Modernities, Class, and the Contradictions of Globalization: The Anthropology of Global Systems

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The Anthropology of Global Systems

Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and lonathan Friedman

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A division

of

ROWMAN & LlTTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham

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New York. Toronto . Plymouth. UK

ALTAMIRA PRESS A division of Rowman

& Littlefield Publishers,

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman

Inc.

& Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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© 2008 by AltaMira Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form

or

by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Friedman, Kajsa Ekholm, 1939�

"

--

,..

Modernities, class, and the contradictions of globalization: the anthropology of global systems / Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and lonathan Friedman. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and inl1ex.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7591-1112-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-tO: 0-7591-1112-X (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Social change.

2. Globalization-S0cial aspects.

4. Postmodernism-Social aspects.

11. Title.

5. Group identity.

3. Culture and globalization. I. Friedman, lonathan.

GN358.F754 2008

303.4--dc22

Printed in the United States of America

2007039877

@TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American

National Standard for Infonnation Sciences-Pennanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

,

Contents

1

Introduction Part I Other Modernities? Resistance, Continuities, and Transformations

25

1 From Religion to Magic Kajsa Ekholm Friedman

29

2 Myth, History, and Political Identity lonathan Friedman

89

3 Will the Real Hawaiian Please Stand? Anthropologists and Natives in the Global Struggle for Identity lonathan Friedman 4 Global Complexity and the Simplicity of Everyday Life Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and lonathan Friedman Part 11

Other Modernities? Globalization, the State, and Violence

5 State Classes, the Logic of Rentier Power, and Social Disintegration: Global Parameters and Local Structures of the Decline of the Congo Kajsa Ekholm Friedman

v

139

175

179

Contents

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VI

6 Social Movements and the Struggle against Evil Kajsa Ekholm Friedman

213

7 The Implosion of Modernity: A New Tribalism lonathan Friedman

239

Part III

263

Globalization as Representation and Reality

8 The Hybridization of Roots and the Abhorrence of the Bush lonathan Friedman

265

9 Indigenous Struggles and the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie lonathan Friedman

295

Index

315

About the Authors

323

•

Introduction

This is a book about the emergence and dynamics of the contemporary world,

one that seeks to understand the latter in terms of global processes of social reproduction. It is not about globalization as such, although globalization is

certainly part of the story. We ha ve argued previously that globalization is not an evolutionary stage but a historically delimited process that occurs primarily in periods ofhegemonic decline within the global arena, and it is in this sense

that we use the term here. Globalization as a discourse is a ma jor focus of this volume, and it is linked to the transformation of the world order itself, one in which globalizing elites and those who identify with them are the locus of the

production of globalization as a set of representations. Colonial empires are

surely global in their extent, and they include processes of social and cul�ural

reorganization in large parts of the world, but we have not characterizedsu.�Q .

I\i1 .

.

'

phenomena under the rubric of globalization, primarily to distinguish the Hitl ...

historicalterms.!

Our approach to globalization (Ekholm and Friedman 1980) is not one in

which the local is a product of the global, as is fashionable in much

of the

globalization literature. In the latter there is a tendency to deny and even to fear the local as an expression of xenophobic nationalism and to attempt to dissolve it into a mere second-order construction of the global itself.2 In our own approach, the global is itself the set of processes that connects localities

and to the extent that the processes contain specific logics of reproduction we

can speak of global systems, systems that are always historical systems, even in the minimal sense that it takes

time

for them to reproduce themselves. W ithin

such systems there is an articulation at any particular moment between local and global in which the local is reproduced, not created, within larger global

1

,

2

Introduction

processes. The articulation is constituted by two principal mechanisms. In cultural terms there is a tendency for local social orders to assimilate externally imported objects, texts, and schemes. This is the spaghetti principle, the process

by which an imported element becomes integrated into the local in such a way that its origins play no role in its usage or even in its identity. It occurs

ubiquitously in practically all cases of what has been referred to as cultural transfer. At the same time, there is a material integration of the local into the global, primarily in cases of imperial expansion or other forms of systemic incorporation of local populations within larger systems. In imperial orders this relation most often corresponds to relations of dependency, but these are, in fact,

a subset of a larger array of global relations. Our approach then is founded on a

notion of social reproduction, and it is also implicitly a method of investigation.

For example, there are populations that may well be isolated and that must be

studied in terms of local resources and local processes of reproduction. But such populations have histories, and it must be determined whether or not they have always been isolated. Most often this is not the case, so that modem

small-scale "egalitarian" societies studied in previous decades have turned out

to be integrated either in the present or in previous larger systems. On the other hand the fact of integration does not imply that such societies are products of some larger system, only that they are connected and reproduced within

the latter. The articulation also occurs within a continuum of penetration and replacement. There are long histories of social and cultural transformation,

such as the Congo in which the integration of the area has led to quite drastic

transformations generated by the slave trade and the later development of colonial trade and even colonial rule, but which were orchestrated internally since local structures were not utterly dismantled by external powers. There

are, at the other end of this continuum, places like Hawaii, where a powerful process of penetration totally destroyed the political order from the outside and

replaced local institutions with imported institutions, not merely at the political summit ofthe society but all the way down into the local communities. Practices

of socialization remained intact if transformed, but in conditions in which they were not adaptive to the new social order. There was at least as much catastrophe and death in the Congo case, but institutional replacement was much less

complete and never succeeded in penetrating all levels of social organization.

One of the mistaken tendencies within cultural globalization approaches is

that they can only deal with openness in terms of cultural diffusion and that

this is most often in the form of objectified culture. It is true that, as discussed below, one might envisage this articulation in terms of mixture or hybridity, but for those who actually live within a particular social world, this is rarely

the case. That is, they do not usually show any interest for the genealogy of the cultural elements that they appropriate and they, in any case, have integrated

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3

Introduction

these external elements into their own domestic schemes of existence. The

anthropology of globalization maintains a diffusionism that tends to be based

on the exclusive perspective of the observer and reinforces a museological

objectification of culture (as meaning for the observer rather than the subject

of a particular lived life world), thus negating that once-major principle of anthropological research, to understand the "native's point of view."

Now for many of the members of the globalization school the assertion

that the local is still really out there comes as a serious problem. "There has been a tendency to batten down the hatches in fervid defense of the particular,

the local, and the parochial against the onslaught of 'the global,' the latter in anthropology-talk, having become a generalized, under-motivated sign of the

changing universe in which we live and work"

(1.

and 1. Comaroff

2003).

Here is the assumption, never once analyzed, that we are living in a new

world in which the global has somehow replaced the local. In all of its misplaced

concreteness (just where is the global?) there is a certain fantasy Idesire of the

new,

of having a prophetic role in announcing our arrival in this newfangled

globalized world. Like a priesthood, those who have been there and seen

the truth of the global claim to represent that latter to the rest of us. Instead

of argument we have a statement of authority based on a position in a new world from which the truth can be broadcast to the plebeians, the "terrestrials"

(terriens) as they are referred to by French aristocratic cosmopolitans (Wagner 1998:204; see also Pin�on and Pin�on-Charlot 1996).

MOD E R N I T I ES? Modernity is an increasingly popular and confusedterm of reference, one that

re.;.lspcl1 . for this is in itself worth discussion. Sociology, of course, has had lots t6;[sA� has not been an object of anthropology as such until quite recently. The

.

. on the issue, and many of the major debates in an earlier period wereveiy much focused on the issue of the transition itself and its possible meaniilgs.

Fromgemeinschajt to gesellschajt, status to contract, tradition to modernity'­ evolution and development were all part of a general understanding of the transformation of European societies and of the world as a whole. The modem

in this perspective was envisaged as a series of states-of-the-world: individ­

ualism, market, liberty, and democratic government; briefly, the model of a

society, a civil society made up of free individuals whose activities were orga­

nized within the framework of a state ruled by an elected government, whose

goals were individual self-fulfiHment and whose alterity implied a secular ex­

istence where religiosity and all cultural identity was relegated to a private

predilection bereft of public influence. This notion was not the product of

Introduction

4

empirical investigation but of a quite general act of self-reflection, one that sought to delimit the specificity of an emergent condition. So we are squarely

in the realm of identity talk, of categories that might immediately be desig­ nated as ideological or even mythical. Modernity, like one of its metonyms,

the French Revolution, is a mythical component of contemporary Europe, a charter of a social order rather than an aid to its understanding. This is only

partially true, of course, and it has become a major problem in much of the literature on the subject. On the other hand we have taken it upon ourselves in the West to claim analytical distance to ourselves, to be able to come to a self-understanding via rational critique and empirically grounded research.

This may also be a particularly self-congratulatory myth, but we shall accept its value for the time being, as nothing yet has come along to replace it.

The recent plethora of writings on the subject of modernity, clearly depicted

in Knauft

(2002) poses serious questions as to what it is we are supposed to

be talking about. His critique of Harvey's neglect of "economic and political histories of non-Western peoples, including their engagements with and resis­

tances against capitalism" (Knauft 2002), is where anthropology can be said to

have confronted this primarily sociological discussion. It might be countered

in good relativist terms that modernity is a product of European capitalist soci­

ety, a cultural specificity, a "tradition" that is inapplicable to the understanding

of non-Western societies. This implies further questions that have never been

posed in a clear fashion. Are the different Western polities similar with re­

spect to their "cultures"? If so, is this a product of a common or convergent history, a capitalist history for example, producing similar social and cultural

transformations? If what is called modernity is the product of these transfor­ mations, then are all social formations subject to the same kind of trajecto1ily?

Or, might we assume another more structuralist position in which modernity comes in varieties, the latter the products of particular historical articulations

of capitalist development in differing initial conditions. This would produce French, English, and American modernities, as well as Indonesian, Japanese,

and Chinese modernities. These are big questions that are not easily assumed

away

in

discussing alternative modernities or alternative relations to a single

modernity. They cry out for more precision, for an elucidating of perspectives rather than yet another plunge into the murky waters of this discourse.

We shall in the following briefly indicate what appear to be the problems

that have yet to be solved in such discussions as well as suggest what one might be doing in constructing a viable discursive arena.

In the introduction to a book on modernities, Knauft noted that there is

a virtual grab bag of terms listed,

if not united, under

the term "modernity."

Individualism, nation-state, imperialism, and capitalism

or just the plain variety

whether millennial

are all points of reference for numerous discussions.

,

Introduction

5

We shall return to this laundry list since it is not only a reflection of the indeterminacy of the term but has been a glaring symptom of more "theoretical"

sociological works as well (Giddens

1990; Friedman 1994:214-27).3

The uses of the term in recent anthropological texts seem to arrange them­

selves along a set of varying contours.

1. Modernity is very often a mere gloss on the contemporary. For example,

the existence of witchcraft today is an expression of the modernity of witchcraft. The latter is modern because it is part of a process organized within the global capitalist world of today, not of yesterday. This notion

has no particular content, no specificity. It is a mere temporal category

of presupposed disjunction, and it is often conflated and confused with more substantive understandings of the term. 4

2. Modernity can refer to the leading sector or region of the world, under­ stood in hierarchical terms, as a center/periphery structure or as empire.

It includes the center of the "system," the West and the others, the pe­ ripheries and sub-peripheries that are defined and then define themselves in relation to the modern. The modernities described in this version are

primarily relations to a postulated modem, something that exists in an­

other part of the world, the subject of either emulation or rejection. Here there is a conflation of geographical space and developmental time.

3. Modernity is simply the set of modem products, or the products of cap i­

talism, the products of the center. The latter is present metonymically, in the form of technologies, commodities, and images, from haute couture to CNN, to (our) visions of "modem life." Many write of modernities

in

other parts of the world as a relation to, representation of, or discourse on these metonymies.

4. Our own approach is to understand modernity as a cultural space, aregci�e . - , '- - '.:

"

of social experience. It is not defined as a specific historical phenomei'lt)U.

associated with Europe, but it certainly possesses a specific structure, one that has emerged to varying degrees in recent European history but also

in previous times and places.

WHOSE MODERN ITI ES? Alternative modernities are invariably about a certain representation and prac­

tice of a dependency relation, a social construction of perpherality, but how is

modernity understood in the centers themselves? This must ultimately return us to the earlier sociological discussion, which was more focused on the con­

tent of the term than on its connotative function with respect to those defined as

6

Introduction

peripheral to its existence. This does not mean that the sociological literature offers a solution to our problem, since it partakes of much of the list-like nature of other discussions. We might begin by dropping the necessary assumption that modernity is a concept and maintain it simply as a word that refers to a cluster of phenomena that may or may not be systematically related to one another. We shall suggest in this book that they do hang together and that it is in uncovering the nature of their configuration that we can contribute to an understanding of the apparent resonance of the term. We can begin with the list itself (Friedman 1994): individualism public/private division democracy nation-state enlightenment philosophy/critical rationality capitalism global economy/imperialism modernism/developmentalism/evolutionism Now, these terms are not of the same logical type. "Individualism" and "global economy," for example, relate to different orders of reality, but this does not exclude the possibility that they might be systemically related in material terms. Any item might be chosen as a subject for discussion, or for appropriation as part of a particular "modern" identity, but the logic that links the terms is then absent. The alternative modernities concept is compatible with the laundry list of terms because they are integrated as signs into other fomns of life, other strategies. Because no logic, no structured field, is stipulated, it becomes all to easy to conflate contemporaneity and modernity.

T H E lOG IC OF MOD E R N ITY ,

Do the terms in the above list have anything to do with one another? We have argued that, in fact, they are aspects of a unitary process that inflects them all in a particular way (Friedman 1994). The advance of commercial capital­ ism generated a dissolution of larger sodalities over several centuries. This advance itself was predicated on the formation of a European-centered world market from the fifteenth century. It enabled a new form of differentiation by wealth in which the individual accumulation of capital/abstract wealth was paramount. This reconfigured class structure in such a way that a bourgeoisie emerged as the most powerful group in society. With the gradual demise of

•

•

Introduction

7

the aristocratic model of fixed status, consumption became a primary means of social self-definition. The eighteenth century marks the first consumption revolution in Western European history. Lord Chesterfield's famed correspon­ dence with his son deals with the problem of confronting increasing numbers of people whose status is undecipherable, because it is socially unmarked, and the necessity of creating a personal space secure from public encroachment. The private sphere emerged in the same period, a domestic or private sphere of the "neglige" where the self was free from the imposed and increasingly un­ clear roles of the public sphere. But more important, the core principle of this change is the fracture of the person into a private subject and a public identity. From this fracture springs the well-known experience of alterity. Alterity, the founding dynamic of modernism, is an understanding of the world in which identity is reduced increasingly to social role, achieved rather than ascribed, and temporary and even alienated from the subject. The nation-state is a political formation that depends upon the dissolution of older sodalities and communi­ ties and the individualization of a territorial population enabling the state with some effort to re-socialize it into a new kind of identity based on "citizenship" rather than subject status. Democratic forms of politics make increasing in­ roads in the state as the nation/people become the only source of sovereignty with the demise of the aristocracy. This entire development is dependent in its turn on capitalist economic growth, which in its turn is dependent on the formation of a larger economic and therefore political arena than the territory of the state itself. The formation of imperial systems is the foundation of the entire development as it is in the center of empire that the social transformation leading to modernity occurs.5 The success of this process produces a new so­ cial identity, one in which the national society itself is placed within the center of the larger the imperial process. This creates a center/periphery organization of the world, but in the center it is paralleled by individualization and the q�sin tegration of theologically based cosmologies such as the Great Chain ofB&it!g.· If mobility depends on individual success, the latter can readily be underst�od as a process of development. And if this modality of experience is transferred to the larger society and even to nature, the result is evolutionism, the ordering of the world in terms of degrees of developmental success. This is, then, a future-oriented cosmology that becomes generalized to all domains natural history, social history, individual development and is the core of modernism. The modernity described here is no mere expression of a relativity, of a con­ temporaneity that requires its complementary opposite, tradition, the primitive, or whatever. This would be to conflate the term "modernity" with its specific cultural content. We shall suggest here that there is a structural content to the notion of modernity, one that can only be understood in terms of a set of com­ plementary parameters. The latter generate tendencies to the structuring of an ..

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Introduction

8

MODERNISM

- culture

- nature

,

+

culture

TRADITIONALISM

+

nature

-----t- PRIMITIVISM

+

culture

+

nature

POSTMODERNISM

Figure 1.1.

identity space, one i n which traditionalism is just as modern as modernism, primitivism, and postmodernism. All of these can be understood as expressions of the parameters of the space. The graphic that we have made use of for a couple of decades (figure 1.1; see also chapter 7 for a discussion) consists of a number of simple dichotonfies that define four endpoints or polarities. The latter are also ideal types that never exist as empirical totalities but only in the imagination and as tendencies in social reality. We leave this discussion to chapter 7, where the graphic is dealt with in more detail. If these poles define the limits of the space, they do not determine its dynamic, which depends on the larger social and political over time is a function of global economic context. The way people identify . . systemic processes. The contemporary period of hegemonic decline is a period of increasing polarization within this space in which traditionalism is clearly on the rise and massively so, while modernism is increasingly weakened. Where the future fades people tend to invest in the past rather than the future. The result is ethnification and cultural fragmentation, at least in the lower half of the social order. At the top a congery of modernist and postmodernist elites identify as the new cosmopolitans. This represents a certain folding in upon itself of the identity space so that modernist and postmodernist identifications become increasingly fused in spite of their contradictory natures. 6 This is New

:,� �:

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. Introduction

9

Age modernism, revolutionary fleo-liberalism, and other "double thinks" so common in Third Way ideologies that have brought political elites from right and left into the Neue Mitte. If the above schema can be understood as a set of interwoven processes, all of which are dependent upon the degree of intensity of capital accumulation and commodification of the social field, then modernity can be understood as a structure in the structuralist sense; it is not a fixed form, but a set of proper­ ties of a series of interconnected dynamic processes. This, further, raises the issue of historical conditions and here we would suggest that modernity is a trans-historical structure that has appeared in several times and places, always a product of a similar set of processes of commercial capitalist accumulation and commodification. It can be said to have appeared in classical Greece, continuing into the Hellenistic period before disappearing following the end of the Roman Empire, but there are also tendencies in certain periods of Chinese and Indian regional histories, and in the medieval Arab world. The degree of individualization and "alterity" has, of course, varied, just as other tendencies, such as democracy, the nation -state, rationalist philosophy, and science. This is related to differing political-historical contexts . But the similarities are clearly worth investigation. Thus, in one sense, we have certainly never been modern, insofar as these tendencies have never worked themselves out to their logical conclusions in any historical period. On the other hand the tendencies them­ selves are of the same order, and it is here that we may speak of a family of phenomena that harbor similar structural dynamics. Modernity is, in this argu­ ment, the cultural field of commercial capitalism, its emergent identity space. This implies that the question of so-caned alternative modernities would have to be reframed. The alternatives within modernity are aligned within the same space of features. And it is because of these invariant features that we can speak, if we so desire, of alternative modernities. But this is not the c �!\e,if · the cultural field is organized in terms of other basic features. Thus the &�ct that one desires Western goods does not have anything to do with moderiffty as such. This is emphatically so if the desire itself is structured in terms of the logic of a very different kind of social world. Cargo cults, for example, are totally focused on what appears to us to be the modem, but this ignoresthe internal order of this relation, the intentionalities involved, what these objects mean in the lives of those who desire them. Ethnographic analysis is too often glossed into or replaced by a ready-made interpretation based on the expe­ rience of the observer. The structural approach suggested earlier might help make sense of the otherwise quite confused issue of alternative modernities that is current in anthropological discussions. Instead of immediately utilizing the term alternative modernities, it might make more sense to first ascertain the relevant parameters involved in the particular ethnographic material. In all •

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10

Introduction

cases that we have encountered it is an issue of confrontation, articulation, and sUbsumption of other parts of the world by expanding capitalism; modernity seems to be taken along for the ride, as if it were part of the baggage itself without the actual articulations involved,being considered.

TH E I D EO LOG I CAL BAS I S OF "ALTERNATIVE" MOD ERN ITIES

There is an interesting ideology that links the use of the term modernity to a notion of historical discontinuity. It is based on the very acceptance of the evolutionary character of the term so that to even insinuate that modernity is a rather restricted phenomenon can be construed as racism. This fear of as­ sociation with such discrimination has led to an even stronger bond between modernity and contemporaneity, one that is clearly illustrated by recent dis­ cussions of the "modernity" of witchcraft. But it is also a reinforcement of the developmentalist paradigm itself. Geschiere's work on sorcery in Cameroon is an excellent example of the problem that arises when applying notions like alternative modernities. Here there is an agenda: Geschiere would like to insist that contemporary sorcery is modem. This implies that all of the properties of contemporary sorcery that display some historical continuity are subsumed within this new category and are thus assimilated to the modern. He thus creates precisely that discontinu­ ity that has been the hallmark of Western notions of the modem. What is the same, and what is different? For Geschiere, the objects and actors are differ­ ent, but the mode of going about identifying others and the central issu t¥ of wealth accumulation and inequality is part of the "old" logic. Now this implies that potlatching with sewing machines is not potlatching but modern potlatch­ ing, something entirely new. It also makes a serious category mistake by not qualifying the older strategies with respect to the foreign. Now if, as in the Congo region, prestige goods need to be exotic, and if their value is a sign of a political status relation to the outside world, then there ought always to be a tendency to import new things into the internal cycles of exchange and dominance. The direct application of a term such as mOdernity flattens out a more complex articulation of different kinds of relations that coexist but are nevertheless of different orders. This kind of critique was made of moderniza­ tion theory by Marxists decades ago. Geschiere writes clearly that there are "traditional" elements in modern sorcery after castigating others for entertain­ ing such dangerous ideas (2000: 23). His modern tale is as follows: X arrives in town without money to eat . . . he joins a tontine (jamla) and contracts a debt that has to be paid by selling one of his kin.

,

Introduction

11

Or si la notion de dette en sorcellerie n'est pas neuve, elle acquiert de nouvelles dimensions en etant en rapport direct avec le Jamla" (24). This is the linkage to the labor of others, to the capitalist process. But what is changed in all of this? As he himself says: "le discours de la sorcellerie s'articule si facilement aux changements modemes" (24). What is new are the new commodities introduced by the world market: "biens hautement convoites parceque devenus les symboles memes de la vie 'modeme': maisons 'en dur' equipees de frigidaire, de television et de tout ce qui rend la vie modeme agreable; voitures de luxe (Mercedes, ou maintenant Pajero), etc." (24)

Now what is the real problem here? It might be the forced introduction of the notion of the modem, as in "symbols of modem life." Yes but is this modem in itself or modem in the sense of foreign prestigious items that demonstrate wealth? Geschiere answers this by warning us that to use the word "retradi­ tionalization" as do Chabal and Daloz is dangerous because what is happening is that this new imaginary is the product of "un effort concerte pour participer aux changements modernes, voire pour les mai'triser" (25). So what makes sorcery new is the situation to which it is applied. But even Geschiere admits that the way in which it is applied is continuous with the past. He goes on to suggest that it is the closect/open nature of sorcery that is what makes it so adaptable to modernity. Now, a1l of this is framed in singu lar terms. We are today in the modem world, so everyone who is part of this in the material sense, that is, part of world capitalism, is part of modernity as well. All the rest is variation. This is a contorted version of Fabian's call to accept the contemporaneity of the contemporary rather than classifying it as radically other in the sense of tem­ porally past. But in Geschiere's version modernity becomes contemporaaeity; a misleading conflation if we assume that modernity has its own specific lq)gie� a cultural logic. There is a world of difference between material contiguityil �i.Fni interaction that is organized by the world system and the cultural articulatiltils involved in the former. There is no contradiction between material unificatli)i:l and the continued existence of very separate social worlds, even where they are very much transformed. The denial of continuity coupled with the asser­ tion of the radical difference of the modem expresses a kind of politically correct approach to difference. They can certainly be very different, but they are differently modem. This is the problem in the work of the Comaroffs, as well, where "occult economies" are associated with globalization, or as it is now termed, "millennial capitalism." The enemy here is a straw man notion of tradition, interpreted as the fixed, essentialized culturalist imprisonment of the "other" in a local unchangeable world, the world of traditional anthropology, which at last is being revolutionized by this new "afterology" (Sahlins 1999).

.

12

Introduction

While admitting that there are clear continuities, the fact that it is happening here and now and in a new context ordered by the contemporary changes of the capitalist system makes it entirely different. This is our problem, perhaps, our millenarism, our desperate need to project ourselves into the future and take "them" with us, with the feeling that we are indeed entering a new world of cyber-capitalism and virtual accumulation. But this is, in fact, more of a gut feeling than a social revolution, one made by capitalism itself. Capitalism has not changed in its general tendencies to the deepening of commodification, the increase in the rate of accumulation of fictitious capital relative to real accumulation, the increasing lumpenization of large portions of the world's population. All these processes are abetted by the new technology, but they are certainly not its cause, and if anything they are the symptoms of a capital­ ism in dire straights, a situation quite predictable from the logic of the system (Friedman 1 999, 2000; Hirst and Thompson 1 996; Harvey 1 990; Wallerstein 1 976). But there i s more here than meets the eye. What is it that seems to embarrass anthropologists in admitting that the world might consist of mere variations on modernity? It would seem to be the claim that somehow modernity is about rationality and that magic is therefore something that belongs to our past and to traditional society. When arguing for the global prevalence of "modern" magic, the African "occult economy" is merely a local variant of a global millennial phenomenon. Thus the driving force in this change is globalization itself, the speedup of circulation of goods, images, information, t-shirts, and cults: "it is a feature of the millennial moment everywhere, from the east coast of Africa to the west coast of America" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 291). And they do stress the local forms of this phenomenon. "Once more, however, a planefary phenomenon takes on strikingly particular local form . . . " ( 291). In one sense these authors are expressing an awareness that is very much already present in the media. On the other hand, their account jumps directly from the fact of globalization itself to magical reactions: too much to buy, consumer insanity, understood as the liberation of desire, and not enough money to get it all, not for the masses of poor. This is what produces the occult economy, the magic of money, the imagination of zombies and of sorcery. This is not a new connec­ tion, of course. It is a replication of the old structural functionalist account but now in a more intensified situation and with a new, millennial vocabulary. The old account also linked the epidemic of sorcery to the inroads of the market into "traditional" African societies. Sorcery, as Geschiere puts it, is an attempt to stop the flow of globalization. In the old days it was an attempt to do some­ thing more particular, for example, to counter the commercialization of social relations or simple individualization. So what's new, we might ask? A closer account would have to clarify the fact that it was elders who were accusing

,

Introduction

13

their youth of sorcery as the latter became increasingly independent economi­ cally when they became employed in the capitalist sectors that encroached on these worlds, a process that was explosively evident in the early colonial pe­ riod. So even the "modernity" of witchcraft has a historical continuity. Ekholm Friedman has argued that the kind of witchcraft/sorcery found in contemporary Congo is, in fact, a phenomenon that dates to the latter half of the past century, that is, to colonialism itself, and that previous to that, it was primarily organized as a mechanism of political control over potential revolts by vassals (Ekholm Friedman 1 991). Even while admitting the historical continuity of the forms of these phenomena, it seems preferable even i f contradictory to stress their dis­ continuity with the past. The self-contradictory nature of this discourse leads to an apparently satisfactory new version of theme and variation. The theme now is capitalism, as a cultural phenomenon. A critique of those who would stress cultural continuity in all of this 7 is revealing with respect to precisely the contradiction discussed here. We are warned not retreat into some form of old-fashioned localism in order to avoid "the "methodological challenge posed by the global moment" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000:294). This move is typically rationalized by affirming, sometimes in an unreconstructed spirit of romantic neoprimitivism, the capacity of "native" cultures to remain assertively intact, determinedly different, in the face of a triumphal, homog­ enizing world capitalism. Apart from being empirically questionable, this de­ pends upon an anachronistic ahistorical idea of culture transfixed in opposition to capitalism-as if capitalism were not itself cultural to the core, everywhere indigenised as if culture has not been long commodified under the impact of the market. In any case, to reduce the history of the here and now to a contest between the parochial and the universal, between sameness and distinction, is to reinscribe the very dualism on which the colonizing discourse of early modernist social science was erected. It is also to represent the hybrid, dialectical hist r1 ically evanescent character of all contemporary social designs." (Com aroff Comaroff 2000:294) .

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Who is the CUlprit? We seem to have been counted among the category by Meyer and Geschiere whos e position is practically identical to that of the Comaroffs and who participate in their quota of mutual admiration. In the introduction to their Globalization and Identity, one of us is taken to task for precisely this awful crime of continuity. He emphasizes that globalization goes together with "cultural continuity." This makes him distrust notions like "invention of tradition" or "hybridization"; in­ stead, one of the aims of his collection of articles seems to be to understand the relation between the "global reordering of social realities" and "cultural

14

Introduction continuity" . . . this makes him fall back, in practice,. on the highly problem­ atic concept of "tradition," which---especially in his contributions on Africa­ seems to figure as some sort of baseline, just as in the olden days of anthropol­ ogy. . . . Similarly he relates the emergence of les sapeurs, to "certain fundamental relations" in Congo history which "were never dissolved"; as an example of such "fundamental relations" Friedman mentions: "Life strategies consist in ensuring the flow of life-force. Traditionally this was assured by the social system itself". This is the kind of convenient anthropological shorthand which one had hoped to be rid of, certainly in discussions on globalization . . . . Friedman's reversion to such a simplistic use of the notion of tradition as some sort of base line--quite surprising in view of the sophisticated things he has to say about globalization­ illustrates how treacherous the triangle of globalization, culture and identity is. Relating postcolonial identities to such a notion of "tradition" makes anthropol­ ogy indeed a tricky enterprise. (1 999:8)

This seems the work of nervous intellectuals. I use the word "traditionally" to refer to both a colonial and precolonial past. If this makes anthropology a "tricky enterprise" it would be interesting to know just how. I refer in the article discussed here to the way in which, in spite of the destruction of Congolese polities at the end of the last century under the onslaught of Leopold 's Congo Free state, there were important continuities maintained in transformation. This analysis was taken from Ekholm Friedman 's work on the subject ( 1 9 91), which analyzes the way in which transformation actually works, the way in which certain basic logics of being and of life strategies remain intact even in transformation as the political and much of the social order collapses. This is not in order to oppose culture to capitalism. It i s to ascertain the way in which different logics articulate with one another over time. Now if allll'of these authors admit that some things don't change while others do, then we would all seem to agree, and yet not so. The reason is related to the way reality is classified. To see an articulation over time is to stress a transformational approach to historical change. To see in every new combination of elements something completely new is to stress discontinuity. Some years ago, we suggested that global/local relations can be understood in terms of a double process: cultural assimilation and the material integration of populations into the larger system. We spoke of two kinds of transfor­ mation, one in which local change is endogenously organized but initiated and channeled by global relations, and another in which local structures are simply replaced by those of the dominant power. These two kinds of trans­ formation occur, of course, together, but it is important not to confuse them. In Hawaii, the native population was re-integrated into the imported orga­ nizations of American colonial society, from church, to school, to the en­ tire political structure. Their whole society was replaced. In Africa colonial

•

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Introduction

institutions did not replace local political structures in this way, and postcolo­ nial African polities can be said to have strongly assimilated the imported formal structures of government. The same can be said to have happened in Papua New Guinea, where the state, while employing the formal categories of Western governance, enmeshed them within local forms of sociality. Thus, a district governor could describe his activities in terms of distribution of goods and advantages to relatives and the accumulation of prestige typical of big-man activities. Now, of course, "big-man" strategies are themselves an endogenous transformation that might be of quite recent date. From our point of view this is not a question of modernity but a particular articulation of different logics in a particular place. Contemporary, of course! But this does not mean that people can't live in radically different worlds of experience, desire, or ways of going about the world. This issue was discussed in a small publication with 1. Carrier on the subject of Melanesian Modernities (Friedman and Carrier 1996). The title was simply a way of marking the fact of participation in a postcoloniaI set of institutions, but it implies nothing about the way in which this participation occurs. From this vantage point it would have been more adequate to speak of Melanesian contemporaneities, a clumsy term indeed, but more to the point. There are many different ways of appropriating Westem products, ways that are not contained within Western cultural logics. The potlatching with sewing machines at the turn of the century referredto earlier was not a different way of being modern but a different way of connecting to a largerworld. The ultimate and very difficult issue here relates to the limits and nature of such differences, and this cannot be solved by simply stating that people play different roles in different situations or that the way to understanding is via hybridity. The latter concept entirely forsakes the issue of articulation, that is, how, exactly, . .. .. . . differences are integrated with one another. .; : .

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Letme return now to these arguments. Both stress the modem as hybrid, evanes­ cent, unbounded in space, and impossible to characterize in terms of what the Comaroffs refer to as the dualism of colonial discourse. Here is the heart of their conception of the modern and of its necessary discontinuity. The world is one, because capitalism is now globalized. And capitalism is thoroughly cultural, apparently equivalent to modernity, although this is never clearly ad­ dressed. This means that the world is a collection of specific capitalisms and therefore of specific modernities . In other words, to identify continUity is to deny the absolute contemporaneity and coevality of the entirety of the world's populations.

16

Introduction

I am not in favor of reforming language, but it is important to be able to distinguish among vastly different usages. In order to clarify this for myself and perhaps the reader as well, let me suggest the following categorization: 1 . Modernity as the contemporaneous refers to a situation of integration within the capitalist world economy and to varying degrees within the capital­ ist world as such. To wit, the relations to the capitalist world can vary according to the way in which different populations participate in that world, the articu­ lation of different structures of experience, different socialities to one another. Being integrated into global capitalist reproductive process is not equivalent to being dominated by the capitalist logic. It is one thing to plant cash crops in order to gain money incomes, but where these incomes are used to buy pigs in order to give feasts in the context of a big-man strategy, then the local form of accumulation of prestige, while dependent on the larger market, is not organized by it. Where a big man begins to use his monetary wealth to employ workers instead of gaining people's labor via debt and exchange rela­ tions then we can speak of a tendency to capitalization. However, in order to move toward category 2, below, capitalist accumulation would have to become dominant within the population so that the big-man strategy became a form of prestige only, an expression of real accumulated wealth. There is an enor­ mous economy of prestige in capitalist modernity, of course. Otherwise there would be no private universities, no Rockefeller Center, but these entities are direct products of capital accumulation. The generosity of the millionaire does not automatically create pressure to reciprocity, indebtedness, garbage men, and social dependency. There are other mechanisms for that. Where there is a sphere of social reproduction that is not organized in capitalist terms, external to the capitalist sector, there is a sphere for the production of other formf of identification, sociality, and cultural representation. 2. Modernity in the structural sense, as outlined above, refers to the cultural parameters of capitalist experience space, a product of the commodification of social relations to various degrees. To wit, modernities can vary in terms of the recombination of their basic parameters and i n the degree of their realiza­ tion. This is very much a question of historical change. European modernities represent a set of variants with respect to individualization, the private/public division, modernist ideology, and so forth. These variants can profitably be compared to modernities that emerge in certain elite sectors of the Third World, in certain classes, in China, Japan, and India, and to earlier historical moder­ nities, in classical Greece, certain periods of ancient Mesopotamia, and so forth. These variations, we would argue, belong to the same family of forms because of certain basic tendencies that they harbor. In all of these cases we would argue for the existence of a structural dominance of capital accumula­ tion in the social reproductive processes. This suggestion cannot be dealt with

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Introduction

17

i n fu U here, but i t has been more fuUy discussed i n other writings (Ekholm and Friedman 1979; Friedman 2000; Adams 1974; Larsen 1 976). We refer here to capitalist accumulation, which is a process and should not be conftated with any notion of social type. A social formation can be more or less transformed as a result of capitalist processes, but the latter remains a specific kind of logic of wealth accumulation; in the most general sense, the conversion of money capital or what Weber called abstract wealth into more s"uch wealth. 8 The rela­ tion between this logic and the social reproduction of a particular population generates tendencies toward what we have described as modernity, but these tendencies are worked out to varying degrees and in variable ways since the logic works itself out in different social and cultural contexts. Since there are no examples of societies that have become totally capitalized, and since capitalist reproduction does not dissolve everything, there are plenty of domains that are transformed without being dissolved and reconfigured in capitalist terms. Thus there are clearly differences in local and national cultures within formations dominated by capitalist accumulation. There are large areas of social existence that are not the products of capitalism and i n this sense, we have never been modem. It may be useful to refer to alternative modernities or whatever term might seem appropriate to characterize a particular form of articulation between peripheral societies in the world system and centrally initiated capitalist pro­ cesses. These vary along two axes; one, the degree oftransformative integration into the global system, the other, the representations ·of the center as future, wealth, well-being and so forth, and strategies related to such representations. But the other sense of the term as the identity and cultural spaces of capi� talism refers to the fundamental aspects of a particular phenomenon wQQ,se parameters have been the source of the various fragments, whether ind(vidu� . alism, democracy, or capitalism that have functioned as symbolic refere�tt9f the alternative modernities described for the world's peripheries. This l�t�r sense renders modernity a "tradition," a particular cultural configuration� a.@'d its variants with a long history and full of its own magic and fetishism, as M;�I'x demonstrated long ago. The opposition between modernity and tradition i� it" self a product of this logic of modernity. The evolutionist logic of those who today fear the word and who would see modernity everywhere is inadvertently replicating this very logic. This book is an exploration of the articulations between global and local processes in the f01mation of the contemporary world. It deals with the h istori­ cal formation of what anthropologists once assume d to be a fixed "traditional" culture in Central Africa, one that dates in fact to the last half of the nine­ teenth century. This does not imply that something appeared as entirely new. The formation of the "modem" culture of the Congo was a transformation .

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Introduction

in which crucial logics of practice were not eliminated but elaborated upon · or truncated. It deals also with the contemporary politics of identity in the Pacific, both among indigenous peoples and anthropologists. It argues for the importance of understanding the continuities of internal logics of social life against the onslaught of anthropologists adhering to both "inventionist" and globalizing assumptions. It addresses the issues of violence in relation to global and state transfoIlIlations in Central Africa and more generally in the current period of Western hegemonic decline. Finally the issues of hybridity and glob­ alization and of the process of double polarization, ethnic (horizontal) and class (vertical), are discussed in order to gain some purchase on the current positional production of dominant discourses.

PARTS AND CH APTERS

These chapters, then, explore the structural aspects 0 f what i s often referred to as modernity. Here they are understood as a particular kind of identity space linking individualization to a series of transformations of both experience and representation. Thus while traditionalism and primitivism may often be thought of as existing in opposition to modernity, we argue that they are an integral part of the latter, defining its total frame of reference. In this way evolutionary and developmental thinking, primitivism, postmodernism, and religious or ethnic traditionalism can be understood as structurally related to one another, and the movements surrounding one or another of these polar terms can be understood as products of the decline or rise of strong modernist identities in capit�ist worlds, identities which are, of course, never pure. No, "we have never been modern," but the tendencies are what define the nature of a system not the particular products.

Part I: Other Modernities? Resistan.,

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Hawaiian resistance is not a new phenomenon, but it was carried out and developed during a long period of increasing American hegemony in the is­ lands. It was a struggle doomed to political failure. And it increasingly took the form of subaltern or passive resistance rather than open confrontation. It is the decline of that hegemony that has made the movement that began in the 1970s a more successful venture. The examination of the history of Hawaiian resistance reveals an elaborate and continuous set of frames for the interpre­ tation of the experience of colonization. I have argued elsewhere (Friedman 1 992a:204; 1 992b:854) that this continuity might be related to late pre-contact

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Chapter 3

social configurations in which a consolidated chiefly elite, endogamous and warlike, is opposed to a class of commoners.

T H E MASTERS OF AUTHENTICITY A N D T H E PRO B LEM O F C U LT U RAL CONTI N U ITY

The intense interest in the question of authenticity of the museological va­ riety is worth a study in its own right. As I am primarily interested in its consequences in Hawaii, I can only make some cursory suggestions. Firstly, as stated in the introduction, there is an apparent correlation between the de­ cline of Western hegemony, the rise of cultural movements throughout the world system, and the shift of anthropology toward culture, identity, and au­ thenticity. The "invention of tradition" school of thinking bears, in this re­ spect, striking resemblance to writings on cultural globalization, hybridiza­ tion, and creolization. There is, in this work, a common focus on a contrast between what might have been in some mosaic-like world of the past and the current world of invention, cultural confusion, and cross-breeding. The adherents of this approach qualify their practitioners as bearers of truth in the global arena i n those cases where their identification of contemporary groups clashes with those groups ' own self-identification. In the following, I have chosen my example from Hawaii in an attempt to "deconstruct" the implicit deconstruction of other people's constructions. I suggest that the en­ tire approach is an expression of a retrenchment of modernism, a historical and/or ethnographic authoritarianism. The latter is not a mere question of at­ titudes but a necessary expression of a positioning within the global field ItIf identification. There are several variants of the "invention of tradition" version of cultural critique now in vogue in anthropology. The first version appeared with the publication of The Invention a/Tradition by Hobsbawm and Ranger ( 1 983). In the introduction to this work, the editors make an absolute distinction between lived tradition, or custom, and invented tradition: "The strength and adaptability of genuine traditions is not to be confused with the "invention of tradition." Where the old ways are alive, traditions need be neither revived nor invented" (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1 983 :8). The approach represented in this work is one that aims to set the record straight concerning what has been assumed to be age-old tradition and what is in fact recent fabrication. The contrast between the ever-changing institutions of modernity and the stability of tradition is argued to be entirely a product of modernity itself. Tradition becomes a kind of nostalgia, a longing for that which has been lost, a longing that can only exist in a society whose principle of existence is change itself. And since this

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Will the Real Hawaiian Please Stand?

1 17

is the true nature of modern society, all tradition can only be understood as false construal whose object is political in nature. Invented traditions designated the construction of pasts for political purposes i n the present, the most obvious examples coming from nationalist movements. Its banner, for many, was the demonstration that the Scottish kilt was a late in­ vention foisted upon the Scots by the English. Trevor-Roper's argument ( 1 983) was based on juxtaposition rather than historical process . While acknowledg­ ing the existence of an earlier plain garment of a slightly different form, he went on to show that Scottish nationalism coupled to the textile industry produced something altogether new. But in all of this, it is difficult to ascertain what it meant for the participants at the time, and how the Scots perceived the relation between their identity and the kilt. And Trevor-Roper's own description of the process of "invention" turns out, on closer inspection, to be a transformation of the prior "belted plaid," which could be worn in a way that resembled the "modern" kilt, the primary difference being that the former was a single cloth wrapped around the body in such a way as to include both a top and a bottom, whereas the latter was a new and industry-produced version of the bottom or skirt alone. The differentiation of colors and patterns by clans rather than by rank is also a crucial change, and the elaboration of the latter is clearly re­ lated to the vagaries of Scottish national identity. But the weaving of identities with h istories is not so much a question of invention pure and simple. It is, rather, a question of transformation and recontextualization. This important essay epitomizes the central problem involved in the invention paradigm. The integration of the Scottish Highlands into the expanding British indus­ trial empire transformed that region and created new contexts of identification that gave rise to the kilt as we know it today. But the historical process involved demonstrates a fundamental continuity as well, which enables us to translate . invention as cultural transformation. This historical process is curiously absent . � ; from the general theoretical discussion. The latter is not simply an oversig t . but a product of the terminology or, perhaps, the conceptual frame itself, whiQh is based on discontinuity and a contrast between the artificial traditional and the real traditional. No amount of recanting and modification can escape the logic of that framework, which is that of "tradition" as opposed to the lived existence of traditional society, that is, tradition objectified. After all, not only kilts but the entire structure of "Western culture" is very much a product of the invention of the classical world in the Renaissance. It established a historical continu­ ity and even a genealogy going back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. The invention of tradition is an old and perhaps quintessential European tradition (Sahlins 1 993). This approach was also recently applied by an anthropologist to Hawaiians in the throes of a developing cultural movement. The transformations of this .

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Chapter 3

approach are worth analyzing, as they are the product of a direct confrontation with a political reality that cannot simply be reduced to the "politics of culture." In the following, the confrontation between cultural rebirth and anthropological identity crisis are portrayed as aspects of the global fragmentation referred to in the introduction. This is, I shall argue, a question of structure and not of personality. In 1 983, anthropologist 1. Linnekin published an article on Hawaiian tra­ dition titled "Defining Tradition : Variations on the Hawaiian Identity," which appeared in the very respectable journal American Ethnologist ( 1 983). The ostensible purpose of this article was to demonstrate in a straightforward de­ scriptive manner the ways in which the recent cultural movement in Hawaii has created tradition in creating its own identity. The argument presented in the introduction is plausible enough. Tradition is the use of past "lifeways in the construction of present identity." This argument already had a tradition of its own among anthropologists, sociologists, and even historians (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1 98 3 ; Shils 1 97 1 ) . Culture, in this view, is a product continu­ ally undergoing transformation (Geertz 1 966; Wagner 1 975). In relation to the specifics of nationalist and nativist movements , Linnekin draws on Linton and Eisenstadt, who explain that such movements build their identities out of certain chosen elements from the present and past that are combined in a spe­ cific, consciously manipulated way. This, of course, implies that the cultural creations of such movements are not "authentic" and that they can often be contrasted to the supposedly real traditional culture of remote, rural areas. But even here, as Linnekin shows, the local societies have been so transformed as to be ineligible for the title of authenticity ( 1 983 :243-44). It is true that Linnekin has claimed that authenticity itself is a misnomer here, and I slIDll return to this question shortly. All of this is a perfectly reasonable argument. Such a summary statement, however, says little about the mechanisms of creation or transformation in­ volved in the process of building traditions. One might have hoped that the concrete analysis that follows the programmatic introduction would have shed some light on such mechanisms. But we are instead treated to a list of exam­ ples that merely indicate the difference between so-called modern Hawaiian traditions and what is from this point forward referred to as aboriginal culture, defined as Hawaii before the arrival of Captain Cook. The main focus of Linnekin 's article is the emergent Hawaiian movement, but there are a number of well-known examples of ethnographic a that appear to require demystification. The slack-key guitar and ukulele, both of which are imported, the mixed Portuguese-Hawaiian music that is played on them, lomilomi salmon as a modernized party version of an original ritual dish all are modern creations of tradition that differ considerably from the originals .

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Will the Real Hawaiian Please Stand?

Tb e egalitarian ideology associated with the word ohana, which is used often in

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the movement to characterize traditional Hawaii, is in many ways the opposite of the aboriginal hierarchical model of social relations. In sum: "The histor­ ical correspondences are generations removed from contemporary models of Hawaiian tradition held by nationalists or rural villagers" (Linnekin 1 983 :242). Following this, two principal examples are taken as targets for Linnekin 's exercise in analyzing the fabrication of tradition, both associated with the Hawaiian cultural movement, a movement that harbors, in fact, a broad spec­ trum of ideologies, but that is here reduced to a monolith. The first of these is the much publicized voyage of the Hawaiian canoe, the Hokulea, to Tahiti in 1 976. This voyage was one of the activities that symbolically marked the start of the Hawaiian revival. A number of disputes concerning the purpose of the voyage, the navigation techniques to be employed, and so forth gave rise to differing interpretations of the importance of the Hokulea. The boat itself, a double canoe, was designed by a Hawaiian-born mainland resident, Herb Kane, who returned to Hawaii and has been active in the Hawaiian movement for some years. The expedition is characterized as follows: "A series of ironies marked the canoe's construction and launching. The Hokulea's designer, Herb Kane, is half-Hawaiian, but was reared and educated in the Midwest . . . a successful commercial artist [who] . . . only returned to Hawaii in 1972 . . . . Yet again, ethnicity has little to do with the ' facts' of 'parentage'" (Linnekin 1 983:245). Blunders are cited that are apparently meant to disqualify the entire ex­ pedition. Since there was no Hawaiian capable of long-distance navigation, a Micronesian had to be recruited. Mistakes were made in everything, from the drinking of kava, the intoxicating ritual drink of western Polynesia bor. rowed for the occasion by Hawaiians, to incorrect preservation of food. 'l'1le apparently inauthentic concept of ohana was invoked by rebellious "urb�1' Hawaiian crew members, who intended to take the canoe to the politicaHy riJ)t island of Kaho'olawe against the wishes of their own "pure" rural Hawaiian captain. The second "nationalist symbol" (Linnekin 1 983 :244), and clearly the m0st important, is the island of Kaho' olawe. This island, off the coast of Maui, has been a bombing zone for the D.S. military since World War 11, where allied members of the Pacific Rim (RIMPAC) have periodically been invited to test their equipment. Hawaiians havefoughtformany years to regain the island and the "Protect Kaho' olawe Ohana" (PKO), which has been the core of Hawaiian "nationalism," has, through its "accesses" to the island, found it to be a source of religious and political identity. The island has been a symbol of the rape of Hawaiian lands, its desolate landscape riddled with shells and devoured by the thousands of goats that are its only i nhabitants. While the island does host a •

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Chapter 3

number of ancient temples and sacred places, Linnekin is quick to point out that it has never been much of anything: infertile without water, and a penal colony in the nineteenth century. In other words, its present symbolic importance is incongruous with its insignificant past, yet another example of the creation of tradition, apparently out of the blue in this case. What are we to make of this? The anthropologist would seem to have at­ tempted to demonstrate that the contemporary constructions of Hawaiian tra­ dition are indeed modern creations suited to the political goals and cultural needs of contemporary elites. In accordance with Eisenstadt, the urban nationalist version of tradition is viewed as the product of political manipulation. But even the rural version of tradition is regarded as a modern fabrication. All that Hawaiians today think of as traditionally Hawaiian is in reality no more "authentic" than any other aspect of modem existence: "The resulting version of Hawaiian culture does not correspond to a specific time period. In the cultural revival, isolated facts have been transformed into symbols of Hawaiianness and accorded a signifi cance without precedent in aboriginal Hawaiian society" (Linnekin 1 983 :243). The entire argument here consists in the exemplification of the original thesis. It might be said that I have misunderstood these arguments, but it seems quite clear that the demonstration of the lack of fit between the symbolism and practices of today's Hawaiians and their own "aboriginal" culture is both inconsistent with the original argument and indicative of a competitive relation between the anthropologist and the people that serve as her object.

OBJ ECTIVE C U LT U R E AN D MOD ERN FAB R I CATION

I suggested earlier that there is plenty of evidence for a continuity of cultural forms in transformation, as well as a fundamentally authentic relation between the producers of cultural forms and their conditions of existence. Building walls, reviving the hula, and the current Hawaiian movement are not, in this view, inventions, but transformations of culture. Invention implies discontinu­ ity and pays little regard to the cultural conditions of cultural creativity. What is invention to the outsider may be necessity for the insider. And if such is the case, the outsider is lacking in insight. Let us consider the examples chosen to demonstrate the inventiveness of modern Hawaiian tradition. Kaho 'olawe: It might be argued that the little target island of Kaho 'olawe owes its importance to nationalist politics, so that claims of sacredness for the island are politically motivated. While not denying this obvious point, it does not warrant belittling any significance that the island might have. The origin myths, characterized by the usurpation of power by a commoner or

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parts of the Pacific, demonstrating that such movements, were within the range of control of the ancient Polynesians. My argument here is that while current circumstances may indeed have a great influence on those sectors of a body of tradition that become the fo­ cus of contemporary identity, there is a great deal more complexity in the continuity through transformation that generates that body than Linnekin is willing to recognize. Kaho'olawe is not just an old island that people have concocted a lot of fantasies about because the navy has dropped bombs on it for 30 years. Nor is the "pathway to Tahiti" just a good story with lots of political potential. The stress on the "ironies" of the Hokulea, the contrast between ethnic­ ity and the "facts of parentage," and the zealousness of part-Hawaiians as opposed to pure Hawaiians are difficult to interpret as mere objective descrip­ tion, since such language implies that these mongrel modems have somehow got it wrong. This in its turn implies that there is something right, defined here as "aboriginal." Cultural Values: Three related concepts are central to the Hawaiian move­ ment: ohana (extended family) with its implication of equality and reciprocity; a generally anti-hierarchical attitude, at least with respect to post-contact aris­ tocracy; and aloha 'aina (love of the land). It might seem reasonable to suppose that these values are not those of "aboriginal" Hawaii, certainly not in the form they have today, but there is good reason to believe that there is a significant continuity here with the last century and a half. That Linnekin does not think this worth consideration would seem to belie her preoccupation with prov­ ing the nonauthenticity or nonaboriginality of these values. It is, of course, quite probable that very many of the modem "traditional" Hawaiian values !Ire products of the violent transformation of the sociocultural order that occurred throughout the past century. Thus, it is quite possible that the ohana principle, as well as an entire community structure, emerged in the wake of an absentee aristocracy, an encroaching plantation economy and a colonial market sys­ tem that left a dwindling commoner population with a minute portion of their former productive lands. While it is true that some politically motivated Hawai­ ians have publicly described ancient Hawaii as an egalitarian utopia, very few actually subscribe, or find it neces sary to subscribe, to such a belief. Attitudes toward the alii (aristocrats), both ancient and modern, vary considerably among those engaged in the movement. There are those who maintain quite simply that the aristocrats sold them out, and they understand aristocratic principles to be directly opposed to those of ohana. There are also those who maintain that ancient aristocracy was based on a kind of noble generosity that became corrupted in the contact period when the great King Kamehameha acted as unknowing midwife to the birth of a class society. In all cases, a distinction is

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apparently made between a notion approaching that of tribal aristocracy and the more modem definition of a political upper class. Thus, while the concept of ohana might in some sense be compatible with a "primitive" aristocracy, it is absolutely antipathetic to modem forms of class dominance. Aloha 'aina might conceivably be a nineteenth-century product of an oppressed population in the process of losing its land to an encroaching plantation economy and a new social structure, destructive not just of an ancient chiefly system but of the commoner remains of that society. Linnekin 's informants ' equation of in­ side cool, wet, taro, Hawaiian versus outside hot, dry, cane, haole (white) ( 1 983:243) appears to express a cultural closure indicative of local resistance. In fact, very many of the above cultural "patterns" bear a striking resemblance to Wolf's closed corporate community ( 1 957), or at least a form of sociality emergent from cultural opposition to the establishment of a dominant colonial sector, not just of production, but of life in general. B ut it is one thing to assert the strategy of closedness that I suggest, and to conflate this with some notion of invention, implying, again, historical discontinuity. On the contrary, it might be argued that much of the strategic practice involved in the ohana is part of an older, or at least an available, strategy of closure in relation to a chiefly elite that had become dependent upon Europe and had become increasingly oppressl ve. We have here the basis of an argument that current Hawaiian cultural mod­ els are, in the first instance, derived from nineteenth- rather than eighteenth­ century structures, which in their turn did not simply fall from the sky. If such is the case, then there is indeed a cultural continuity represented in the modem reconstruction of Hawaiian identity. The kupuna (elders) do have, objectively speaking, the important role assigned to them by younger members of the ohana movement and even by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. ,

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ANTH ROPOLOGY VERSUS THE CREATION OF C U LTURE

Let us try, at this point, to sort out the problem. On the one hand, we are prec sented with a general assumption that all culture is the product of continuous transformation. On the other hand, we are treated to an attempted demonstra­ tion of the inauthenticity of the "tradition s" of the Hawaiian movement on the grounds that they do not correspond to an aboriginal baseline. No other argument is made use of. No attempt is made to discover the roots of modem tradition in some other period than that of first European contact. The logic of the argument would seem to be as follows. If tradition is indeed the product of contemporary circumstances, and not a relatively fixed fund of cultural reperto­ ries of knowledge, values, and symbolism, then the only way in which a proper

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evaluation of authenticity can be determined is by the establishment of another constant, in this case, aboriginal culture, Hawaiian culture as represented in the interpretations of anthropologists and historians. This is accompanied by an attitude that does not appear to be a misinterpretation on my part, expressed in Linnekin's list of ironies, and in her several references to the way in which Hawaiians "wax poetic" or "wax sentimental" over one or another aspect of their tradition, all of which we anthropologists know amounts to no more than contemporary artifice. If tradition is a "conscious model of past lifeways that people use in the construction of their identity" and if "the inheritance of an authentic tradition and the naIvete of the folk are illusory" (Linnekin 1 983:24 1 ), then strictly speaking, no comparison between the folk model and real aboriginal culture is possible. Aboriginal Hawaiian society of the late eighteenth century is itself a transformation of earlier Hawaiian sociocultural organization. There is no reason to assume that paramounts always had the same kind of power, that human sacrifice and warrior chiefs were part of a constant cultural scheme, that the kumu (red) fish was always the "conventional offering" in short, that there was no historical transformation before the arrival of Captain Cook. What is irritating here, for Hawaiians at least (Trask 1 993 : 1 6 1 -78), is the clash between a theoretical approach that would understand tradition as by definition inauthentic and a description that at the same time harbors an im­ plicit critique of a social movement on the basis of this apparently universal in authenticity. If the Hawaiian social movement creates tradition in a way that is logically equivalent to the way that an anthropologically defined aboriginal society invented tradition, then there is no cause for a language stressing the ironies and incongruence of just this particular tradition, unless one assumes that all tradition is somehow false and mystifying. If, after all, the subject of the discussion is supposed to be the invention of tradition, why are we not offered either a description or an analysis of such invention instead of a rather simple exercise in its demystification? My own position here is that while it is indeed the case that tradition is con­ stantly undergoing transformation as long as it participates in a dynamic social process, there is also a significant contiiluity necessarily embedded in the trans­ formation itself. And where absolute discontinuity exists, it can be overcome by the act of creating a social identity based not so much on history books as on the transformed cultural strands that link generations. As such, the word "authenticity" is totally inapplicable, quite simply because it implies, contrary to anthropological assumptions, that the aboriginal culture is somehow a fixed entity nearer to something essentially Hawaiian, which in turn implies that such a Hawaiian "essence" once existed. While we cannot ascertain exactly what Linnekin 's intentions are here, the use of such language has clear connotations. •

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1 25

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At issue are not the pronouncements of one anthropologist, but the structure of the entire ethnographic enterprise and the definition of the anthropologist's identity. Anthropological knowledge, defined as the privileged understanding of otherness by means of fieldwork, is the basis of our self-definition. The ideological or cosmological space within which anthropology developed is by very definition the space of our civilization; modernity as opposed to tradition and the primitive state, the developmental paradigm, whether in the form of evolutionism, primitivism or relativism. It is founded on the translation of space into time, the conversion of the peoples of the margins of civilizational expansion into stages that preceded our present state of development (Friedman 1 983). It is in this sense that ethnography has for years been a kind of imaginary time travel. Even in the guise of extreme cultural relativism, the fantasy of discovering another world entirely different and separate from our own is the hallmark of the anthropological imagination. Authenticity for the anthropologist consists essentially in his/her relation to "his/her" people. It is the authenticity cherished by the art collector and the antique dealer. If professional identity depends on such notions as aboriginal, pristine, original culture, or primitive enclave, connoting an isolation from the pollution of industrial c apitalist civiLization, and if anthropological discourse consists of the analysis or interpretation of cultures, then a Hawaiian movemen t whose membership drinks Coke, watches videos, and at the same time is engaged in the reconstruction of its own cultural identity is a potential threat. It is not oversimplifying to recall that the traditional reactions to such a "polluted" object are either to bury oneself in the archival past, to ferret out "authentic" cultural patterns from today's inauthentic natives, or to give up the traditional anthropological identity and go over to a more sociological anthropology of industrial, colonial, or postcolonial life forms. In all but the last solution, where the anthropologist maintains his identity as the master of othemess, ther�ciis a built-in assumption that whatever is out there now, there is some illus'iye past inhabited by the pure forms that we can only glimpse in the presen,t. If one is ready to criticize the search for the authentic in the patchwork of the present on the grounds that tradition is always a contemporary illusion of the past, then there is always the possibility of reconstructing a model ofthe pristine that once existed, the aboriginal purity that can be contrasted with mere "tradition." Thus, aboriginal culture is fixed in time in the same way it used to be (and still is) fixed in geographical space. My people "out there" become my people "back then": tradition is freed for political manipulation by would-be natives, while aboriginal culture remains safely in the monopolistic hands of the anthropologist. Much of the exoticism of the primitive enclave has evaporated in an un­ derstanding that such cultures were themselves the products of transformative ,

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Chapter 3

integration into the expanding European world system and even of previous global systems. In fact, the critique of tradition that inspired Linnekin is very much a reflex of an increasing historical understanding of our own civilization (Ekholm and Friedman 1 980; Wolf 1 982). But this new insight has incited many an anthropologist to rescue the object by traveling back in time to a securely ethnographic past. In this way, true culture becomes a thing of the past, the native a contemporary of Captain Cook. When anthropologists interpret the cultures themselves, they risk losing control over their ethnographic reality. It is only by attempting to understand how traditions are created and transformed that we can transcend an authority that is entirely dependent on a power situation in which we speak for the other. After the onslaught of the "natives," some anthropologists have seen fit to retreat somewhat. Linnekin has begun to flirt with a post-modernist posi­ tion, claiming that there is no true or "real past" or "tradition." She adopts, in principle, a "constructionist" view of all tradition: "all traditions are invented in the sense that they are symbolically constituted. Authenticity the gen­ uine/spurious distinction is therefore a red herring" (Linnekin 1 992:255). In this way, Linnekin is able to differentiate herself from those whom she calls ob­ jectivists (Keesing 1 989; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1 98 3 ; Babadzan 1 988). And yet, she notes that Keesing is ambivalent insofar as he assumes that there is no substantial difference between kastom and "genuine" culture. I have argued elsewhere ( 1 992b) that Keesing maintains a thoroughly consistent position that is based on a modernist engagement, and while one may disagree with the strategy of total demystification that this implies, it benefits from a consistency that is not evident among other, more insecure anthropologists. Linnekin man­ ages, for example, to state a case that might appear to be directly opposed ttJ the kind of "cultural critique" of Ha waiianess reported earlier when she claims the following:

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The objectivist criticism suggests that many anthropologists find it difficult to relinquish their authority to define culture and "genuine" tradition. Defending scholarly narrative authority in the postcolonial Pacific seems a contentious and , ultimately self-defeating enterprise, however, because foreign academics clearly , no longer monopolize the business of representing indigenous culture. (Linnekin 1 992:257-58)

Is this a welcome change or a structural adjustment to a changing balance of the power to represent? Some, of course, might question the assumption that Hawaii is "post" colonial. And the ethnographic authority that is criticized in the above quotation repeatedly surfaces as more concrete issues of the "truth" of Hawaiian values, objects , and representations return to center stage. There are "significant ambiguities and conflicts in public perceptions of pre-European

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Hawai ' i ' . . . statements about ancient Hawai' i are rife in local media . . . and these apparently untrustworthy representations are taught to schoolchildren (God help them) by none other than kupuna (elders) hired by the Department of Education." Furthermore, "there is little public recognition or discussion of the contradictions between these portrayals and their different implications" (Linnekin 1 992:258). The very language of this description of "the situation" contains the same kind of critique as in the earlier work. They, "the locals," the Hawaiians, are confused by their various representations and by the media. To continue into the mire, we are informed that "the nature of hierarchy in Hawaiian society is particularly an area of ambiguity." Some say tyranny, others community and generosity. The author maintains a "just right" position. "The vision I present in my own class on pre-European Hawai ' i is somewhere in­ between but leans toward the Edenic" (Linnekin 1 992:258). Hawaiians, in my experience, have been perfectly capable of debating the issue of chiefly power without the intervention of anthropology, not least because this is not a truly anthropological issue. Linnekin does point out that different views of chiefly power are entertained by different segments of the Hawaiian population, but she says nothing about the tradition of representation involved in these different views. The ambivalence is not a mere question of modem political debate, but is in evidence in most of the oral traditions and myths of chieftaincy that can be found in the historical materials. And Linnekin 's own position in all of this struggle for the "true" Hawaii is that of the self-identified "professor such as myself" who, aware of the true situation while possessing "ultimate narrative authority," understands, wisely, that it is "folly to claim definitive standing for a particular representation." And yet this folly that is so vociferously denied in the name of responsible scholarship seems to peacefully coexist with statements such as the following: ;

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If a student asks me to confirm that this (Hawaiian gourd helmet) was part of · the ancient Hawaiian warrior's garb, I cannot comply, just as I cannot honestly > concur with a vision of the ancient society as a counter cultural egalitarian Eden along the lines of a ca. 1968 commune. Similarly, I cannot attest (contrary to t-shirt representations) that helmeted Hawaiian warriors used sword-and-sorcery bows and arrows, had muscles like body builders taking steroids, or kept packs of pit-bull dogs (despite the caption on one shirt representing such activity as TRADITION). But I can and do use these t-shirt motifs to discuss symbols, meanings, messages, and the contemporary construction of culture. I relate this selection of symbols from the past and the present (a combination that sells) to history and politics: to the Hawaiian cultural and political renaissance, to the struggle for sovereignty, which has gained increasing credibility among members of all ethnic groups in Hawai'i, to assertions of personal and political strength by young Hawaiian men particularly. (Linnekin 1992:259)

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In the same textual breath we are told that there is no longer any such thing as authenticity, that all traditions are constructed, and yet that it is possible to compare modem Hawaiian constructions with those of the past in order to ascertain their "truth" value as truly traditional, that is, ancient or not. The staying power of this particular form of academic identity is extraordinary. It is perhaps even reinforced by the objective decline in ethnographic authority, a modernist overreaction.

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TH E CONTI N U ITY OF AN ACADEMIC TRA DITION

Let m e suggest that there is an underlying consistency and continuity in the approach adopted by Linnekin, in spite of the fact that she has several times claimed that no claims can be made for scholarly authenticity in the under­ standing of traditions. It has been continuously and vociferously stressed that all tradition is invented and constantly undergoing change. This is not new, of course, and was pointed out in the earliest articles (Linnekin 1 983; Han­ dler and Linnekin 1 984). The problem here is the logic of the categories. If all tradition is constantly changing, then why use the word tradition at all? If not everything changes, where is the continuity? Bodies of explicit knowledge are one thing, but implicit understandings, the organization of experience, and other, les s tangible phenomena have traditionally been the stuff of the analysis of tradition and culture. They are not merely handed down, nor invented, since they constitute the context of explicit knowledge. Thus, the distinctions be­ tween pristine and genuine collapse, but the notion of tradition also becomes irrelevant. This has rarely been a problem for anthropologists because the' have not been concerned with authenticating or disauthenticating the activity and representations of the people they study. Handler and Linnekin also claim to have said something similar in insisting that all tradition is symbolically constituted. "The origin of cultural practices is largely irrelevant to the experience oftradition; authenticity is always defined in the present. It is not pastness or givenness that defines something as traditional. Rather, the latter is an arbitrary symbolic designation; an assigned meaning rather than an objective quality" (Handler and Linnekin 1 984:286). They go to some lengths to criticize what they call the "naturalistic paradigm" of tradition, even where that paradigm assumes that tradition may embody continuous changes. This is because it assumes that there is something out there irrespective of the way it is symbolically constructed. They do sense that there is continuity in tradition, but they discuss it in terms of reference, that is, tradition builders or attributors refer to the past from the present in constructing their models, but even this continuity is constructed. This is so, I

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presume, because in a definition of tradition as a posited model, the very act of positing is by definition discontinuous with all previous acts of positing. But, I have argued, the continuity is not at the level of posited models, but of the experiential substrate that it draws upon. "Ongoing cultural representations refer to or take account of prior representations, and in this sense the present has continuity with the past. B ut this continuity of reference is constructed in the present" (Handler and Linnekin 1 984:286). Identity is not about the constructs themselves, but about the way in which they are embedded in social reality. It is embeddedness that accounts for the success of what might appear to be newly invented models. It is this that would appear to inform the descriptions offered of other people's identification. "In Quebec, patrimonial traditions, self-consciously constructed by both indige­ nous and foreign observers , have become an integral component of the sense of national identity that Quebecois entertain about themselves" (Handler and Linnekin 1 984:287, emphasis added). Is this a mere slip of the pen or is it meant that Quebecois entertain a sense of identity about themselves that exists in contrast to a more grounded real­ ity? The insinuation is clear, whatever the cause of the expression. Similarly, Hawaiian country-dwellers are said to have taken on "new traditional signifi­ cation to previously unmarked practices" (Handler and Linnekin 1 984:287). In all of this, one cannot deny that the language used to describe what others are doing consists of a contrast between something more and something less real, accurate, or authentic, in spite of all disclaimers . The continuity is evident in the repetitive practice of describing other traditions as inventions in opposition to a truer version of the past. The examples here ought to suffice to demonstrate this point. The discontinuity lies in the self-representation of an approach in which all versions are inauthentic. In a recent discussion of Hanson's ( 1 989) more blatant "deconstructionl' ;�f " Maori tradition, Linnekin, while praising the content of this very controversi�l; ," article, admits, as she has several times recently, that there are problems of communication with "natives": •

The tender point appears to be the analytic deconstruction of authenticity when applied to cultural representations asserted by indigenous peoples. This potential political vulnerability is, I suggest, an unintended consequence of the cultural invention argument, but one that anthropologists must confront nonetheless." (Linnekin 1991 b: 446)

Hanson, apparently more receptive to the implicit contradictions of the no­ tion of tradition, was perfectly open to admitting that invention "when applied to culture and tradition is a systematically misleading expression that should

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not be perpetuated" (Hanson 1 9 9 1 :45 1 ). But Linnekin, following through on the logic of the invention paradigm, uses the terms "tender point" and "polit­ ical vulnerability." If one believes that all tradition, in the sense of models of past lifeways, is a mere symbolic construction, then one can either struggle for a demystification of all tradition in the name of objective reality, or go entirely anti-modernist by insisting that since all symbolic constructions of re­ ality are equivalent, no comparisons or contrasts can be made. Keesing ( 1 989; 1 9 9 1 ), as I have mentioned earlier, adopted in a fairly consistent way the first position, whereas Linnekin would appear to assert the first in theory and the second in practice. Others , such as Jolly ( 1 992) and Thomas ( 1 992a), have also found themselves in ambivalent positions, but have not clearly identified the problem. Of course, study of the "inversion" of tradition, where and if such occurs, might transcend the invention problem by analyzing concretely moti­ vated practices in their social contexts, but then this would not be reducible to the problem of discontinuity, not any more than the structuralist analysis of mythology. But in his analysis of Fijian culture, Thomas also appears to have engaged in precisely such a d iscourse of discontinuity (Thomas 1 992b; Sahlins 1 993:5). The invention of tradition approach has all the continuity of a tradition, not as a corpus of knowledge, but as an anthropological habitus, a set of predispositions to describe the world i n terms of a constant system of categories.

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The problem here resides i n the notion of culture and tradition itself, or at le�t in the particular way that it has been utilized: as models of past lifeways, as representations , images, that is, as products, most often conscious products. In such terms, tradition is an externalized object that can, of course, be manipu­ lated by people just like ourselves with, perhaps, other goals, such as national autonomy, but goals nonetheless that are entirely within our realm of expe­ rience and understanding. But this way of representing culture or "selected" aspects of culture (or tradition) is the expression of a strategic formulation of reality, one in which there are people whose experiences are just like ours, organized as individual subjects, and whose culture consists in objects or ob­ jectifiedtexts, recipes , and rituals. In this sense, anything different that appears is necessarily an invention. The hula is reinvented, the oh ana, aloha 'aina, the Hawaiian language, all are either inventions or reinventions produced in the present for the purpose of gaining political power. The objects of culture are, as such, instruments in a purely instrumental strategy; means to a political end. This is surely consistent if applied to the whole of world history, but as I

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have tried to show, this i s not the case in Hawaii. And even i f it were applied consistently, it would miss some essential questions. Most important, it eliminates the possibility of what has been referred to as cultural continuity. And I maintain that with an artifact-based notion of what culture is all about, the question of continuity cannot even be properly addressed as a social phenomenon. This is because continuity, and therefore transformation of cultural form, is not comprehensible in terms of the forms themselves, but must be rooted in the motivations and strategies, the intention­ alities of social subjects in time and space. No comparison of the traditional religion of the Congo kingdom with present-day Christian healing cults can be undertaken at the level of the particular symbols, names of spirits, and or­ ganization of rituals involved. The similarity is located in the commonality of experience, in the constitution of selfhood in relation to cosmic forces, and in the strategies generated by this constitution. In such terms, one can grasp the assimilation of Christian paraphernalia, texts, interpretations, and symbols into the Congolese world. Without this, Congolese Christianity is a creolized import, an invention, discontinuous with the past except for a number of ele­ ments imported or maintained (depending on the interpretation) from the old religion. Hawaiian activists might agree completely with the invention view of tradi­ tion if it were seen as transformation. In a critique of Linnekin, H. Trask attacks precisely the contradiction in Linnekin between, on the one hand, a definition of tradition as fluid, and, on the other hand, as, "pre-contact era" (Linnekin 1 983:242) which "insists on hard-edged bifurcations of reality : pre-Western culture vs. post-Western culture" (Trask 1 993 : 1 67). But what constitutes "tradition" to a people is ever-changing. Culture is not static, nor is it frozen in objectified moments in time. Without doubt, Hawaiians were transformed drastically and irreparably after contact, but remnants of earlie{i,'y{ lifeways, including values and symbols, have persisted. . . . Thus, Hawaiians assert. ... a "traditional" relationship to the land, not for political ends, as Linnekin argues, . . but because they continue to believe in the cultural value of caring for the land. That land use is now contested makes such a belief political. This distinction . is crucial because the Hawaiian cultural motivation reveals the persistence of traditional values, the very thing Linnekin claims Hawaiians have "invented." (Trask 1 993 : 1 68)

The argument is not overdrawn. While Linnekin attempts to eliminate the question of authenticity, her discussion is very much embedded in just such a frame of reference. Otherwise, the origin of Hawaiian cultural items would not be an issue. Hawaiians have seen their political and social structures trashed over a relatively short period of time, and their modes of representation debased

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and forbidden. Today, in new, yet I would argue systemically predictable cir­ cumstances, they have begun to reassert themselves with astounding success. This assertion is a social action andnot a rearrangement ofthe bits and pieces of a museum collection. Anthropologists, as actors on the global stage struggling for their monopoly over other people's self-definition, are pitting the museum against historical process . •

ACAD EMIC VERSUS EXISTENTIAL AUTH ENTICITY

Our much-referred-to notion of authenticity means different things to the an­ thropologist and to the individual engaged in the forging of a cultural identity. For the former, it is a question of originality or even of aboriginality. For the latter, it is a question of identity itself, a relation between the individual sub­ ject and the culture. Authenticity in this case refers to the state of integrity of the members of an identifying group. Inauthenticity would thus consist in the relative alienation from the cultural model, a lack of engagement, a social distance with respect to the values and categories embodied in a tradition or program of action. In our multi-ethnic capitalist civilization, the question of authenticity is epitomized in Sartre 's discussion of Jewish identity, in which both assimilationism and liberal humanism are rebuked after the catastrophe of the Second World War. "The authentic Jew abandons the myth of the universal man; he knows himself and wills himself into history as a historic and damned creature; he ceases to run away from himself and to be ashamed of his own kind. He understands that society is bad" (Sartre 1 948 :42). This notion of authenticity is not a new issue in anthropology. Many yeaFs ago, Sapir ( 1 924) distinguished between what he then referred to as spurious and genuine culture. He used the expression, "inherently harmonious, bal­ anced, self-satisfactory" ( 1 924:410), which is certainly vague enough, but a number of other qualifications enable us to ultimately arrive at a clearer un­ derstanding of Sapir's essential goals. While we are told that genuineness is achievable in any society, whether primitive or civilized, it is emphasized that there is, in fact, an inverse relation between civilization and the possibility of establishing a genuine culture. A genuine culture is one whose categories form a coherent cosmological structure for the subject, so that individual acts and objects retain meaning within a larger scheme of things. Genuineness also assumes a specifiable relation between the individual and culture in such a way that the subject is not external but internal to the former. Sapir employs the example of the artist to illustrate the authenticity of the genuine cultural act, one in which the realization of a culturally informed project and the content of the project are one, so that the subject is not . separated from either his cultural

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Will the Real Hawaiian Please Stand?

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scheme or its implementation, as is the case in spurious culture, where the re­ lation between the individual subject and the objects of culture are reified and externalized with respect to the life of the s ubject. Genuine culture is internal because the subject experiences it as himself. This is related to S apir's insis­ tence on "the sense of mastery instinctively sought by each individual soul" , ( 1 924:425), which in the case of spurious culture appears as the los s of control over reality that in other representations appears as alienation. This sense of mastery, needless to say, is quite different from that of the culture expert. With respect to the question of tradition, Sapir has this to say: No greater test of the genuineness of both individual and communal culture can be applied than the attitude adopted toward the past, its institutions, its treasures of art and thought. The genuinely cultured individual or society does not con­ temptuously reject the past. They honor the works of the past, but not because they are gems of historical chance, not because, being out of our reach, they must need be looked at through the enshrining glass of museum cases. These works of the past still excite our heartfelt interest and sympathy because, and only in so far as, they may be recognized as the expression of a human spirit warmly akin, despite all differences of outward garb, to our own. This is very nearly equivalent to saying that the past is ofcultural interest only when it is still the present or may

yet become thefuture. Paradoxical as it may seem, the historical spirit has always been something of an anticulturalforce, has always acted in some measure as an unwitting deterrent of the cultural utilization of the past (Sapir 1924:422).

Sapir goes further, however, in arguing that the conditions of emergence of genuine culture are much enhanced in small-scale or primitive societies. "An oft-noted peculiarity of the development of culture is the fact that it reaches its greatest heights in comparatively small, autonomous groups. In fact, it . . is doubtful if a genuine culture ever properly belongs to more than such,'ia ·· restricted group, a group between the members of which there can be sai cf �: o . . be something like direct intensive spiritual contact" (Sapir 1924:426). There is no need to romanticize the small-group aspect of the diSCUSSIon of genuine culture. Sapir made a point that can be understood in quite neutral terms, that cultural production in interpersonal relations has less of a tendency to become objectified. The small-group aspect, easily dismissed as bearing "romantic overtones" (Handler and Linnekin 1 984:287), might better be un­ derstood in terms of Sartre 's notion of existential authenticity or perhaps more importantly in terms of Alberoni's work on the "nascent state" phase of social movements in which individual and group projects become identical (Alberoni 1 984). Sapir's comments on "genuine" tradition should shed some light on our discussion of Linnekin 's treatment of the Hawaiian movement. As Linnekin clearly sides with the "historical spirit" against culture, she must judge the . ...

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content of Hawaiian identity in terms of its supposed historical accuracy and not in terms of those positive (in the sense of active) features that are respon­ sible for its creation and force of attraction. Existential authenticity is the core of cultural continuity. Hopelessly roman­ tic for some, but I would stress that this has nothing whatsoever to do with gemeinschaft. Rather, it refers to that area of social life wherein we find the shared experiences that enable models of reality to achieve an effective degree of resonance among their practitioners. The Hawaiian movement draws upon such sources in the reconstruction of its tradition s. It does so in the present, of course. The latter point is obvious enough. The past does not impose itself upon the present (Friedman 1 992) but is rather invoked and is, as such, cre­ atively refigured in the present. If there are discontinuities, as measured from the outside, as with the introduction of Christian icons and beliefs, of modern interpretations of ancient myths, these must be understood in the terms of their integration and not in terms of simple contrast to "our" vision of "their" past. Otherwise, spaghetti is a hopelessly creolized and confused invention-import from China to Italy. Even in Boasian terms, the origin of inventions and imports is trivial in comparison with the way in which they are integrated into cultural schemes. It might well be that the construction of tradition is an anthropolog­ ical construction of other people s' activities that might better be construed in different terms. Perhaps it is our fantasy, for all our ridiculing of the "good old days," and not theirs.

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G LOBAL PROCESS: THE PRACTICE OF I D ENTITY A N D C U LT U RAL CONT I N U ITY

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1 35

in modem cultural creativity, one that accompanies much of the invention school 's pronouncements. It is true that culture is being evoked in acts of political liberation, as it always has been. But this fact, superficial as it is, has been used to categorize willy-nilly the errors ofthe natives who ought to know better than to dabble in an area dominated by experts. Marshall Sahlins has made the point in no uncertain terms: Western intellectuals have been too often disposed to write off the meanings as trivial, on grounds that the claims to cultural continuity are spurious. In the going academic view the so-called revival is a typical "invention of tradition"-though no slight is intended to Maorior Hawaiian folks, since all traditions are "invented" in and for the purposes ofthe present. (Sahlins 1 993 :4)

Sahlins goes on to argue forcefully for an understanding of the continuity of culture in the modem world. In the terms set out here, the problem resides in a confusion between the world system and culture. The world system is not a system of culture. Globalization is, of course, one of the processes that occurs in such systems, but localization, Balkanization, and world war are all equally aspects of global process, not by cultural diffusion but by global interaction. Cultural revivals in Hawaii and elsewhere are possible because of a resonance between local existences and the cultural forms proposed by such movements. While certain kinds of cultural continuities are comprehensible in purely struc­ tural terms, as when politically powerful kings are historically transformed into Frazerian, castrated divine kings in African history, other continuities cannot be understood in terms of the logic of the structures themselves and their transformational potential. Instead, it is necessary to grasp such continuities in terms of a certain stability of socially organized experience, the constitution of specific subjects or selves that tend to react to the world in similar terms, pr . . with the same terms of reference. I cannot but agree here with Sahlins when he emphasizes that people l1l:iY devise "their own categories, logics, understandings" which "may be tot;:LUy improvised, something never seen or imagined before, not just a knee-jerk repetition of ancient custom" (Sahlins 1 993 : 1 8), so that "cultural continu­ ity . . . appears . . . as the mode of cultural change," the innovations following "logically . . . from the people's own principles of existence" (Sahlins 1 993 : 1 9). And i f cultural change is not to be equated with "changing clothes," we must consider that while cultural invention is motivated, the motivations themselves are not invented (Strauss and Quinn 1 992:295). Hawaiian cultural identity is a product of active construction today. And it may even be based on elements from disparate sources, for example, kava ceremonies from western Polynesia. But the import of elements is nothing new , ., /.

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in the history of the world. 3 Boas and his students, as I suggested earlier, were less concerned with what they saw as the universal fact that cultural forms were largely imported than with the more fundamentalfact oftheirconfiguration and integration. The latter was the essence of cultural specificity, not the former. The engagement of Hawaiians in the forging of a viable future, a meaningful world, is precisely the kind of practice that Sapir would have designated "genuine." The disauthentification of such praxis by certain anthropologists is an attempt to maintain a modernist identity in a world going ethnic and cultural. This is a choice made within an increasingly polarized modem identity space. It is not an act executed in a rarefied space of authoritative truth and objectivity.

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1. There is, in all of this, a strong tendency to a shift in accumulation to eastern Asia, especially to China and Southeast Asia. Multicentricity might be a phase in such a shift, but given the general speed-up of rates of accumulation and the ease with which capital can move from place to place, it is likely that hegemonies in the world system are to be increasingly short lived, i f they manage to form at all. 2. I have referred to this in terms of Fourth World and Third World strategies, respectively. The latter seeks its identity i n the center, the former in its own past or cultural specificity (Friedman 1988, 1992). 3. Here too, the invention school would say, "but we have always claimed that imports, as all discontinuities, are a general phenomenon." But then there ought to be no need to contrast the authentic and the invented. As I have said, there is a glaring contradiction here between theoretical claims and practice.

REFERENCES

Alberoni, F. 1984. Movement and institution. New York: Columbia University Press. Babadzan, A. 1988. Kastom and nation building in the South Pacific. In R. Guideri, F. Pelizzi, and S. Tambia, eds., Ethnicities and nations: Processes of interethnic relations in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Pac((ic, 199-228. Houston: Rothko Chapel. Beckwith, M. 1 970. Hawaiian mythology. Honolulu: University of Hawaiian Press. Clifford, J. 1988. Identity in Mashpee. In J. Clifford, The predicament of culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Daws, G. 1 968. Shoal of time. New York: Macmillan. Ekholm, K., and 1. Friedman. 1985. Toward a global anthropology. Critique ofAnthro­ pology 5. 1 : 97-1 19.

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Finney, Ben. 1 99 1 . Myth, experiment, and the reinvention of Polynesian voyaging. American Anthropologist 93.2: 383-404. Friedman, J. 1 9 8 3 . Civilizational cycles and history of primitivism. Social Analysis 14: 3 1 -52. . 1988. Cultural logics of the global system: A sketch. Theory of Culture and Society 5 . 2-3 : 447-59. . 1992a. Myth, history, and political identity. Cultural Anthropology 7.2: 1 94210. . 1 992b. The past in the future: History and the politics of identity. American Anthropologist 94.4: 837-59. Geertz, C. 1966. Religion as a cultural system. In M. Banton, ed., Anthropological approaches to the study of religion 1-46. London: Tavistock. Handler, R., and J. Linnekin. 1 984. Tradition, genuine or spurious. Journal ofAmerican Folklore 97: 273-90. Hanson, F. 1 989. The making of the Maori: Culture invention and its logic. American Anthropologist 9 1 : 890-902. . 199 1 . Reply to Langdon, Levine and Linnekin. American Anthropologist 93: 449-50. Hayes, Homer. 1 977. Testimony in Oia' i' 0 0 Kaho ' olawe ("The Truth of Kaho' olawe"). Manuscript. Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger, eds. 1 98 3 . The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press. Jolly, M. 1992. Spectres of inauthenticity. The Contemporary Pacific 4: 49-72. Keesing, R. 1989. Creating the past: Custom and identity in the contemporary Pacific. The Contemporary Pacific 1 : 19-42. . 199 1 . Reply to Trask. The Contemporary Pacific 2: 168-69. Linnekin, J. 1983. Defining tradition: Variations on the Hawaiian identity. American Ethnologist 10: 241-52. --- . 199 1a. Text bites and the R-word: The politics of representing scholarship. Contemporary Pacific 2: 172-77. 1 99 1 b. Cultural invention and the dilemma of authenticity. American Ant1tf,fJ� pologist 93: 446-48. --- . 1992. On the theory and politics of cultural construction in the Pacific. Oceania 62.4: 249-63 . [Special issue on "The Politics of Tradition in the Pacific," edited by M. Jolly and N. Thomas.] McGregor, D. 1989 . Kupa'a I Ka 'Aina: Persistence on the land. Doctoral thesis, University of Hawaii, Honolulu. Petition, 1 845. A petition to your gracious majesty, Kamehameha Ill, and to an your chiefs in council assembled, signed by Kenui, Tiona, Nawaakoa et al. The Friend, August 1 845 , 3 . 1 5 : 1 1 9 . Ralston, C. 1985. Early nineteenth century Polynesian millennial cults and the case of Hawai'i. Journal of the Polynesian Society 94: 307-3 1 . Sahlins, M . 198 1 . Historical metaphors and mythical realities: Structure in the early history of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Association of Social Anthropologists ---

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of Oceania, Special Publications No. 1 . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. . 1992. Anahulu; The Anthropology of history in the Kingdom of Hawaii, voL I Historical Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . 1993. Goodbye to Tristes Tropes : Ethnography in the context of modern world history. Journal of Modern History 65. 1 : 1-25. Sapir, E. 1924. Culture, genuine and spurious. American Journal of Sociology 29:

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401-429. Sartre, J. P. 1948. Anti-Semite and Jew. New York: Schocken. Shils, Edward, 1 97 1 . Tradition. Comparative Studies in Society and History 1 3.2: 1 22-59. Strauss, C . , and N. Quinn. 1 992. A cognitive/cultural anthropology. In R . Borofsky, ed., Assessing cultural anthropology, 284-96. New York: McGraw-HilL Thomas, N. 1992a. The inversion of tradition. American Ethnologist 19: 2 1 3-32. . 1992b. Substantivization and anthropological discourse. In J ames Carrier, ed. , History and tradition in Melanesian anthropology, 64-85 . Berkeley: University of California Press. Trask, H. 199 1 . Natives and anthropologists: The colonial struggle. The Contemporary Pac(fic 2: 159-67. . 1993 . From a native daughter: Colonialism and sovereignty in Hawaii. Mon­ roe, Maine: Common Courage Press. Trevor-Roper, H. 1983. The invention of tradition: The Highland tradition of Scotland. In E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds., The invention of tradition, 15-4 1 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valeri, V. 1 982. The transformation of a transformation: A structural essay on an aspect of Hawaiian history ( 1802- 1 8 19). Social Analysis 10: 3-4 1 . Wagner, Roy. 1 97 5 . The invention of culture. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-HalL Wolf, E. 1957. Closed corporate peasant communities in Meso-America and Cenlltal Java. Southwestern Journal ofAnthropology 1 3 : 1 - 1 8 . --- . 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of Cali­ fornia Press. Yamamura, D. 1 94 1 . A study of the factors in the education of the child of Hawaiian ancestry in Hana, Maui. Master's thesis, University of Hawaii, Honolulu.

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l' (I

G lobal Com plexity and the Simplicity of Everyday Life

Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman

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In the literature on modem society, on world systems, and on contemporary

culture, the term complexity often appears. We confess that we think this term lacking in significant content, especially for the understanding of the contemporary world, as it is founded on a superficial and quite ideological dichotomization between the assumed face-to-face simplicity of traditional society versus the extensive division of labor, the market, and social differen­ tiation of modem societies. We have no intention of entering into a discussion of a word that is best left to common usage. Instead we shall relate it to the context that we find relevant for this analysis. In cultural terms, global systems are obviously complex. In such systems the local is produced in an articulation with broader processes. The local is encompassed and constituted within the global, which is not to say that it is a mere product of external forces. On rqe contrary, we have insisted on the articulation between the local and glob;;l�;iftS central to the generation of specific social realities. The question of complexity, on the other hand, is more closely related to perspective itself. A position based on social distance, the bird's-eye view of the cosmopolitan, especially the cosmopolitan self-identified as culture expert. This complexity is part of the experience of the traveler encountering a myriad of cultural differences jumbled together with ketchup, McDonald's, and MTV. The natives in this very naive view are not what they used to be, and there is a tendency to think of them as B audrillardian simulacra, hybrids, modems toying with the ideas of their identities. But this is indeed the self-identity of the cosmopolitan culture critic, and not of those whom he observes. We argue that while all social systems are complex, everyday life tends to reduce this complexity to schemes of meaning and action that are significantly simplified. ,

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The complexity is not a cultural complexity except for the external observer. The global perspective embraced here is simply an awareness of that larger set of reproductive processes within which local social fields are encompassed and maintained. Global systems are, in their very nature, historical, in the minimal sense that they are processes of social reproduction, that is, temporally defined. The analysis of such systems consists of the study of the degree to which and the way in which local structures are constituted in and by global relations. Global processes encompass much more than what is referred to as cul­ tural process. They are directly involved in the production of the social frames within which culture is constituted. Thus, the appearance of the nation-state, individualist ideology and experience, the novel, evolutionary thought are all linked to the processes that transformed Western Europe into a hegemonic cen­ ter in an emergent world system. Such processes do not preclude the existence of local strategies but merely define the framework, the context, in which they develop. Until quite recently, African cloth was made primarily in Holland and Germany. The production was targeted to specific regions and "tribes," that is, based on specific patterns, and the cloth was not for sale in Europe. The production of local difference on a global scale is proof of a global relation in production and consumption. Now, for the cosmopolitan culture expert, this may become a matter of some amusement the innocent tourist who buys genuine African cloth in the local market and returns home to find "made in Holland" printed into the edge and one might go on to surmise that the local African culture had become hybrid or Europeanized, on this basis. This is not, of course, the globalization of culture, but global control over local consump­ tion via product differentiation. However, the appropriation of the cloth at\d its uses is not deducible from this fact. In other words the global circulation of products is not equivalent to the globalization of meaning, except, perhaps, for the global observer who ascribes meaning in global terms. In several previous publications we have discussed a phenomenon called la sape, whereby young men from the Congo and Zaire, usually from more im­ poverished urban areas, systematically 'accumulate designer clothing, moving up the ranks of finery until moving to Paris, I ' aventure, in order to engage in becoming un grand. The emergence of a kind of cult group surrounding this process is well documented, with clearly defined age classes and competitive cat-walking, organized by returning to Brazzaville, center in the periphery, sewing the accumulated labels into a single jacket and performing la danse des griffes at the local sape club. Now in one sense this process is about glob­ alization, the globalization of people, or garments, a veritable traffic in people and goods, sometimes including drugs and often resulting in the re-import of low-end jeans and t-shirts to be sold in the African markets. What is not occurring, however, is a mixture of culture, not unless the notion is confined

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Global Complexity and the Simplicity of Everyday Life

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to the museological definition of ethnographic objects. A lumpenproletarian Congolese who flaunts his Versace suit and Westin crocodile shoes is not, in our view, a Westernized African, nor is he something "betwixt and between." This is because he is engaged in a specific practice of accumulation of "life-force" that assimilates the Western goods to an expression of a process that is entirely African. The Western is encompassed by the practice of la sape. The clothes are contained within a different project, and the properties of the clothes do not alter those of the project. The content does not shape the container. On the other hand, his entire project, as a social practice, is in its turn encompassed by the larger global processes upon which it is, in its global specificity, entirely dependent. Thus, instead of falling back on a model of complex cultural flows or other similar metaphors, we think it better to conceive of such global cultural pro­ cesses in terms of positioned practices such as assimilation, encompassment, and integration in the context of social interaction. This is a relation between container and contained in the sense of the variable forms of incorporation of the products of a global field of interaction into the practice of local strate­ gies, and the relation of these processes to the practice of identification, that is, of meaning attribution. The global processes of commercial world systems contain three very broad levels of integration:

1 . The assimilation of the global to local systems of practice (social repro­ duction) 2. The integration of the local into the reproductive cycles of the global 3. The interaction of identification processes (a) global identifications of the local as part of the self-identity of the center (b) local self-identity " (i) via the mirror of power, that is, the assimilation of the gaze �f " , ' the other, the localization of global categories (ii) via the elaboration of local and historicized representations (c) the practice of authority, that is, the institutionalization of identity ,

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In the Congolese case the strategy of appropriation of the world is strongly other-directed and consists in the identification of the foreign as life-force to be appropriated, as the definition of well-being, power, wealth, and health. This is a practice of dependency that defines social selfhood as part of a larger whole whose source of power is external to the local society. The Hawaiians discussed below practice precisely the opposite form of selfhood, one that builds a blockade to the outside world and that transforms all those people and things that enter into the local. In both cases, we have an assimilation of the global to local systems of practice, but the forms of identification are

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exo-social and en do-social, respectively. In either case, · what may appear as complex from the outside is integrated into a life strategy that is considerably simpler. In the following discussion, we attempt to concretize the way in which the Hawaiian village of Miloli'i is at once engaged, or perhaps entangled, in the larger world system in terms of material transactions that are, of course, social, while at the same time it is driven by a strategy of self-preservation, self-isolation, what we refer to as endo-sociality. As this is a rather descriptive discussion we might detail the course of the argument in advance. The first section describes the historical processes in­ volved in the formation of the modern village. It concerns the way in which the village has become increasingly isolated as an economic unit from a former regional economy and reintegrated into the larger economy of the islands, and the simultaneously increasing force of attraction of the village as a refuge for Hawaiians. This is followed by three aspects of contemporary village life: first, a concentric presentation of social relations from the village itself to the rela­ tion to tourism; second, the representation of the village in the media and the Hawaiian movement, detailing the symbolic signifi cance of the village, and the way the former affects village self-identity; finally, the physical context of the village as a central place on the sparsely populated coastal plain. This is fol­ lowed by a discussion of the relation between the complexity of the place when seen from the outside and the simplicity of everyday life seen from the inside. The case studies exemplify the argument that the relations between the village and external forces are changing due to changing global relations and their expressions in a declining modernism and an expansive cultural identity among Hawaiians. Miloli 'i has gained from this change, but it may be changirt'g from this gain.

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Miloli'i is a small village of fewer than 200 inhabitants in the South Kona district of the island of Hawaii (figures 4. 1 and 4.2). It is one of perhaps two well-known villages in the state, known for its continuity with the Hawaiian past, a continuity of settlement that is rare in the islands, where the Hawaiian population was more or less ousted from its lands from the middle of the nineteenth century until the struggles of the 1 970s. The Kona coast of Hawaii is well known for its beauty and perfect weather. Even the Hawaiian nobility gathered there for sport and leisure in the late pre­ European period. Miloli ' i is located today in an area that is far to the south of the more lucrative tourist areas. Traveling down the coast from Kailua,

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The one-party system was dissolved in 1 990, leading to a transitional govern­ ment in 1 9 9 1 and then to elections in 1 992, which brought the south, more populous, back to power. Sassou, from the sparsely populated north, lost the presidential election by a very large percentage. The elected president, Pascal Lissouba, was from Niari province in the south, and his victory was guar� :- . teed by an alliance between the three southern provinces of Niari, Boueti��, and Lekoumou (Nibolek). Lissouba was, however, not the strong man hiJIlS�1'"t\ He was brought in by the Bembe, especially the group that was later caUed "la bande des quatre" (the gang of four), because he was useful. He was a "professor," a "scientist," and a man of the glorious 1 960s . The new multiparty system changed the political landscape. While the for­ mer one-party system was inclusive in the sense that regional power holders were included in a unified hierarchy encompassing the entire country, "democ­ racy" spawned fragmentation and conflict among its political leaders. The po­ litical realm was, instead, populated by an increasing number of ambitious men, each with his own political party. In 1 99 1 there were nearly a hundred parties or political associations After the first elections of 1 992, their number was, for strategic reasons, considerably reduced. But, still, a typical political party is composed of a man and his entourage. It is identified with its leader and

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presented as such for example Clemant Mierassa's PSDC, William Otta's PAPE, Andre Milongo's URD-Mwinda, General Mokoko's MRC, General Ngollo's RDR, and so on. Political leaders tried, in the same way as before, to form alliances. But when the old strategy was adapted to new circumstances, it did not end in national unity but, instead, in deadly conflict. During the five years of "democracy" there were two political blocs, La mouvance presidentielle (the presidential movement) and the Opposition. The Opposition was composed of the two allied sub-blocs, URD and FDU. URD was, in its turn, a coalition of a number of political parties, MCDDI, RDPS, UP, UPDP, PSDC, UNAPAC, and PAPE. In the same manner FDU was a coalition of PCT and a number of related parties. The M ouvance presidentielle was constructed in the same way. A characteristic feature of the new political situation was that new parties were easily created, coalitions and alliances easily rerouted, and the num­ ber of politicians considerably increased. Thus, the political sphere was not only highly fragmented and unstable due to intensified competition but also substantially inflated in numbers. Another novelty was that very little political organizing took place below, or outside, the political class itself. Even if the po­ litical leaders during the one-party era lived their separate lives in comfortable exclusiveness, a single party (PCT) still penetrated both country and popula­ tion through its party cells and "mass organizations." With the introduction of "democracy," politics became, paradoxically, much more of an exclusive business for politicians. Ethnic voting is a reflex of clientelism. The only way up the hierarchy is through ethnic channels. Even if the poor in the Niari province did not exactly expect Lissouba to reward them immediately for their votes, there were no alternatives. They could not vote for another group's politician because that would be completely illogical. The increasing number of parties and politicians may explain why there was, paradoxically, even less money, if possible, available for the Congolese people after the introduction of "democracy." The nibolek government was, in fact, criticize. for un blushing nepotism, The Lari, who lost the elections of 1 992 and felt excluded and deprived of resources , complained about the Nibolek being even more corrupt and greedy than the PCT. They have "eaten " in all

the previous governments, but they have never before been the dominant group in a government. Now it is their turn to "eat," and they do it in grandiose manna People in general, not only politicians, felt excluded in a way that

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they were not used to. The money remained in the political realm while the everyday life of ordinary citizens became increasingly precarious. Why did the Nibolek govemment content itself with the same old distribution of wealth within its own circles while investing almost nothing on improve­ ments for the Congolese people? When I posed this question at the beginning

State Classes, the Logic of Rentier Powel; and Social Disintegration

203

of 1 997, a middle-aged Lari working for a Swedish-Norwegian aid project answered, It is not easy. Those who have voted for the government bloc must be rewarded. And politicians need a lot of money. It is expensive to live well, to send one's children to schools an d universities in the West, to have the best kind of health care, to travel. They need all the money for themselves. That is why there are ministries for youth, sport, education and family, with politicians, offices, salaries and other benefits-but no activities within these sectors aimed at benefiting Congo's population.

Lissouba used to defend himself in international media by refening to the Congo's enormous external debt, which was generated by the former pres­ ident, and also by claiming that Sassou had used up the oil money in ad­ vances of credit. This sounded quite reasonable in 1 993, not least because people strove to adopt a positive attitude, but less and less so by 1 996-1 997. A growing popular discontent made the earlier S assou period look increasingly appealing.

I NC R EASED POLITICAL COMPETITION, MI LITIA REC R U ITMENT, A N D THE RES U LTI NG. C I V I L WARS

The introduction of democracy dramatically altered the situation of poor young men. The intensified struggle for power among politicians suddenly created a demand for young men as militia men. They were needed in a way that was not previously the case. A new form of ethnicity emerged, groups of power holders and their young soldiers. The main opponents in 1 992, Lissouba (Nibol�Ip), Kolelas (Lari), and S assou (Mbochi), recruited their own miIitias--Lissotifiia; theAubevillois, after the village Aubeville where they were trained (apparentl¥ , by Israelis); Kolelas, the Ninjas; and Sassou, the Cobras. In addition, a number of private bodyguards appeared. Every man of any political importance found it necessary to have his own bodyguard. All the various militias were, of course, recruited from the power holder's own ethnic group. None of these militias were later disarmed. Instead new groups have con­ stantly accrued. The Zoulous (Bembe) appeared on the scene in 1 993-1 994 fighting their own war against Lari and the Ninjas. Lissouba later recruited the Cocoyes before the second war and the Mambas (from Niari) during the war. The "sharks" appeared in Pointe-Noire and a certain minister, Binkinkita, created his Condors. In the war of 1 993-1 994 ethnic cleansing took place in various parts of the country. The southern parts of Brazzaville, Bacongo and Makelekele, were

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ethnically cleansed of their Nibolek inhabitants. Lari were attacked and driv en from the Nibolek provinces as well as from certain parts of the north. Nibolek took over the centre-ville of Brazzaville and seized control of the area north of the railway, Mutabala, which was cleansed of its Lari inhabitants. The three militia groups confronted each other as well as civilians, and civilians joined forces with militias in attacks on enemies. As the army was itself divided along ethnic lines, it was incapable of preventing this spiral of violence. The minister of foreign affairs declared in an interview at the end of 1 992 (Jeune Afrique 1 992) that there was no tribalism in the Congo, "il n 'y a pas de tribalisme au Congo." A year later, ethnic war broke out. We are, as noted by Horowitz in his work on ethnic conflict, often surprised by the emergence of ethnic conflict due to its episodic character. It appears suddenly, as from nowhere, "it comes and goes, suddenly shattering periods of apparent tran­ quility," a fact that also accounts for our defective understanding of the phe­ nomenon ( 1 995 : 1 3) . Under normal circumstances the Congolese desire to live peacefully with one another, as we all do. Why, then, in the 1 990s have they occasionally been so intent on killing each other for ethnic reasons? There are several explanations, as I see it. Clientelism in itself leads to a situation in which people easily feel excluded for ethnic reasons because they really are excluded for ethnic reasons. They react ethnically because they are ethnically affected. The first war had to do with the struggle for power and wealth, and ultimately for survival, a struggle between the Nibolek and the Lari. When the Nibolek won the elections, they gained access to the state and its wealth, and, in true democratic fashion, they kept it for themselves. . Another aspect of the phenomenon is that fantasies and rumors play an important role in the production of ethnic hatred. Rumors may be false '" , ," -

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subject" surrounded by a world of potential being. The "romantic ethic" in all its forms is the existential translation of this state of affairs, better expressed by the notion of modernism. Modern consumerism is a direct and practical expression of this same notion. If there can be said to be a formal structure of the modern condition, one produced by the capitalization in and of society, it is one that dynamically links the constitution of the indi vidual with the gamut of cultural constructions that go under the name modernity: consumerism, romanticism, modernism, nationalism. All of these phenomena have as their prerequisite the formation of a certain kind of individualized experience: the mind in the body, nature encapsulated within culture as id is to ego, any fixed "cosmological" structures dissolved, providing the appearance of the lack of culture, insofar as the latter is an external "object, that has always to be created and superceded. Everything beyond the bounds of the individual subject is reduced to a formally empty space within which the various constructions of culture are to be inscribed and reinscribed. Thus consumption produces a life space, just as nationalism or other forms of cultural identification produce an engagement of the individual subject in a greater unity. Modernism as a practice of supersession just as traditionalism as a practice of return, are both, just the same, practices that need to "create" or "fashion" that for which they long. One may rightly oppose consumption and its spirit to the more violent social movements of modernity since it represents no more than the sphere of legitimate personal variation within the realm of social convention. These movements, after all bohemian, nationalist, subnationalist, ethnic, socialist, and so forth express revolt, at­ tempts to go beyond or back in time with respect to the conventional present. All, however, function to "clothe" the person with a specific social identity that is always and everywhere opposed to nature, the "real self" libido, and so forth. ' The "romantic ethic and the spirit of consumerism" would thus appear to be • . inscribed in the history of the "faU of public man," and the latter expresses tlile" , ' more general principle of our civilization that "everything solid melts into ait:" ., "

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A hybrid category .never took "root," and the sociologists might be accused

of conflating cultural heritage at best, and race or blood at worst, with ethnic identity. The sociologists gave up sometime in the 1960s, but the official state ideology of the multi-ethnic paradise continued and continues today in spite of increasing consciousness of the clear ethnic oppositions that characterize Hawaiian society. The interpretation of this wishful thinking cum ideological policy is, I would argue, rooted in the same question of social position. The sociologists were outsiders, striking/oots in a place that had, since the turn of the century, denied that Hawaiians had any particular right to the land. There developed a saying that anyone who lived in Hawaii and had aloha was a true Hawaiian. There are several variants of this discourse, but its core is constant. They stretch from the remarks of colonialist Judd to the attitude expressed by anthropologist Kelly ( 1995) to the effect that the Japanese immigrants were at least the equals of the Hawaiians with respect to land claims, an easy proclamation for those who have a privileged position above the immigrant mixture. In a recent television talk show in which the popular issue of children of mixed marriages was taken up, a number of people discussed their mixed heritages, which were, in all cases, clearly demarcated. One youth claimed to the dismay of some of the others to be black: "Oh yes my mother is white and I do love her, but I am black." But why, he was asked. Because, he said: "If I am mixed, then I have no history and no identity, no roots. I am nobody !" Barth (1 995) stresses the necessity of distinguishing between culture and ethnicity, a distinction that he has made famous. Culture can move anywhere and be transmitted to anyone, but ethnicity is about social boundaries, not about the content of what is on either side of them, not about what can be transferred from one person, or region to another, but to the way it is in relation to a group. Hybridity is in large part a result of this simple of categories.

CON CLUS I O N

There is a common evolutionism in the discourses of globalization. It has been assumed that we are now in the global stage of political-economic develop­ ment. The world has become one place, and there is a world society. We have evolved from tribal to national to regional and now to a global ecumene. Glob­ alization is not something that happens in particular conjunctures, but it is a stage of world integration. There is some truth to the notion that the world is more globally connected than ever, but the fact of g lobality is not new.

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More importantly, the world is not now in the hands of multinational capital any more than it was a hundred years ago. What appears as a new stage, is, in my argument, the product of declining hegemony, the increasing export of capital and the decentralization of capital accumulation on a world scale. This decentralization is not an even process but has, I argue, demonstrated a clear gradient of movement of accumulation toward East and Southeast Asia. This has meant stronger polities in the East and a weakening of polities in the West, where fragmentation of nation-states and multiculturalism are expres­ sions of this process. Globalization occurs and is an expression of declining hegemony. It implies the globalization of capital movements, commodities, and populations, the latter largely as a result of increasing facility of migra­ tion and increasing local instability and dislocation. In this process, cultural identity proliferates at all levels of the system. Indigenous movements have increased logarithmically, regionalism has grown rapidly, national identities have become .increasingly ethnified, and immigrants have become diaspora societies. Above it all, in the global circuits of high cuI ture, intellectual arenas, media elites, and diplomatic spheres, there is a global identity, a cosmopolitan iden- ,I. tity constructed on the basis of a multiculturalized world. It is a self-identified "\ hybrid identity encompassing the cultural plurality of the world on which it is totally dependent for its self-definition. But as this is an all-encompassing identity it must define other people's realities for them. Hybridity becomes truth, and national, local, ethnic and other restricted identities become back­ ward, red-necked, and nationalist. Global becomes equivalent to cosmopolitan and then to urban and hybrid. World cities become world cultures and the latter are not merely multicultural as a result of globalization, but truly hy­ bridized as a result of fusion, as in fusion cuisine. This is a new world, a new world of class, a new world of cosmopolitan consumption. s As a normative stance, hybridity requires interesting moral imperatives, not least a systematic solidarity with that which is unknown, on the grounds of a universal cultural tolerance or even engagement (see, for example, Levinas 1 97 1 ). Much of this discourse expresses a combined repudiation of that which is most at home in exchange for that which is most distant. It is a language of distinction and of distantiation from the local, which is why it often celebrates the city or even the airport. And while intellectuals may celebrate border crossing, the lumpenproletariat real border-crossers live in constant fear of the border and express a very different view of the matter. Without real borders, no border­ crossing, without differentiation, no hybridization, and the fact of difference is not an autonomous cultural fact but the product of the practice of building walls, fences, and boundaries.

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The Hybridization of Roots and the Abhorrence of the Bush

29 1

N OTES

1. ''Two Crows Denies This" is a famous phrase from an article by Edward Sapir dealing with the issue of outsider versus insider representations of reality (Sapir 193 8). 2. I have argued that hybridity harbors no critique of essentialism because it is a

derivative of essentialism. Arguing that cultures are creole merely pushes the essences back in some mytho-historical time frame when things were pure. This is inherent in the concept itself. 3. It should be noted that diasporas are not usually associated with hybridity, but, on the contrary, with extreme forms of precisely that essentialism, transnational ethnic identity that ought to be at odds with hybridity. 4. The actual terms are used as follows: "boundary transcending potential which emerges out of spiritual visits into historical, past cultures or contemporary, alterna­ tive cultures"; "reservoir of alternative knowledge"; "alternative cultural frames of reference"; "new composite language s"; "complex forms of transcultural communi­ cation"; "struggle for control over one's own existence against authority, dominant cultural norms, racism and discriminating control"; "shared cultural experiences in local communities . . . unite black and white youth"; "amalgamation of cultural ex­ pressions (language, music and other forms of interaction)" which "symbolizes mu­ tuality in a common struggle to reconstitute a 'collective historical presence' beyond the divisive, fragmented forms of existence in the inner cities"; "ethno-cultural amal­ gamation, which includes a dynamic merging of the legacy of anti-colonial resistance with new forms of struggle rooted in modem urban contexts." 5. A well-known intellectual colleague explained to me that while he is negative about Germany, he bought a Volkswagen instead of a Saab, because the latter was constructed out of a high percentage of German parts while the former was entirely Mexican. The identity of objects is tricky business. .

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REFERENCES

Alund, A. 1 992. Immigrant youth-transcultural identities. In C. Palmgren, K. Loy and G. Bolin, eds., Ethnicity in Youth Culture, 73 94. Stockholm: Unit of and Cultural Theory, Stockholm University. Barth, F. 1 995. Ethnicity and the concept of culture. In D. Imig and P. Siavsky, eds., Nonviolent Sanctions and Cultural Survival. Boston: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Bergesen, A., and R. Fernandez. 1995. Who has the most Fortune 500 finns? A network analysis of global economic competition, 1 956-1989. Journal of World-Systems Research 1 . 12. Online at csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/jwsr.html. Caglar, A. 1 997. Hyphenated identities and the limits of "culture." In T. Madood and P. Werbner, eds., The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe, 1 69-85. London: Zed. -

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Canciini, N. 1 995. Hybrid cultures. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Chatterjee, P. 1 993. The nation and itsfragments . Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. Dicken, P. 1992. Global shift: The internationalization of economic activity. London: Chapman. Dirlik, A. 1992. The postcolonial aura: Third World criticism in the age of global capitalism. Critical Inquiry (Winter): 328-56. Elm, B. 1 992. Youth and multiculturalism. In C. Palmgren, K. Lovgren, and G. Bolin, eds., Ethnicity in youth culture. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Ekholm, K. , and J. Friedman. 1995. Global complexity and simplicity of everyday life. In D. Miller, ed. , Worlds apart. London: Routledge. Fish, S. 1 988. No bias, no merit: The case against blind submission. PMLA 1 03 : 739-

48. Friedman, J. 1 997. Global crises, the struggle for cultural identity and intellectual pork barreling: Cosmopolitans, nationals and locals in an era of de-hegemonization. In P. Werbner, ed., Debating cultural hybridity. London: Zed. Gellner, E. 1 994. Malinowski and Wittgenstein: Impact of the Habsburg world on England. Lecture given at Research School for Historical Anthropology/Sociology, University of Lund, Sweden, October 3 . Gilroy, P. 1 987. There ain 't n o black i n the Union lack. London: Hutchinson. Hall, S. 1 996. When was the post-colonial: Thinkiqg at the limit. In I. Chambers and " ,¥", L. Curtis, eds., The post-colonial question, 242-60. London: Routledge. Hannerz, U . 1 988. American culture: Creolized, creolizing. In American culture: Cre­ olized, creolizing and other lectures. NAAS Biennial Conference, Swedish Institute for North American Studies. --- . 1 996. Cosmopolitans and locals in world culture. In Transnational connections. London: Routledge. Hansen, T. 1 995. Inside the Romanticist episteme. Unpublished manuscript. Harvey, D. 1 989. Thepostmodern condition. Oxford: Blackwell. Hebdige, D. 1983. Subculture: The meaning of style. London: Methuen. Hooks, R 1 995. Killing rage: Ending racism. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Jacoby, R. 1994. Dogmatic wisdom: How the culture wars divert education and distract America. New York: Doubleday. Kelly, John. 1 995. Diaspora and world war: Blood and nation in Fiji and Hawaii. Public

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Culture 7 . 3 : 475-97. Kotsinas, Ulla-Britt. 1 992. Immigrant adolescents' Swedish in multicultural areas. In C . Palmgren, K. Lovgren, and G . Bolin, eds., Ethnicity in youth culture. Stockholm: Unit of Media and Cultural Theory, Stockholm University. Lash, S., and 1. Urry. 1 994. Economies of signs and space. London: Sage. Levi-Strauss, C. 1962. La pensee sauvage. Paris: Pion. Levinas, E. 1 97 1 . Totalite et infinite. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Lind, Andrew. 1 953. Changing race relations in Hawaii. Social Process in Hawaii 1 7 :

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Pietersee, J . N. 1995. Globalization as hybridization. In M. Featherstone, S . Lash, and R. Robertson, eds., Global modernities, 45-68. London: Sage. Rosaldo, Rene. 1995. Introduction. In N. Canciini, Hybrid Cultures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rushdie, Salman. 1 99 1 . Imaginary homelands. London: Granta. Sapir, E. 1 938. Why cultural anthropology needs the psychiatrist. Psychiatry 1 : 7-1 2. Sassen, S. 1 994. Cities in a world economy. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge. . 1 996. Losing control: Sovereignty in an age of globalization. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Indigenous Struggles and the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

jonathan Friedman S ince the mid-1 970s there has been a massive increase in the activities of indigenous minorities in the world. Their struggles have become global news, and they have entered numerous global organizations so that they have become an international presence. This, I shall argue, does not mean that they have been globalized and that they are just like everyone else in today's globalizing world. They have been part of many a national scene for many decades. They have been marginalized in their own territories, boxed and packaged, and sometimes oppressed even unto death. But this has changed in many parts of the world, because the indigenous is now part of a larger inversion of Western cosmology in which the traditional other, a modem category, is no longer the starting point of a long and positive evolution of civilization, but a voice of wisdom, a way life in tune with nature, a culture in harmony, a gemeinschaJt, that we but lost. Evolution has become devolution, the fall ofcivilized man. But . is a social reality to this change as well, since the voices of the other voices of real people struggling for control over their conditions of conditions that have been denied to them at the very least. This struggle is oQt about culture as such, but about social identity of a particular kind, indigenous identity, which is constituted around cultural and experiential continuities that are only poorly mirrored in Western categories, not least, in anthropological categories. Fourth World struggles have been partially, and in some cases very, successful, but they do not operate in a simple structure where the only larger context is the nation-state or some other kind of state. They are also part of a dynamic global system, one that is multiplex and contains a number of related processes. There has been a more general inflation of cultural politics and ethnic conflict in the world, but there are also substantial increases in class 295

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stratification, economic polarization, and major shifts in capital accumulation. All of these changes constitute a field of analysis that must, I believe, be our central focus of understanding. We need always to struggle to gain and maintain a perspective on reality, especially in periods, like this one, when it seems to be escaping at such great speed. This is a period of rapid change. It is heralded as the age of information, the age of globalization. Anthropologists have been much taken by the current transformations but have not done much in the way of research on them. This is unfortunate because the changes or experienced changes have certainly impacted the discipline. What is going on? Is culture dead? Is consumption where it's all at? Are we entering a new urban civilization in which hybridity is the rule and the indigenous interesting primarily because it can be incorporated into a larger global celebratory machine, like world music incorporates its various themes? It is necessary to step back, take it easy, look at the contours of the world we inhabit and investigate seriously the mechanisms that seem to be steering our history. What may appear as chaos, or as "disjuncture," is truly an appearance, the starting point and not the end point of our attempt to grasp the nature of social reality.

ON G LOBALIZATION

The first appearance that strikes many of us today is captured by the slogan "globalization," which is bandied about in business economics (where it really developed), to cultural studies and even anthropology. Some work on globaliza­ tion is analytically and theoretically significant, but much more of it consists in simple opinions and reflections on the immediate. Cultural globalization think­ ing is based on a myopic vision rooted in intellectual experience of the media, Internet, and travel. It correctly understands that the wor Id has become smaller. (But this is always relative: Braudel made speed of transport a key to his notion of world "systems," a theme also well developed among geographers, not least Harvey, whose concept of "time-space compression" does enough to account for much of what globalization consciousness is all about.) Robertson, who was one of the first out in these discussions, places globalization at the turn of the twentieth century, although he has now pushed this back to the ancient world. He is primarily interested in consciousness of a larger world and the way in which people increasingly identify with a larger global unity as well as the way the local expresses the global. The establishment of the League of Nations and many of aur new global cults is an example of globalization, but so is the Meiji Restoration 's importing of European concepts of governance. 1 Cultural form moves and is adopted into increasingly larger spaces. Now of

Indigenous Struggles and the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

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•

course this has been going on for quite a long time. Even the conceptual ap­ paratus of globalism is present in the universalism of the Enlightenment or the Ecumenism of the late medieval Church, to say nothing of Alexander the Great. So, the historical demarcation of the origins of globalization does not hold water since there is no historical disjuncture involved, or on the con­ trary, there may be innumerable such ruptures. Robertson, at least, explores the ideological structures of globalization, although without any concrete re­ search material to support his interpretations. In anthropology, globalization discourse is even more limited in historical and intellectual scope. It usually refers to a very recent period, the 1 970s, perhaps and is closer to CNN in its intellectual content, the latter having been first with much of the jargon. Here it is used, very much following cultural studies arguments, to dislocate and deconstruct common notions of culture. The latter is no longer anchored in territory. Nor is anything else, according to Appadurai. Instead we are all in movement, not just our migratory selves, but our meanings, our money, and our products. And all of these various "scapes" seem to have gotten lives of their own, leading to a chaotic disjuncture. More pedestrian approaches, such as that of Hannerz, make no clear statements, except that the world has suddenly become culturally hybridized because of the various movements of cultural things, inclUding here, subjects. This is indeed a global vision of matter out of place. Mary Douglas might h ave seen it coming. But it is also an enjoyable chaos of variable mixtures that has become an identity among certain intellec­ tuals and non-intellectuals that is part of the reason that a larger perspective is needed. Globalizing intellectuals, and significant actors in the world today, do not seem to like indigenous movements. Kelly ( 1 995) after citing Appadurai to the effect that, "we need to think ourselves beyond the nation" (Appadurai . 1 993:4 1 1 ) , goes on to make his case against the indigenes: > :, . .

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