The Samoan category Matai (Chief) : a singularity in Polynesia? Historical and etymological comparative queries

Abstract

In contemporary Samoan discourse as well as in all writings by Samoans or Westerners, from the 1930s to the most recent books and theses, the word matai is presented as the specific Samoan word which has always been used to designate 'chiefs'. There is even a tendency to say that this specifically Samoan notion embodies the whole culture. Samoans often explain to the visitor that "the Fa'aSamoa (the 'Samoan custom') is the Fa'amatai (the 'matai-system')".1 It is certainly true in many aspects for the 20th century, for Western and Eastern Samoan politics (Tcherk?zoff 1997a, n.d.b), even if, in the State of (Western) Samoa, recent governmental decisions have begun to abolish some privileges of the matai at the level of national politics.2 But the equivalence between Fa 'aSamoa and Fa 'amatai may have been less true for earlier periods. Scholars, Samoan and Western, have also tended to search for an etymology of the word matai within the sole Samoan context. The common hypothesis relates the word to the base mata-? This is also problematic. There are linguistic difficulties which contradict this option, from a Polynesian comparative view and from the consideration of the 19th century Samoan society. A revision of the matter is proposed here and opens a new consideration on the historical transformations of 'chiefs' in Samoa. The matai is not simply the Samoan type of the "Polynesian chief. There are two shortcomings in such a statement. One is the recurrent idea that the "Polynesian chief is fundamentally of one type, in contrast for instance to the "Big-man" of the Papua New Guinea highlands. The second shortcoming is the omission of the transformations that affected the various kinds of Samoan leaders during the last two centuries.