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 They do not know each other, do not cite each other, share neither language nor ocean.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.

English

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.

English

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.

English

The world of Oceania is not small; it is huge and growing bigger every day.

English

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.

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.

Spanish

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”.

English

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:

Spanish

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.

English

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.

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.

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 and suma qamaña 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.