I used 2001 as a popular culture illustration, but if you look at Jane Goodall's work, you will recall that she has documented dissent and murder amongst the chimps she studied for years. The bonobo are different, and they are a "sex positive" species that a lot of humans are uncomfortable extending to human behavior. As much as you'd like to compare Polynesians to bonobos, they are humans, not child-like chimp-humans. And as humans, I think you'll find a social complexity that IS present, but simply didn't have the same territorial or cultural markers that the early Europeans would have been looking for.

They may still have gotten along a lot better in their place than Europeans got along in their own; there may have been an entirely different social structure based less on territory and more on a unique origin story and belief system that taught the population how to get along in their environment. This has been seen in American Indian cultures, where religion dedicated this as varied as government and marriage to what and when to plant and when and what to hunt.

That tends (this isn't an absolute) to be one of the benefits of religions growing in a specific (autochthonous) way--a culture learns to balance their impact on the land by practicing rituals that moderate the impact. This can extend to population growth and sexual practices, I am sure. If you're talking about isolated populations where discord could wipe out the population (think Easter Island) with no new blood available to rebuild, then encouraging behaviors that lessen stress and strife is a benefit. This is a general statement, I won't try to offer more specific examples here, but there have been quite a few anthropologists in the field to document some of this. In general, though, I think most populations pack the usual social ills in their cultural quivers; they just decorate them with different feathers.

SRS