pathfinder who could bring them back
even though the lagoon light vanished from the sky.
The weather was assured.
 Le Moan had taken the wheel from Poni, who wanted to go
forward. She, who had brought the schooner to Karolin was, after
Aioma and Dick, the chief person on board; in a way she was above
them, for neither Dick nor Aioma had yet learned to handle the
wheel.
Forward, by the galley, stood the rest of the crew and Dick’s eyes
having ranged over them, turned to Aioma.
“Yes,” said he, “we will go and see.” He turned to the after rail.
The treetops had vanished, the land gulls were gone, but Karolin still
spoke from the great light in the sky that like a faithful soul
remained, above all things, beautiful, assured.
 CHAPTER VI—VOICES OF THE SEA AND SKY

Kanoa, dreading another voyage in the schooner and hating to be

parted from Le Moan, hid himself amongst the trees of the canoe-
builders.
He was nothing to Le Moan. Though he had saved her from
Rantan, he was less to her than the ground she trod on, the sea that
washed the reef, the gulls that flew in the air; for these she at least
felt, gazed at, followed with her eyes.
When she looked at Kanoa, her gaze passed through him as
though he were clear as a rock pool. Not only did she not care for
him but she did not know that he cared for her.
Worse than that, she cared for the sun-like Taori. This knowledge
had come to Kanoa only the other day.
Sitting beneath a tree, Reason had stood before him and said, “Le
Moan does not see you, neither does she see Poni nor Aioma, nor
any of the others— Le Moan only sees Taori, her face turns to him
always.”
As he lay now by the half-shaped logs waiting for the daylight that
would take away the schooner, Reason sat with him telling him the
same story, the sea helping in the tale and the night wind in the
branches above.
It was night with Kanoa, black night, pierced by only one star—
the fact that Taori was going away, if even for only a little time. The
perfume of the cassi flowers came to him, and now, with the
perfume, a far-away voice calling his name.
It was the voice of Poni. The men were going on board the
schooner and Poni was collecting the crew.
Again and again came the call, and then the voice ceased and the
night resumed its silence, broken only by the wash of the reef and
the wind in the trees.
 “They will think I have gone fishing,” said Kanoa to himself, “or
that I have gone on a journey along the reef, or perhaps, that the
sea has taken me, but I will not go with them. I will not leave this
place that is warm with her footsteps, and on all of which her eyes
have rested; the place, moreover, where she is.”
He closed his eyes and presently, being young and full of health,
he fell asleep.
Dawn roused him.
He could see the light on the early morning sea. The sea grew
luminous and the gulls were talking on the wind, the stars were
gone, and the ghost of Distance stood in the northern sky blue and
gauzy above the travelling sea that now showed the first sun rays
level on the swell.
Then Kanoa rose up and came towards the village beyond whose
trees the day was burning.
A woman met him and asked where he had been.
“I have been fishing,” said Kanoa, “and fell asleep.” He came
through the trees till the beach tending towards the break lay before
him and the lagoon. The schooner under all plane sail was moving
up towards the village and turning in a great curve, but so far out
that he could not distinguish the people on deck. He watched her as
she came up into the wind and lay over on the port tack. He
watched her as she steered, now, close-hauled and straight, for the
Gates of Morning, and then he saw her meet the outer sea.
She was gone. Gone for a little time at least; gone and he was left
behind, free in the place Le Moan had warmed with her feet, on
every part of which her eyes had gazed, and where, moreover, she
was living and breathing.
The women had parted with their new husbands the night before.
There was no crowd to watch the vessel go out, only Katafa, a few
boys and a couple of women who were dragging in a short net
which they had put out during the night, using the smaller of the
schooner’s boats which Aioma had left behind. The women stood for
a moment with their eyes sheltered against the sun, then they
returned to their work whilst Katafa, leaving the beach, came on to
the high coral and to the very point of rock where Aioma, standing,
had seen the approach of the giant waves.
She had scarcely slept during the night. Taori was going away
from her, nor far or for any time, but he was going beyond the reef.
To the atoll dweller the reef is the boundary of the world—all beyond
is undecided and vague and fraught with danger; the comparative
peace of the lagoon waters gives the outer sea an appearance of
menace which becomes fixed in the mind of the islander and even a
short trip away from the harbour of refuge is a thing to be
undertaken with precaution.
But she had said nothing that might disturb Dick’s mind on her
account or spoil his pleasure or mar his manhood. Even had the
business been visibly dangerous and had Dick chosen to face it, she
would not have held out a hand to prevent him. This was a man’s
business with which womenfolk had nothing to do. So she ate her
heart out all the night and stood waving to him as the boat pushed
off and watched the Kermadec leave the lagoon just as she was
watching it now out on the sea, sails bellying to the wind and bow
pointing north.
She watched it grow smaller, more gull-like and more forlorn in
the vast wastes of water and beneath the vast blue sky. On its deck
Le Moan was watching Karolin and its sinking reef just as on the reef
Katafa was watching the ship and its disappearing hull, dreaming of
wreck, of disaster, of thirst for her beloved one, dreaming nothing of
Le Moan.
She watched whilst the morning passed, and the schooner still
held her course. “She will soon turn and come back,” said Katafa, as
the distance widened and the sails grew less, and as the hull sank
from sight she strained her eyes thinking that she saw the sails
broaden as the ship, tired from going so great a distance and
remembering, turned to come back to Katafa.
But the mark on the sky did not broaden. Vaguely triangular and
like a fly’s wing it stood undecided in the sea dazzle, it seemed to
wabble and change in shape and change back again, but it did not
increase, and one moment it would be gone and the next it would
say “Here I am again, but see how much smaller I have grown!”
Then it vanished, vanished for a long time, only to reappear by some
trick and again to vanish and not to return.
The sea had taken the schooner and its masts and spars, its sails,
its boat; everything that was mirrored only last evening in the
lagoon the sea had taken and dissolved and made nothing of. The
sea had taken Poni and Timau and Tahuku the strange kanakas; the
sea had taken Aioma, and—the sea had taken Taori.
Oh, the grief! The pain that like a knife cut her heart as she gazed
on the sea, on the far horizon line above which the speechless sky
stood crystal pale sweeping up to azure. He had gone only a little
way, soon to return, storms would not come nor would the wind
change, nor would it matter if it did change.
Nothing could keep him from coming back. He had food with him
in plenty, water in abundance, he had Poni and Timau and Tahuku
and Nanta and Tirai; he had Aioma the wise and he had Le Moan—
Le Moan the pathfinder.
Nothing could keep him from coming back and yet the heart of
Katafa failed her before that speechless sky and that deserted sea
whose meeting lips had closed like the lips of silence upon her lover.
Her happiness, so great, perhaps too great, had been cut apart from
her for the moment; it stood aside from her never to join her again
till Taori came back from what the gods might be doing to him
beyond that deserted sea, beneath that speechless sky.
The waters that from all those desert distances drew the voice of
indifference and fate that she heard at her feet in the thunder of the
breakers, the sky, robbed of speech, yet filled with the ever-lasting
complaint of the questing gull.
Someone drew near her. It was Kanoa.
Katafa, who was a friend of all the world, was a friend to Kanoa.
She had watched him as he sat apart from the others, noticed his
melancholy and spoken to him, asking the reason.
“I am thinking of my home at Vana Vana,” had lied Kanoa, “of the
tall trees and the village and the reef, of my young days and my
people.” His young days! He who was still a boy!
 “But you will return,” said Katafa.
“I do not wish to return,” said Kanoa, “I am as one lost at sea,
who has become a ghost, and whose foot may no more be set in a
canoe and whose hand may no more hold the paddle.” Then Katafa
knew that he was in love, but with whom she could not tell, nor had
she time to watch and find out, being busy.
As he drew near her now, she turned to him, and for a moment
almost forgot Dick in her anger.
“Kanoa,” said she, “where have you been in hiding? They have
gone without you; they called for you and you did not come, and
they could not wait. You were wanted to help them in the raising of
the sails and the work with the ropes—where have you been in
hiding?”
“I have been fishing,” said Kanoa.
“And where are the fish?” asked Katafa.
“Oh, Katafa,” replied Kanoa, “I hid because I could not leave Le
Moan, who is to me as the sun that lights me, who is my heart and
the pain in my heart, my eyes and the darkness that blinds them
when they see her not. I go to find her now to say to her what I
have never said and to die if she turns her face from me.”
“And how will you go to find her now?” asked Katafa. “Have you
then the wings of the gull and know you not that she has gone with
the others?”
“She has gone with the others!”
“She has gone with the others.”
Kanoa said nothing. He seemed to wither, his face turned grey,
and his eyes sought the distant sea. He, too, had watched the
schooner disappear, rejoicing in the fact that she was gone with
Taori leaving him (Kanoa) to find his love. And now Le Moan was
gone—and with Taori. But he said nothing.
He turned away and lay down with his face hidden in his arms
and as Katafa stood watching him, her anger turned to pity.
She came and sat beside him.
 “She will return, Kanoa; they will return: he whom I love and she
whom you love. They are gone but a little way. It is because they
have gone from our sight that we grieve for them. Aioma said they
would go but a little way—aie, but my heart is pierced as I talk,
Kanoa, my breast is torn; they have gone from our sight and all is
darkness. I will see him no more. I will see him no more.”
Then, as on the night of the killing of Carlin, the man in Kanoa
rose up and cast the boy away; saying not a word about his
suspicions of the passion of Le Moan for Taori, he turned to comfort
the wildly weeping Katafa.
“They will return,” said he, “Aioma is with them and they can
come to no harm—they will return before the sun has found the sea
or maybe when he rises from it we will see them sailing towards
Karolin. Peace, Katafa, we will watch for them, you and I. Go now
and sleep and I will wait and watch, and if I see them I will come
running to you, and when I sleep you can wait and watch and so
with our eyes we will draw them back to us.”
Katafa, whose tears had ceased, heaved a deep sigh. She rose
and stood, her eyes fixed on the coral at her feet. Weary from want
of sleep, she listened to the words of Kanoa as a child might listen,
then, without looking once towards the sea, she passed away
towards the trees.
Kanoa stood, his gaze fixed on the sea line, and from then
through the hours and the days the eyes of the lovers watched and
waited for the return of those who had gone “but a little way.”
 CHAPTER VII—ISLANDS AT WAR—THE OPEN SEA

Something beside curiosity and the spirit of adventure had made

Dick decide to push on towards Marua (Palm Tree).
The truth is Marua was calling to him. He wished to see it again if
only for a moment. The hilltop and the groves and the coloured birds
sent their voices across the sea to Karolin just as Karolin had sent its
appeal across the sea to Katafa when Katafa had lived at Palm Tree.
As a matter of fact those two islands were for ever at war in the
battle ground of the human mind. In the old days natives of Karolin
had gone to live on Marua, and Karolin had pursued them and
brought them back, filling their minds with regret and longing and
pictures of the great sea spaces and free sea beaches of Karolin. In
the same way natives of Marua had gone to live on Karolin and
Marua had pursued them and brought them back, filling their minds
with regret for the trees, the hilltop and the blue ring of the lagoon.
Between Dick and Katafa there was only one faint suspicion of a
dividing line, something that might increase with the years and make
unhappiness the difference between Marua and Karolin: the pull of
the two environments so vastly different, the call of the high island
and the call of the atoll, of the land of Dick’s youth and the land of
the youth of Katafa.
It is extraordinary how the soul of man can be pulled this way and
that way by things and forms that seem inanimate and yet can talk—
aye, and express themselves in the most beautiful poetry, strike in
their own defence through the arms of men, follow without moving
though the pursued be half a world away, and inspire a love as
lasting as the love that a man or woman can inspire.
The love of a range of hills, what battles has it not won, and the
view of a distant cloud, to what lengths may it not raise the soul of
man—heights far above the plain where philosophy crawls, heights
beyond the reach of thought.
 With the suggestion of Aioma, the concealed longing in the mind
of Dick began to show itself. He forgot Katafa; he forgot the bad
men who had taken possession of Marua, old days began to speak
again and the sound of the reef, so different from the voice of
Karolin reef, began to be heard.
He watched Le Moan at the wheel, and noticed how her eyes
followed the almost imperceptible track far to starboard where the
water colours changed. She was steering by the current as well as
by the sense of direction that told her that Karolin lay behind. He did
not know the speed of the schooner, but he had travelled the road
when coming to Karolin with Katafa and he knew that soon, very
soon, the hilltop of Marua must show.
He went forward and gazed ahead—nothing. The land gulls had
been left behind and in all that sea to the north there was nothing.
He came aft to find Poni again at the wheel, and as he came he
crossed Le Moan who was going forward; she did not look at him
and he scarcely looked at her. Le Moan, for Dick, was the girl who
had saved them by killing Carlin and fighting with Rantan till he was
overcome; but to him, personally, she was nothing. So cunningly had
she hidden her heart and mind that not by a glance or the least
shade of expression had she betrayed her secret to him. Kanoa only
suspected—but he was her lover.
Aioma was squatted on the deck near the steersman, eating
bananas and flinging the skins over his shoulder and the rail.
“Aioma,” said Dick, “there is no sight of Marua yet, but soon we
will see it lifted to the sky, with the trees—it calls to my heart. You
have seen it?”
“I was one of those who chased Makara and his men to Marua,”
said Aioma, “we fought with them and slew them on the beach; aie,
those were good times when Uta Matu led us and Laminai beat the
drum—taromba—that is only beaten for victory, and will never be
beaten again, since it went away with Laminai and has never
returned. Tell me one thing, Taori. When you came to Karolin with
Katafa, you made friends with the women and children, and Katafa
told them a tale, how the canoes of Laminai had been broken by a
storm, and all his men lost, and how the club of Matu was found by
you on the reef of Marua and the gods had declared you were to be
our chief. I was on the southern beach at that time and did not hear
the tale, but the women and children took it without any talk, glad
to have a man to lead them.
“Tell me, Taori, was that all the tale? I never asked you before
and I know not why I ask you now.”
“Aioma,” said Dick, “there was more than that. Laminai and his
men came through the woods of Marua and there was a great fight
between them and me. I slew with my own hands Laminai and
another man. Then, taking fright, all his men ran away and they
fought with each other in the woods—many were killed, and then
came the big wind from the south and the men who were trying to
leave Marua were dashed on the reef, not one being left.”
Aioma forgot his bananas. Some instinct had told him that there
was more in the story of Katafa than revealed by her to the women,
but he had not expected this.
So Laminai, the son of Uta Matu, had been slain by Taori, and his
men put to flight; the storm had destroyed them before they could
put away, but it would not have destroyed them only for Taori.
He looked up at Taori, standing against the line of the rail, his red-
gold head against the patient blue of the sky, and to Aioma it
seemed that this journey they had embarked on was no trip to view
the outer beach of Marua—that they had been deluded by the
guardians of Karolin and the ghosts of the Ancient, drawn to sea to
meet the vengeance of the dead Uta Matu, of his son, and the men
slain by the hand and will of Taori.
That thunder from the heart of the sea, those waves from
nowhere, the prodigy of the gulls, all these were portents.
“Taori,” said he, “now that you have told me, I would go back. My
heart misgives me and if I had known that Laminai fell by your hand
I would not have come; I love you as a son, Taori, you fought for
the women and children of Karolin against the white men, but you
do not know Uta Matu the king, whose son you killed, whose men
you put to flight.”
 “But Uta Matu is dead,” said Dick, “he has no power.”
“You do not know Uta Matu,” said Aioma, “nor the length of his
arm, nor the power of his blow. You have not seen his eyes or you
would not say those words. Let us return, Taori, before he draws us
too far into his grasp.”
“When I have seen what I wish to see, I will return,” said Dick. He
had no fear of dead men, nor of living men either, and for the first
time his respect for Aioma was dimmed. “I will return when I have
seen what we came to see. I am not afraid.”
Aioma rose and straightened himself.
“I have never known fear,” said he, “and I do not know it now. It
was for you I spoke. Go forward then, but this I tell you, Taori, there
are those against us who being viewless we cannot strike, whose
nets are spread for us, whose spears are prepared.”
“Aioma,” said Dick, “no net can hold me such as you speak of.
Nets spread by the viewless ones are for the spirit—Ananda—not the
body. My spirit is with Katafa, safe in her keeping, how then can Uta
Matu seize it?”
“Who knows?” said Aioma. “He is artful as he is strong, and Le
Juan who is dead with him is more artful still, and, look, we have the
child of Le Juan’s daughter with us—Le Moan. Aie! had I thought of
all this I never would have brought her.”
“How can she hurt us?”
“It is not she. It is Le Juan, the wicked one, whose blood is in
her.”
To Aioma, as I have said before, people were not dead as they
are with us, only removed to a distance, and though he might speak
of Spirits, he spoke of people removed out of sight, yet still potent.
He did not believe that Uta Matu could use a real net or spear
against Dick, but he did believe that the dead king of Karolin and his
witch woman could, in some way, stretch through the distance to lay
nets and strike with spears. Ghostly spears and nets not meant for
the body, but the man.
If you could have pierced deeper into the mind of Aioma you
would have found the belief—never formulated in words—that a
man’s body was just like the shell of a hermit crab, a thing that could
be thrown off, crept out of, discarded. Uta Matu when called into the
distance had discarded his shell, but the man and his power
remained—at a distance.
“I fear neither Le Juan nor Uta Matu,” said Dick, and as he spoke
the air suddenly vibrated to the clang of a bell.
 CHAPTER VIII—WE SHALL NOT SEE MARUA AGAIN

It was the ship’s bell.

Tahuku had struck it in idleness, just as a child might, but the
unaccustomed sound coming just then seemed to Aioma a response
to the words of the other. But he said nothing. Taori had chosen his
path and he must pursue it.
At noon the northern horizon still showed clear and unbroken by
any sign of land, yet still the wind blew strong and still the schooner
sped like a gull before it.
Tahuku, who had been cook and who knew where the stores were
kept, prepared a meal; and whilst the crew were eating, Aioma took
the place of the lookout in the bow. Nothing—neither land gull nor
trace of land. Nothing but the never ending run of the swell bluer
from the southern drift that showed still the contrast of the deeper
blue.
A road leading nowhere.
The canoe-builder came up to where Dick was standing in the
bow.
“Taori,” said Aioma, “we have not lost our way, there runs the
current and there Karolin still shows us her light, we have come
faster than the big canoes of forty paddles and so have we come
since morning, yet Marua is not in sight.”
It was late afternoon, and Aioma as he spoke skimmed the sea
line from west to east of north with eyes wrinkled against the light.
“No cloud hides it,” went on the old man like a child explaining a
difficulty, “it is full day, yet it is not there—to our sight.”
Dick, as perturbed as Aioma, said nothing. He knew quite well
that by now Marua should have been high on the horizon. They had
been travelling since morning, how swiftly he could not tell, but with
great speed, seeing that they had with them the wind and the
current; also the sky stain made by Karolin was now very vague,
vague as when he had viewed it from Marua.
“Where then is it gone?” went on the old fellow, “or how is it
hidden? Has Uta Matu cast a spell upon us or has Marua been
washed away?” Then turning as if from a suddenly glimpsed vision:
“Taori—we may sail till the days and the nights are left behind us
with the sun and the moon and the stars, but Marua we shall not
see again.”
Dick still said nothing. He refused to believe that Uta Matu had
the power to put a spell on them and he refused to believe that
Marua had been washed away by those waves that did little more
than smash a few houses at Karolin. All the same he was disturbed.
Where then was Marua?
Poni, who was standing near them with Le Moan who had heard
what Aioma said, suddenly struck in, in his sing-song voice.
“Surely we passed an island when Pete’son commanded this ship
and we were running on this course, an island that would be about
here, but is not here any more—and you remember the great waves
that came to us at Karolin and the gulls who sought a home? All
these things have just come together in my head as it might be
three persons meeting and conversing. Well then, Aioma, it is clear
to me now that this island you seek is gone beneath the sea. At the
time of the gulls and those great waves, I said to Timan, that
somewhere an island had gone under just as Somaya which lay not
far from Soma went under in the time before I started to sail in the
deep-sea ships. One day it was there and the next day it was not,
and there were the big waves just like those that came to Karolin.
Marua, you called this island; well, Aioma, you may be sure that
Marua has gone under the sea.”
And now strangely enough Aioma, so far from accepting the
support of this statement, turned upon the unfortunate Poni who
had dared to bring experience and common-sense with him to the
bar.
“Gone under!” The scream of laughter with which Aioma received
this suggestion when it had percolated down into the basement of
his intelligence made the faces of the others turn as they stood
about near the foc’sle head discussing the same subject.
“Gone under!” What did Poni mean by such silly talk, did he not
know that it was impossible for an island to sink in the sea? Sink like
a drowning man! No, the great waves had knocked Marua to pieces,
either that or Uta Matu had veiled it from their sight ... and so the
talk went on and all the time the sun was falling towards the west
and Le Moan’s palms were itching to feel again the spokes of the
wheel and the kick of the rudder; for a plan had come into the mind
of Le Moan, a plan put there maybe by Uta Matu, who can tell; or
Passion, who can tell? But a perfectly definite plan to take the wheel,
steer through the night and put the schooner absolutely and fatally
astray: Put her away from Karolin so far and so much to the east
that the lagoon light would be no guide and a course to the south no
road of return.
The plan had come to her, fallen into her head, only just now; it
was indefinite, but cruelly straight like the flight of an arrow, and in
one direction—away from Karolin.
Great love is an energy that, born in mind, has little to do with
mind. It is a thing by itself, furiously alive, torturing the body it feeds
on and the mind that holds it. Hell is the place where lovers live.
Even when they escape from it to heaven as in the case of Katafa, it
is always waiting to receive them back, as also in her case.
To Le Moan, dumbly suffering, the message of the cassi flowers
telling that Taori was hers by virtue of the power of her passion for
him, had suddenly lost all significance. He was here now by the
power of the wheel of the ship over the rudder. She could take him
away, now, to be always with him—take him away for ever from
Katafa, steer him into the unknown. And yet the knowledge of this
physical power and the determination to use it brought her no ease.
She would be close to him, but of what avail is it to a person
suffering from the tortures of thirst if he is close to water yet may
not drink. All the same she would be close to him.
As she watched the sun so near its setting she dwelt on this fact
as a bird on the egg it is hatching, and brooding, she listened whilst
Aioma urged that they should turn back at once, and Dick countered
the suggestion asking for more time. He had it in his mind to hold on
till sunset, till night came to cut them off in the quest. Well knowing
in his mind that Marua was no more, that the reef and lagoon and
hilltop, the tall trees and coloured birds had all vanished like a
picture withdrawn, either gone beneath the sea as Poni said or
devoured by the waves as Aioma held—well knowing this in his
mind, his heart refused to turn from the quest till turned by
darkness.
He would never see Palm Tree again. Like grief for a person lost,
the grief of this thing came on him now. He knew now how he loved
the trees, the lagoon, the reef, and he recalled them as one recalls
the features of the dead. He could not turn till darkness dropped the
veil and said to him definitely, “Go back.”
He was standing with this feeling in his mind when a sound made
him turn to where Aioma had suddenly taken his seat on the edge of
the saloon skylight with body bent double and head protruding like
the head of a tortoise. He seemed choking. He was laughing.
Aioma, like Sru, had a sense of humour, and a joke, if it were
really a good joke, took him like the effect of a dose of strychnine.
Sure now that Marua had been swallowed by the sea, the
catastrophe, having made itself certain and obtained firm footing in
his mind, suddenly presented its humorous side. He had
remembered the “bad men.” They were swallowed with Marua, he
could see them in his imagination swimming like rats, screaming,
bubbling—drowning—and the humour of the thing skewered him like
a spear in the stomach.
BOOK IV
 CHAPTER I—E HAYA

The sun touched the sea line, the blazing water leaping to meet
him, and then in a west golden and desolate, in a sea whose water
had turned to living light, he began to drown.
Dick watched as the golden brow, almost submerged, showed a
lingering crescent of fire and then sank, carrying the day with it as
Marua had sunk carrying with it his youth and the last visible threads
connecting him with civilization.
He turned. Le Moan had taken the wheel.
The sails that had been golden were now ghost white and a topaz
star had already pierced the pansy blue where in the west the new
moon hung like a little tilted boat.
“To the south,” cried Aioma. “E Haya—to the south, Le Moan, to
Karolin now that we have seen there is nothing to be seen, to the
south; to the south, for I am weary of these waters.”
Le Moan, dumb and dim in the starlight now flooding the world,
spun the wheel; on the rattle of the rudder chain came the thrashing
of canvas and the schooner bowing to the swell lay over on the port
tack—due east.
Aioma glanced towards the moon but Le Moan reassured him.
“The current is fighting us,” said she, “and I would get beyond it.
Have patience, Aioma, the way is clear to me.”
He turned away satisfied and lay down on deck. Dick, who had
brought up some blankets from below to serve as a sleeping mat,
lay down by him, and the kanakas, all but Poni and Tahuku, went to
their bunks in the foc’sle.
Aioma, lying on his face with his forehead on his arms, heard the
rattle of the rudder chain and knew that Le Moan was edging now to
the south. She would steer all night with the help of Poni, and sure
of her and sure of Karolin showing before them at daybreak, he let
his mind wander, now to the canoe-building, now to the spearing of
great fish, till sleep took him as it had taken Dick.
Le Moan, steering, could see their bodies in the starlight, and
beyond them Poni and Tahuku seated close to the galley, their heads
together talking and smoking, heedless of everything but the eternal
chatter about nothing which they could keep up for hours together,
whilst the schooner under the hands of the steersman was heading
again due east.
An hour after midnight the wind shifted, blowing from the west of
south. Poni came aft to see if Le Moan wanted anything, food, water,
a drinking nut—she wanted nothing; as she had steered all that
night long ago towards Karolin, she steered now, tireless, wrapt in
herself, without effort.
As the dawn showed in the eastern sky she altered the course to
full south and handed the wheel to Poni.
She had done her work, e Haya, steered they for ever now they
would never raise Karolin—so far to the west that even the lagoon
light would be all but invisible.
The first sun ray brought Aioma to his feet, he saw Poni at the
wheel and Le Moan lying near him fast asleep like a creature caught
back into darkness now that her work was done. The sunrise to port
told him that the ship was heading south, then he came forward and
looked.
The southern sea showed no sign and the southern sky no hint of
the great lagoon. Not a bird’s wing appeared.
He roused Dick, who came forward and they stood whilst the
canoe-builder pointed to the south.
“There is nothing,” said Aioma—“yet we have come all the night
and she is never wrong—not even the light in the sky. Yet by now
the trees should have shown.”
Dick, gazing into the remote south at the blue and perfect and
pitiless sky, unbroken at the sea line, unstained above it, drew in his
breath; a cold hand seemed placed on his heart. Where then was
Karolin?
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookgate.com