Political Change in Tahiti and Samoa: An Exercise in Experimental Anthropology

The experimental method is often taken to be a private domain of natural science. Indeed, many hold it to be responsible for the fabled progress and exactitude of the natural sciences as contrasted with the more intuitive approach and pedestrian advance of a discipline like social anthropology. Yet the thesis of this paper is that the experimental method is by no means a monopoly of natural science. I shall attempt to demonstrate that it can be used effectively to solve certain problems in social science as well. The vehicle for the demonstration is a problem in Polynesian ethnology. Two distinct hypotheses are available as candidates for explaining the problem. As in the natural sciences, we shall evaluate the hypotheses by the experimental method. It is possible to subject them to a "crucial test"-crucial in the sense that by corroborating one hypothesis the experiment falsifies the other (Hempel I966: 25-26)* In fact, two such experiments can be devised, one relying on historical materials and the other using the method of controlled comparison (Eggan I954). Hopefully these tests will demonstrate that Polynesia is indeed, as Keesing (I947: 39) and Mead (I957) have termed it, a human laboratory.