--- title: "Too Small, Too Poor" sousTitre: "The same verdict rains down from outside on Epeli Hauʻofa’s Oceania and Fernando Huanacuni’s Andes: too small, too poor. Both reject it—but one answers by expanding the world, the other by ceasing to measure it by what it accumulates." description: "An encounter between two voices from within—the Tongan thinker Epeli Hauʻofa (*sea of islands*) and the Aymara jurist Fernando Huanacuni (*suma qamaña*). Two refusals of the same colonial measure, through two opposing gestures: enlarging the frame, or changing the unit of well-being." date: 2026-06-17 lang: en tradition: tonga auteurs: ["Epeli Hauʻofa", "Fernando Huanacuni Mamani"] --- # Too Small, Too Poor Too small, too poor, too isolated. The sentence falls from outside, and it falls everywhere in the same way. On the islands of the Pacific, it says: micro-states lost in the blue void, doomed to depend on the aid of wealthy nations. In the Andean highlands, it dresses itself in the language of development: backward peoples, who must be pulled upward toward living standards, toward “better.” A single measure, imposed from a single center, decreeing what counts and what is lacking. Two voices reject it—one from Tonga and Fiji, the other from the shores of Lake Titicaca. They do not know each other, do not cite each other, share neither language nor ocean. Epeli Hauʻofa (1939–2009), Tongan thinker and longtime professor at the University of the South Pacific in Suva; Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, Aymara jurist and writer, who gathered for an Andean Indigenous organization the meaning of an ancestral word. Both contest the same verdict. But what makes them valuable to place side by side is not their agreement: it is that their responses move in **opposite** directions, and neither can be understood if they are too quickly conflated. ## Hauʻofa’s Response: Enlarging the World Hauʻofa first taught smallness. He described to his students their situation of dependence, their confinement, their remoteness, and watched their faces fall. Then he realized that teaching this to young people from his own region was to work at their humiliation. In 1993, in a foundational lecture, he turned the map inside out. There is a gulf of difference between viewing the Pacific as 'islands in a far sea' and as 'a sea of islands'. The first emphasises dry surfaces in a vast ocean far from the centres of power. When you focus this way you stress the smallness and remoteness of the islands. The second is a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships. There is a gulf between seeing the Pacific as “islands in a far sea” and as “a sea of islands.” The first vision emphasizes dry surfaces in a vast ocean, far from centers of power. When viewed this way, the smallness and remoteness of the islands are underscored. The second is a more global perspective, where things are seen in the totality of their relations. The shift is precise: “islands in a sea” makes the ocean an interval that separates and diminishes; “a sea of islands” makes the ocean the medium that connects. One ceases to count the surfaces of emerged land to measure a world by its routes, its kinships, its exchanges woven over two thousand years of navigation. “*Smallness is a state of mind*”—and the conclusion Hauʻofa draws is not to content oneself with a small, beloved world: it is to affirm that the world, seen rightly, is immense. The world of Oceania is not small; it is huge and growing bigger every day. The world of Oceania is not small; it is vast, and grows vaster every day. The gesture is one of **amplitude**. Against the verdict “you are too small,” Hauʻofa does not plead the sweetness of the confined: he widens the frame until it bursts. What he calls “*world enlargement*” continues under the noses of planners—through migrations, circulations, families scattered from one end of the Pacific to the other and beyond. Oceania “extends,” “grows”; it is, he says in the essay’s most famous closing line, vast, hospitable, generous—“*we are the sea, we are the ocean*.” The answer to smallness is vastness. *[Une voix de l'intérieur]* Epeli Hauʻofa was Tongan, born in Papua, settled in Fiji: a named and situated voice, speaking *of* Oceania without summarizing it—“according to Hauʻofa,” never “the Oceanic peoples say.” The essay is written in English, his working language; “a sea of islands” is our own rendering. The twin formulas—*islands in a far sea* / *a sea of islands*—he attributes to his colleague Eric Waddell; the reversal is his own. ## Huanacuni’s Response: Changing the Unit of Measure In the Andes, the verdict does not go by the name of “smallness” but of “development.” The summons is the same: one must live **better**, climb the slope of living standards, catch up. And it is precisely this word that Fernando Huanacuni comes to disjoin. The Aymara term *suma qamaña*—its Quechua twin is *sumak kawsay*—which is usually translated as “living well,” does not mean one must live better. El término aymara "suma qamaña" se traduce como "vivir bien" o "vivir en plenitud", que en términos generales significa "vivir en armonía y equilibrio; en armonía con los ciclos de la Madre Tierra, del cosmos, de la vida y de la historia, y en equilibrio con toda forma de existencia". The Aymara term *suma qamaña* translates as “living well” or “living in plenitude,” which broadly means “living in harmony and balance: in harmony with the cycles of Mother Earth, the cosmos, life, and history, and in balance with every form of existence.” The word aims at equilibrium, not ascent. And Huanacuni draws the dividing line carefully, where development would read a synonym: El Vivir Bien no es lo mismo que el vivir mejor, el vivir mejor es a costa del otro. Vivir mejor es egoísmo, desinterés por los demás, individualismo, sólo pensar en el lucro. Living well is not the same as living better; living better comes at the expense of others. Living better is selfishness, indifference to others, individualism, thinking only of profit. “Living better” is comparative: one lives better only *more than* someone else, thus at their expense, and for a minority to live better, multitudes must live poorly. This is the grammar of accumulation, which ranks the world into winners and losers. “Living well” does not compare: it measures itself against the balance of the whole, not the deficit one has dug in the neighbor or the earth. Huanacuni’s gesture, then, is not to enlarge anything. It is to **disarm the very unit** in which it is evaluated: neither surface, nor growth, nor “more,” but adjustment to a whole greater than oneself, where the human is but one thread. *[Une voix de l'intérieur]* *Suma qamaña* is an attested borrowing from Aymara, a living Andean language; “living well” and “living in plenitude” are our French renderings, just as “vivir bien” is, by Huanacuni’s admission, a Spanish rendering too brief. The synthesis is carried by a named Indigenous voice—Fernando Huanacuni Mamani—relayed by an accountable Andean Indigenous organization, the CAOI: “according to Huanacuni,” never “the Andean peoples say.” *Buen vivir* has since become a state and NGO slogan; we stick to the Andean source, not its diluted diplomatic version. ## Two Refusals, Two Opposing Directions It would be easy, and false, to conclude here with the same wisdom in two languages. Both men reject a measure imposed from outside; but what they do with it diverges, almost to the point of opposition. Hauʻofa answers “too small” with **bigger**. His weapon is amplitude: the world is immense, it extends, it grows every day; routes multiply, families overflow borders. He remains, in his way, within the language of magnitude—he merely reverses its sign. Where the planner saw tiny dots, he sees a world swelling. Huanacuni, for his part, does not reverse the sign: he **rejects the scale**. To “one must live better,” he does not answer “no, we live grandly”—he answers that life cannot be tallied in degrees at all, that “more” is precisely the trap. His gesture enlarges nothing; he seeks the right measure, balance, sufficiency in relation. Where Hauʻofa celebrates what “grows,” Huanacuni distrusts the very grammar of growth. *[Distinguer]* The terrain is not the same. Hauʻofa contests a **space**—the map, the ocean, scale: he unfolds. Huanacuni contests a **measure of well-being**—economy, progress, accumulation: he rebalances. One responds to smallness with expansion; the other responds to “better” by stepping outside “more or less.” These are not two names for the same refusal. To confuse them would be to attribute to Hauʻofa a defense of sobriety he does not make, and to Huanacuni a praise of expansion he opposes. ## The Threshold They Share Only once this divergence is firmly held can we name what, beneath it, converges. For the measure they both reject is the same in its nature: it is **quantitative**. Surface area, standard of living, output, “more”—always a number, imposed from outside, ranking worlds on a scale. And what both substitute for it is, in its nature, the same thing: a **relational** measure. Hauʻofa: one sees the islands “in the totality of their relations.” Huanacuni: it is about understanding that in life “*todo está interconectado*,” everything is interconnected, interdependent, and “there exists an interdependence between all and everyone.” What makes a world, for both, is not the quantity of its things nor the extent of its lands: it is the density of its ties. The verdict “too small, too poor” errs not only in its answer—it errs in its **unit**. It counts surfaces and goods where it should count relations. But this shared threshold, they reach by two opposite slopes, and they must be left there. Measuring a world by its relations can mean widening its fabric—more routes, farther, an ocean-home that never ceases to grow: that is Hauʻofa. Or adjusting to it without breaking it—enough, not more, balance rather than expansion: that is Huanacuni. The same truth—a world is weighed by what connects it—reads once as amplitude, once as rightness. A non-dual vision, not a fusion: the threshold is one, the slopes remain two. We have learned two questions, and we believe them the only questions: *how big?* and *how much more?* Both demand a number. [The sea of islands](https://viasophia.org/lexique/sea-of-islands/) and [suma qamaña](https://viasophia.org/lexique/suma-qamana/) pose a third—*to how many am I bound?*—and do not even agree on what follows: must this bond extend, or hold in balance? The encounter ends there, on this intact disagreement. It is better than false peace. --- **À lire aussi** - [Une mer d'îles](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-06-17-une-mer-d-iles/) - [Vivre bien n'est pas vivre mieux](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-06-17-suma-qamana-vivre-bien/) - [Urihi](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-06-10-urihi/) - [La vie n'est pas utile](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-06-12-fruicao/) ## Sources - Epeli Hauʻofa, *Our Sea of Islands* — A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, University of the South Pacific, Suva, 1993 ; repris dans The Contemporary Pacific 6/1, 1994, trans. texte original anglais ; rendu français maison - Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, *Buen Vivir / Vivir Bien. Filosofía, políticas, estrategias y experiencias regionales andinas* — Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indígenas (CAOI), Lima, 2010, trans. texte original espagnol ; rendu français maison Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/reenchanter/2026-06-17-trop-petit-trop-pauvre/